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.
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Illustration by Ian Woods
