Mario Carbone
speaker
319 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Mario Carbone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Or just stands out? The dish there for me is, um, there's a couple, there's the Jamaican, the Jamaican beef patty cavatelli, which we've been doing since the original. Um, because when we, when we built Teresi. Rich, did you see he just took credit for your dish?
The tortellini is crazy, too. We wanted to make Italian food that was... We called it New Yorkese. Because there isn't really Italian food in Italy. There's regional Italian food. And they don't fuck with the other regions. Tuscany doesn't care about Sicily. They just became Italy.
They've been in Italy way less years than we've been in America. And... We were like, what if we make our own region of Italian food that is New York-based? That's great. We pulled from the Jewish Lower East Side. We pulled from Jamaican beef patties being in pizzerias randomly. We pulled from all the German low-key.
We pulled from all of that that was New York to make this food that was our New York food. We believed that we were doing the most Italian thing possible by not making Italian food.
We're comedians. We love bomb stories. Bombs are more like no one orders it, right? Like, less they order it and they don't like it, more like you put all this effort into something and zero one of them will order it back.
know yeah and for for chefs usually it's like really chefy shit right like you want to you want to get you want to get away from the mainstream ingredients because something's in season or something's you know some farmer drops something off and you're really excited about it and you and particularly at carbone because you're being bulldozed with the number one menu right yeah everyone's now ordering through social media and like the thing you have to order to be there right and
It's so hard to sell them something else at this point because they need the verification of being there. Yeah, it's like Bert Kreischer's machine story. This is what we came for. Like, no, no, no, this thing's amazing. Sure, get the rigatoni, but I promise you, this is great.
No, I think specials this day and age are something that they're actually trying to work on and it's new. Um, I rather reprint the menu and not verbal a special. And so that when like Ricky verbals things at your table, that's part of a script, like kind of a script because there, I want there to be a back and forth between you and the waiter.
I don't want to just drop menus and then you come back and you tell me what you ordered. There's no, there's nothing, there's nothing there for me.
I want a conversation. So I force these things. I force conversational moments during the order taking. Meatballs are not on the menu at Carbone. That's an intentional thing because as soon as you order pasta, that's a trigger for the waiter to say, you want meatballs? Yeah. You want me to put some equals on it?
ordered there are there any other secret menu items like you have the meatballs obviously they're kind of off many but anything else that someone could order yeah there's i mean there's all sorts of like little we call them pocket pocket moves right like things that you can do um well i hate when the waiter has to ask the chef Like when the waiter says that, oh, let me ask the chef. Oh, yeah.
I really don't like that. I hate it in my restaurants. So I try to make sure that the waiter, the waiters, the captains, they know all the things that are possible. So that when they're at a table and they're talking to you and you're like, yeah. No, I don't want the prosciutto. I don't eat pork. Oh, I can do roasted peppers with the mozzarella for you. That's not on the menu. But he knows.
He doesn't have to go ask the chef.
I can do this, right? I'm not in the mood for veal parm tonight. You want to do a little Milanese? We'll put arugula salad, some tomatoes on it. Yeah, let's do that. Great. We'll do Milanese. These are real waiters. These are lifelong waiters. These are not transient people that are on their way to another thing. This is how they feed their family, right?
So give them all the tools to take care of this table and let us cook. You know, that's the model.
I'm really sensitive to lighting and music in restaurants at this point. Um, if the lighting is really harsh or the music is just, just off too loud, off theme, abrasive, I'm not feeling it. I'm immediately put in a weird situation. a weird place. I'm not comfortable. I'm not cozy. I want warm lighting. I want whatever the music is. I want it to be the vibe of what I think this place is.
And then... Those are my two biggest ones because I think that sets the tone. How do I put people in their position to just kind of succumb to my thing tonight? And if you're not feeling it, you're uncomfortable, you're in a defensive place. And I don't want that. I want you to give in. I want you to be part of my movie. I want you to be an extra in this thing.
And to give in, you have to be totally comfortable. And you've mentally bought into this thing. As soon as that guy walks up to your table with giant menus, you're giving in. It's in your hands.
It felt like to me, at the time when we did it, again, we were going against... To people that don't know, can you just, with your hands, show how big a menu is from Carbo?
Two, three feet by three. It's a small flat screen TV. Yes.
Showing 201–220 of 319 · page 11 of 16
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