From Leonardo DiCaprio to Kim Kardashian and Jay-Z, it’s as if the rich and powerful aren't aware they can go elsewhere for dinner. And it’s all thanks to Mario Carbone.
an outpost of Carbone in Miami, just a short drive down Collins Avenue, one that’s large enough to pull off close to a thousand covers on a big night. The pop-up went head-to-head not just with itself but with a hundred other global hot spots for customers during the jam-packed race weekend schedule. Then there was the little issue of the cost. To eat at Carbone Beach, the price tag was $3,000 per person.
At the center of it all is Mario Carbone, a perpetual kid from Queens now approaching middle age, who opened his namesake restaurant in 2013 at the age of 33. All weekend long in Miami—where he relocated with his girlfriend, the powerful TikTok star publicist Cait Bailey, during the pandemic—he was personally plating the rigatoni and flipping the steaks on the grills while also playing politician, greeting VIPs, and introducing the talent onstage.
“I name a lot of different restaurants, and for whatever reason, they just latched on to Carbone, it’s become so synonymous with the account,” one of the founders of @deuxmoi tells me on a phone call. “Does anyone eat anywhere else? I get so excited when someone sends me a picture of theirCarbone’s gone-Hollywood version of cooking linguine with clams arrived right as Instagram began to take off.
Also a Move: that time the waiter handed over comically large menus and then rattled off the night’s oysters, a list as long as the names of who begat whom in the book of Genesis, ending with “New Brunswick—and that’s Canada, not Jersey! No offense to Jersey though.” Wink wink.
“The idea to do what Carbone is, that’s more acutely Mario’s particular dream as a young chef,” says Torrisi, whose name graced their first restaurant, Torrisi Italian Specialties. When looking for an externship, Carbone sent letters to all of the restaurants on a local magazine’s top 50 list and heard back from very few. Finally, he got a call from a chef at the recently opened Babbo, Mario Batali’s first hit restaurant. His job was to show up at dawn, scale fish, fetch coffee, say yes to everything, and leave long after the last service.
But Carbone did manage to find a spot at the less formal Café Boulud, which, while still a world-class joint, wasn’t as stuffy as the four-star dining room off Park Avenue. At the time, the kitchen was run by Andrew Carmellini, who would go on to open Locanda Verde in Robert De Niro’s Greenwich Hotel, The Dutch in SoHo, and the sprawling French bistro Lafayette in NoHo.
Carbone and Torrisi both eventually moved on: Carbone to wd~50, the Lower East Side mecca where Wylie Dufresne was cooking on the bleeding edge of molecular gastronomy, and then to Del Posto, the city’s first Italiancourtesy of then critic Sam Sifton. Torrisi eventually went to work at A Voce, the first boîte helmed solo by Carmellini. But the two, Torrisi and Carbone, stayed close.
Torrisi and Carbone were intrigued. More than that—they had a similar idea. In the lofted lobby of the Jane Hotel, the place that once hosted survivors of the sunkenan idea was born for a new kind of restaurant that would build on the buzz of Torrisi Italian Specialties but take it one step further by going two steps back. It wouldn’t be an Italian American place leaning on modernist techniques to get insanely fancy. It would be a place that was both insanely Italian American and insanely fancy.
The space had an earned-through-the-decades patina that could actually fulfill the trio’s spaghetti-wrapped dreams. When Rocco started serving pasta a century ago, the South Village was a nexus for immigrants from the Mezzogiorno—the southern part of the old country.
But Il Mulino’s prelaunch build-out was no match for the conceptual rigor girded to the opening of an Italian American juggernaut like Carbone. When I asked Carmellini what he made of the Carbone concept when he first heard of it, he suggested it was ambitious to say the least. “There was definitely a large group of naysayers, all of a sudden, that had never existed,” Carbone says. “There was a lot of ‘Good for you, kids!’ for a long time, the first couple of years. And then we came out with $50 veal Parms and tuxedos and they were like, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That one thing cost more than that whole menu you used to serve.’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah, I know, but it’s different. We don’t have to be those guys, we’re these guys now.
When I asked Carbone to explain the X factor that brings in boldface names more reliably than any eatery on earth—this is based on inexact science, to be sure, but it’s believed to be true by many experts of A-lister rubbernecking—he slipped into a pose that was maybe knowingly clueless, trying not to sound disingenuous while also protecting the discretion of his clientele.
“With The Grill, we fucking put our balls on the table,” Carbone says. “And it’s like, ‘We’re going to do it. Someone’s got to do it. It should be us. It has to be us.’ That was our thought process back then. It’s like, ‘This space is closing. It has to be us to take it. And we will be the ones to do it right.’ ”
As we walk through the cramped kitchen, Carbone tells me that the night’s crowd will be made up mostly of investors and friends and family, an elaborate cocktail party, he says. Beside us is a stack of about 500 loaves of bread.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Avatar 2’s Kate Winslet On Whether Leonardo DiCaprio Would Join SequelsWould Leonardo DiCaprio be interested in joining the cast of Avatar 4 or 5 for a Titanic reunion? AvatarTheWayOfWater star Kate Winslet doesn't think so. 'No, he’s more of like a dry land kind of a guy.”
Read more »
K-Pop Songs That Sound Like They're Straight Out Of Mario Kart | allkpopI was on Twitter the other day (more like I'm there every 2 minutes) and saw this tweet that I thought was super cute because, yes, some of these fun…
Read more »
Leonardo DiCaprio grabs dinner with 23-year-old actress Victoria LamasLamas – who is the daughter of “Falcon Crest” actor Lorenzo Lamas – is an aspiring actress and model. She is 25 years younger than the “Titanic” star.
Read more »
Leonardo DiCaprio and Victoria Lamas not dating despite dinner outing: sourceSources told Page Six on Wednesday that the pair just so happened to be seated at the same table while at dinner with a large group of people.
Read more »