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
It's gigantic. At the time we were going against the micro tasting menu. That was like a little index card. You're here all night. It's the chef's way. There's no substitutions. You have no autonomy, no agency. You mean you, you matter nothing. Yeah.
You matter nothing. Wow. And here, you know, I remember writing an Italian, like have it kind of have it your way. Like it says a piacere, like piacere. The way you want it. If you don't see anything on this menu, tell me what you want. Yeah. We want it to be a yes restaurant. Because to me, that's what Italian restaurants are.
Italian restaurants, by nature, especially in Italy, is a night off for mom and dad. Because you eat so well at home. Wow. This is so fascinating. I never even considered that. You eat so well at home that to go out... It's a night off for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're just using this restaurant as a conduit to eat well, hopefully.
And if you're hoping it's as good as what's at home.
I know what I'm talking about. I'm a customer that's highly edgy.
That's why, by and large, superfine dining in Italy is not great, in my opinion, because they're competing with phenomenal base food of their mom and their grandma. And so they're trying to make this thing that's nouvelle, this new take on it, when the base product is fantastic.
I was 20 and I just moved to Italy and I moved to the middle of nowhere. Where? Northwestern Tuscany. Italy, Italian, English wasn't even really spoken. Modena? No, this is like... North of Pisa in like near, you're trying to like choose a town that maybe you've heard of that's near, like near Lucca. It's middle of nowhere.
And I moved there to live with a family that ran just like exactly the kind of restaurant you hope to run into when you're on vacation. The most amazing mom and pop restaurant. The family lived above the restaurant. The restaurant was on the ground floor. Their apartment was above it. I lived with the family in the extra room. How did you find these guys?
Mario Batali helped me set it up. So you were working at Babbo. You talked to Mario. You asked him, say, I really want to learn. I said, I'm from New York. I only know this food. I want to learn the origin of this whole thing. I need to train in Italy. I need to learn this. Can you help me set up? He connected me to an author who lived in Rome, who knew this family.
And I lived with them for almost two years. He saw talent in you early, though, Mario? I think he saw an aptitude for work. I don't know if I had talent back then. I know I had a very high threshold for work. He saw ambition. Yeah.
Life-changing. There's only one phone number for the whole building, so even if you're upstairs watching the soccer match, you have to answer the phone as if it's a reservation. Yeah. Right. It's your day off and you're upstairs and you're like, you have to take a reservation. It's as mom and pop as it gets. And that was like that. How was your Italian at the time and how much better did it get?
It was not good at all. But I had a, you know, this is before like technology in your pocket. This is 2000. I had a little book in my, like a little translator in my back pocket, a little thesaurus, and I would learn what I needed for the day. And by the time I was done, I spoke the language.
They thought I was crazy, like a crazy American who works too much. Exactly what you would think a European thinks of an American. Why do you work so hard? Can't you just take the afternoon off? It's not all about...
The paycheck, like you need to like instill like the beauty of the process, you know, and a lot of it was, you know, going to the field to find the thing or visiting the farmer, like exactly what you would think. The quintessential food experience would be in Tuscany. I got to live that. You know, a certain mushroom would come in and the chef would be like, hey, go up that road right there.
You see those bushes over there? Like, yeah. He's like, there's an herb that grows over there. Pick a bunch of it and bring it over. It goes for this mushroom. Oh, that's cool. You know, like shit like that, that would happen to me. That's just like, as a kid from Queens, it was like as life-changing as it gets. The Italian food that I knew was the Italian food I make today.
Like Italian, real Italian, greasy Italian-American food. That was like, wow, this is where it comes from. This is Vito Corleone.
It depends on who's doing it, but I think if it's great, it's great. If you believe it, if you're about it, if you've put the work into it, Like, why can't that be your transport of experience? It doesn't have to be mine. Mine's mine. If that's yours, then, then great. I'm all for it. I want to experience it.
I think I learned a great appreciation for how they live. I think at 20 years old, as someone who wanted to tackle the world... Probably not. I think I was just as bullish coming back to the States after that trip about wanting to be this chef entrepreneur who conquers New York more than ever.
I loved my afternoons playing soccer, getting four hours off between lunch and dinner, but I knew that that wasn't my life. I knew that I was coming back to Manhattan to be in the jungle and to conquer it.
that eagerness, that urge. Cause I, for me, it was like, I knew that that was just part of my journey to get to this end goal of make it in New York. That was the, that was the only goal for me. Is that the pinnacle for like, what is the pinnacle for a chef? As a, as a new, as a New York kid training in Manhattan.
Showing 221–240 of 319 · page 12 of 16
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