This story starts with mass migration. In the late 19th century, economic conditions in Southern Italy had deteriorated and millions of Italians set sail for America in search of opportunity and the gold-paved streets of which they’d been told. Many settled in the northeastern United States, sometimes strictly segregated by region. In New York’s Little Italy, Sicilians lived on Elizabeth Street, Calabrians on Mott.
The newly settled immigrants did their best to cook familiar foods with the ingredients available in this unfamiliar country. Their children did the same, and then their grandchildren. Dish by dish, Italian American cuisine was born, a hybrid culinary tradition that has become inextricably woven into our country’s foodways.
By midcentury, Italian American enclaves in major cities were dotted with red sauce joints. You know their aesthetic, even if you’ve never been to one: red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, empty Chianti bottles with a candle stuck in them, meatballs so large they dominate the plate.
Growing up in Queens, chef Mario Carbone was steeped in this cuisine and culture. “My homeroom was alphabetical,” he remembers. “It took an entire row of guys to get through ‘car.’ Cardona, Caruso, Carbone….” Today he is a partner in Major Food Group with Rich Torrisi and Jeff Zalaznick and chef at the restaurant which bears his surname.
It was while cooking together at Manhattan’s Torrisi Italian Specialities that Carbone and Torrisi met Zalaznick, then a regular diner with a lot of opinions on Italian American food. Mainly, Italian American food was already so beloved that diners paid to eat there even when the food was mid. “I like eating at these places so much because of the way they feel and the way that I feel when I’m there,” Zalaznick says, “that I don’t even care about the fact that the lamb is overcooked.”
Carbone and Torrisi saw an opportunity to make their cooking personal. “This is our opportunity to talk about who we are and not cook the food of our mentors or the chefs that came before us,” Torrisi says.
But when the partners began thinking about reimagining—or reinvigorating—the red sauce joint genre in the mid-aughts, they faced an uphill battle. The restaurants they remembered, once charmingly homey, had become staid, outshone by the $17 artisanal burgers and molecular gastronomy spots that dominated popular food culture at the time.
“Serious” chefs were cooking French and New American food, or else focusing on regional Italian food. In 2012, the year before Carbone opened, former New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells wrote, “Italian American cuisine is not beloved by the arbiters of good taste, who celebrate risotto alla Milanese but ignore baked ziti, garlic bread, spaghetti and meatballs and lobster fra diavolo.”
“No one—I mean no one—who wanted to be a great chef in New York would ever consider tying their name to Italian American food,” Torrisi remembers. “It simply got zero respect in the fine dining world.” But Carbone would change that.
.jpg)
Together, the Major Food Group triumvirate toured the five boroughs of New York City, eating at every classic Italian American restaurant they could find. “Each one’s got its own little set of moves and signature moments, and I wanted to understand them all,” Carbone says. The menu at Carbone would be familiar: chicken Parmesan, Caesar salad, linguine vongole. But it would be made with premium ingredients and Michelin-level technique so that the food might transcend what Italian American cuisine had been up to that point: comfort food. “People love this style of restaurant, including ourselves,” Carbone says, “but it could be done much better.”
Zalaznick puts the thesis of Carbone’s cooking more frankly: “We’re gonna reinvigorate Italian American cuisine, and we’re gonna treat it like it’s the fanciest f*#%ing French food that you’ve ever seen in your life.”
Carbone’s success was nearly immediate. When it opened in 2013, it made Bon Appétit’s Top 50 New Restaurants, garnered a Michelin star (one it’s since lost), and Wells at The New York Times gave it a three-star review—one of fewer than a hundred in the paper’s history. Soon Carbone was crawling with celebrities. The Obamas ate there. Drake mentioned it in a song. The Major Food Group trio had made Italian American food sexy, relevant, exciting—but that was just the beginning.
The rapid expansion of celeb-magnet restaurants is making things harder for indie spots.
.jpg)
Carbone’s meteoric rise begat more Carbones. First a Carbone in Hong Kong in 2014, then in Vegas in 2015. There are now nine Carbones worldwide.
You can take an elevator to the ninth floor of a high rise in Hong Kong to discover the same wood paneling, the same blue velvet banquets you’ll find in the original New York location. In Doha, you can watch a captain chisel a chunk of Parmesan before setting it on your bread plate—just as you can in Riyadh, in London, in Dallas. The Carbones around the world offer an almost eerily similar experience to each other. The same besuited captains, the same Rosemary Clooney–heavy playlist, the same hulking tranche of carrot cake for dessert.
That familiarity, Carbone says, is part of what makes the restaurant (in all its iterations) so successful. They’re creating a piece of theater—dinner is the show, as their Vegas billboards read—by tapping into the New York Italian American aesthetics that are familiar “even for those who have never been to either Italy or New York, through cinema, through TV, books,” Carbone says. The Carbones around the world capitalize on the soft power of Italian American culture—Goodfellas, The Sopranos, fedoras and trench coats, and twirling your spaghetti on a spoon—to build a world, a feeling, you can step right into. That soft power is strong enough to convince diners around the world to pay $96 for veal Parmesan.
What started as a restaurant built from equal parts passion and business savvy with a mission to resurrect Italian American food from culinary obscurity is now a global phenomenon. Once relegated to the sidelines by chefs and diners who fancied themselves experts, it is one of America’s most astonishing culinary exports.
Although so many things have stayed the same, preserved perfectly in time inside the Italian American Eden that is Carbone, the immigrant experience it draws on becomes more and more remote. “My children will be one step further removed from Italy, which means one step further gentrified as an American. Which is the whole point, right?” Carbone says. “That’s why my grandparents came over here. That’s why there’s no Italians in Little Italy anymore.”
It’s hard to conceive of the outsize influence Italian American food now holds on a global scale. “What has happened is nothing short of remarkable,” Carbone says of his restaurant’s success. But for all its evolutions and next acts, Carbone thinks of the past as he thinks of the future of Italian American cuisine. “I never wanted to change it,” he says. “I wanted to champion it.”
