Carbone is a luxury brand, a celebrity beacon, a theatrical production, an indoor theme park celebrating the meatball-topped maximalism of Italian American cuisine and pop culture.
It is also a restaurant. And from the moment it opened in Greenwich Village in 2013, this red-sauce fantasia with its wisecracking waiters, “Goodfellas” décor and $91 veal Parmesan has been a sensation. Reservations are nearly impossible to secure. Regulars include Kim Kardashian and Rihanna. Even the chef Mario Carbone and his partners in Major Food Group, Rich Torrisi and Jeff Zalaznick, have achieved a swaggering sort of fame. (That’s Mr. Carbone on the July-August cover of Cigar & Spirits magazine.)
Carbone has become such an emblem of exclusivity that the partners recently opened a private club with a $20,000 initiation fee and a restaurant called Carbone Privato. It’s brought the Sinatra playlists and slippery spicy rigatoni to some of the world’s most moneyed cities, including Hong Kong; Doha, Qatar; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. New locations will open next year in Dubai and London.
Yes, for all that glitz and glamour, Carbone is a chain. And people seem to either love it or hate it. I wanted to understand it.
So I went on a Carbone America tour. In one week, I visited its three other U.S. locations, in Miami (opened in 2021), Dallas (2022) and Las Vegas (2015). I also dined twice at Carbone New York. I wanted to see how the business has weathered its first decade, and how well this deeply New York establishment has translated beyond the city.
My red-sauce “Groundhog Day” yielded mixed results. Or to put it another way: When you’re fed like a queen but so much it’s obscene? That’s Carbone. When the servers perform but the gimmick feels worn? That’s also Carbone. When desserts hit the mark but some entrees lack spark? Ding ding ding, ting-a-ling-a-ling.
I started at Carbone New York, an azure-walled jewel box on Thompson Street, fronted by a doorman sporting a grin that was equal parts gracious and skeptical.
Soon after I was led in, past a table overflowing with flowers, candelabras and glass bowls of fruit, the appetizers paraded out in similar abbondanza: rosettes of salami, doughy breads, oil-soaked pickled cauliflower and a hunk of Parmesan carved straight from the wheel — all presented as if they were personal gifts from the chef. (In fact, every table gets these, free.) I’ve eaten them six times now, and I can’t recall anything about them except that they were there and I ate them.
The rest of the meal felt similar — just fine, but not particularly memorable and often inconsistent. Signatures like the linguine vongole and veal Parmesan felt like tired performers going through the motions. On one visit, the spicy rigatoni vodka was appropriately fiery; on another, any kick in this or the lobster fra diavolo was overpowered by sweetness.
Servers boasted about how the langoustines — dressed in garlic, parsley, lemon and butter, with a subtle, briny undertow — had flown first-class from Norway that morning. The less exciting shrimp cocktail may have gotten stuck in economy. The unexpected star was a pork chop, sumptuous and dripping with jus-soaked peppers. A sturdy metal dessert tray with several choices arrived at the end, but I only had eyes for the lush lemon cheesecake, which shone at every Carbone.
Some waiters seemed weary of the shtick. As one made our tableside Caesar salad (solid, as always) while singing along to Fats Domino, I asked him if the playlist ever changed. “Unfortunately — I mean fortunately — it doesn’t,” he said, a little flummoxed.
As I headed toward Carbone Miami, from blocks away I could hear Dean Martin crooning the same song, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” that played as I first entered Carbone New York. But the owners hadn’t simply plunked their Manhattan dining room into the South Florida sand; there were small nods to the subtropical setting, in both the design and the specials.
The Miami restaurant, on a prime block in Miami Beach, is at least twice the size of the original. The Rococo-meets-earth-tones dining room with tropical flower displays exuded Sinatra-on-vacation. The cheese and bread on the tables were barely touched by the dolled-up diners in sleek buns and slinky silk tops (“Tourists,” said the longtime Miami resident I took along). Surprisingly for a restaurant steps from the beach, Carbone Miami prohibits shorts, open-toed shoes or tank tops.
Almost every dish had problems. The linguine vongole was oily. The crust on the veal Parmesan was underseasoned. The rigatoni was once again too sweet. The jumbo shrimp scampi left an aftertaste of butter and rubber.
The single exclusive-to-Miami dessert, a coconut cake lined with a delicate Key lime curd, deftly toed the line between cake and pie. As in New York, at meal’s end your waiter tosses handfuls of nuts onto the table, followed by a bowl of grapes and nectarines on ice and chilled rainbow cookies that satisfied more than any pasta.
Carbone Dallas, in the city’s Design District, had all the usual trappings: the comically oversize menus, the Dean Martin, the cheery, tuxedoed captains, if not the cachet — prime-time reservations were plentiful. The place is Texas-scale, with a large courtyard leading into a dark, cavernous dining room. But there was little that felt Dallas about it, aside from the Texas pecans to close the meal and the showy velvet banquettes to match the showier guest attire typical of Dallas-ites on the town. (Let the glint off the diners’ Cartier love bracelets guide you, like emergency lights, to the bathroom.)
There were bright spots: The crisp top on the lasagna verde gave way to thick, slippery layers of béchamel and pesto; the Negronis were well-made; the service was warm, though not exactly theatrical. But most of the meal felt like an imitation of Carbone: flaccid broccoli, salty vongole and still no flavor on the veal Parmesan crust. When the valet joked to my father that he recognized him from the cover of GQ, I knew it was time to go.
My tour ended in Las Vegas, where somehow Carbone seemed more at home than it did in New York. The restaurant feels tailor-made for a city where everything is over-the-top, expensive and knowingly absurd.
The performance begins when you make a reservation and are presented with the option of pre-ordering a tomahawk steak branded with the restaurant’s name for $550. And it continues when you approach the entrance, inside the ARIA resort and casino, and are greeted by several large photographs of the actor Christopher Walken; a particularly imposing one hovers over the host stand. (Mr. Carbone “wanted it such that when you walk in, you see Walken,” our server explained.)
Here, the vibes were less “Goodfellas” than “House of Gucci.” The booths were bookended by heavy burgundy curtains. A crystal chandelier cascaded from the ceiling. Most every table, from the bachelor parties to the convention goers, had ordered a bottle of wine that looked old and pricey. (Our sommelier said this Carbone sells more wine than any other of the hotel chain’s more than a dozen properties in Las Vegas).
The food was also much better, perhaps because Mr. Carbone happened to be in the kitchen that night. The shrimp cocktail had been upgraded to lobster, served cold and dusted with chives and horseradish. The sauces on both the meatballs and the veal Parmesan tasted as if they had simmered on a stove all day. The essence of the sea finally came through in the vongole.
This was the only Carbone where the cheese I was served at the start was genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy, not a Parmesan from Wisconsin. The meal concluded with a chiseled slab of torrone, a terrazzo-like nougat, and a nonjudgmental nod from the server when we told her we were headed after dinner to the male revue “Australia’s Thunder From Down Under.”
A decade ago, Carbone felt like a new genre — one that wed many New Yorkers’ favorite cuisine with their desire to feel like a V.I.P. That creation is showing signs of wear. The food lacked the consistency and technical finesse Major Food Group is known for. (Torrisi, not far from Carbone New York, is a far more interesting restaurant.) The signature service moves — the tableside salad, the singing waiters, the jokes about menu size — may be as cringe-inducing as they are entertaining. And not everyone gets the V.I.P. treatment. For my last meal at Carbone New York, I waited 30 minutes past the reservation time in the narrow entryway, despite my pregnant dining companion’s polite pleas for a seat.
Carbone is like a movie franchise that keeps getting rebooted, even though the original hasn’t aged well and the sequels aren’t stellar, either. But like those films, you don’t go to Carbone expecting a cutting-edge experience.
On that last visit, I dined with a regular. “It’s hard to get a reservation, it’s expensive and there may be better red-sauce elsewhere,” he said as a server ignited a tableside pan of cherry flambé, just before another rained nuts on us and joked that the nutcrackers shouldn’t be used on the male diners. “But it’s fun.”
When the food is so-so, but you go for the show? That’s Carbone.
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