A little over 10 years ago, the restaurant scene in New York City was being dominated by luxe tasting menus, chefs who operated like tsars, and the race for Michelin stars. Chef Mario Carbone and entrepreneur Jeff Zalaznick were loathe to join in what was becoming a fraught hospitality industry, but they were ready to take on the world with a new restaurant. They happened to stumble upon a 90-year old establishment, Rocco, that was going out of business. Zalaznick immediately said, “We’ll take it.”
During construction their friend, the artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, came by to see. A designer had made glossy renderings of what the interiors were going to be, and they had placed them on easels inside the restaurant. “Julian walks in, he has a cigarette in his mouth and is walking around the space, and at one point the three of us walk away. Then I smell something on fire, I turn back, and he’s taken his lighter out of his pocket and lit the renderings on fire,” said Zalaznick. In response, they hopped in a cab to Schnabel’s house, where he proceeded to give them a crash course in thoughtful design details and cinema effect. He knew they had a unique vision, and they shouldn’t compromise it.
This applied to their staff as well. “I basically put an ad out on Craigslist. Most people at the time wanted young hipsters from Brooklyn, but I wanted the guys or girls that treated this as a career, trained with real honor, and worked at great mainstay restaurants. People who took the art of being a captain seriously.” That proved to be a critical part of their trajectory, and one they hold instrumental to their business today. If Rocco’s old space was the soul of the restaurant, then the servers would be the voice.
Enter: Carbone. The high-end, mid-century style Italian-American mainstay in Greenwich Village that took the city by storm. To celebrate their achievement, Carbone and Zalaznick joined us for a private cocktail party this past week at ZZ’s Club in New York. The duo hosted a panel discussion with writer Gabe Ulla to wax nostalgic about the restaurant’s triumphant first decade, and celebrate the launch of the new Assouline book chronicling Carbone’s journey. The tome memorializes dozens of recipes, stories old and new, and all of the people who make the dining room come to life every day. “I think for those of you who have been there a number of times, you can feel it. It's a family,” said Carbone. “We hope we can keep doing it for a long time. And to be able to put it on a bookshelf and say that was the first 10 years, and share it with a room full of people that have been part of this from the beginning, it’s really beautiful.”
To learn more about the Carbone book, please see below. And stay tuned for the Culture Lounge podcast episode VII with Mario Carbone and Jeff Zalaznick, launching tomorrow.