These days, the name Carbone could mean a lot of things: a private club that costs $20,000 a year, a line of gourmet pasta sauces, or a restaurant in New York, Las Vegas, Miami, or Dallas. But before Carbone was, well, all of the above, it was a small hole-in-the-wall on Thompson Street founded by three young restaurateurs: Jeffrey Zalanick, Mario Carbone, and Rich Torrisi.
“In 2012, when we were barely in our thirties, the three of us banded together to bring new energy and soul to the fine-dining landscape by building an Italian American restaurant. A red-sauce joint. A tradition that nobody at the time would bet their entire future on. To us, at least, it seemed like the perfect vehicle to achieve our goal. This culinary style, so deeply rooted in the history of our city, had been relegated to a kind of purgatory. Everybody seemed to love these restaurants, but they had been conditioned to never expect greatness when they visited them,” they write in the forward for their new book, Carbone, published tomorrow by Assouline.
Part oral history and part cookbook, Carbone chronicles how, exactly, their culinary empire was built out of a combination of hard work, clout, and spicy rigatoni. “We were not interested in creating a dish you had never had before. We wanted to serve you the most outstandingly perfect version of what you have had hundreds, if not thousands of times at home, at restaurants, at parties, everywhere,” Jeff Zalanick says.
Instructions for several of those dishes are included within the book’s pages, including the linguine vongole, chicken scarpariello, and their signature tableside Caesar salad. Below, the team behind Carbone shares the recipe for their off-the-menu favorite: Mario’s Meatballs.
“For our meatballs, we use sweet Italian sausage instead of ground pork, which provides distinctly Italian American umami,” Carbone says. We also use milk-soaked bread instead of breadcrumbs, which evokes a panada, the centuries-old European technique for making hearty boiled bread to infuse with all sorts of flavors, both savory and sweet. The meatballs are gently fried in olive oil and smothered in tomato sauce before being cooked low and slow to a precise internal temperature, just like a Sunday roast.”
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