We are sitting at the bar when Victoria Beckham walks in. I immediately choke on my cocktail, tequila cascading down my shirt. I don’t know why I’m so surprised. A couple of evenings ago, Leonardo DiCaprio was here. Kate Moss too. Later, at our table, we pester our American sommelier to tell us what it was like, back in the old country, serving Barack Obama. What did Mr President say? Which wine did he drink? The New Yorker gives a nonchalant shrug. “Eh, he’s more of a cocktail guy.”
This is Carbone: a red sauce Italian that was — for much of the 2010s — the coolest restaurant in Manhattan. And in the 2010s that meant the coolest place in the world. Kim Kardashian, Adele, Beyoncé and Jay-Z: they’ve all been there to eat the famous spicy vodka rigatoni, a dish that tastes broadly like Heinz tomato soup with a whack of chilli, and is yours for £29.
Charlotte Ivers at Carbone London
CHARLOTTE IVERS FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Now, Carbone has come to London, to the vast, hollowed-out basement of the garish new Chancery Rosewood hotel, in the old American Embassy building in Mayfair. In doing so, it has laid bare many uncomfortable truths: about British insecurity, about our falling position in the world, and about what money and power actually look like in the capital today. In the London restaurant world right now, everyone, everyone, is talking about Carbone. Everyone is panicking about Carbone. Is this, they wonder, the future? Is this what people want?
Inside the restaurant itself, the lighting is dark, the waiters are in black tie. The ceilings seem to be upholstered in red velvet. C’è la luna mezzo mare, famous from The Godfather, plays softly. Our menus are the size of a broadsheet newspaper.
It’s all impossibly glamorous, according to a very specific definition of glamorous. Italian restaurants in Britain — at least the ones that, like Carbone, want to charge you £88 for a main — tend to project pared back European elegance. Now imagine the exact opposite of that. That’s Carbone. This is the American dream, baby, and it’s come to us.
ASAP Rocky and Rihanna leave the New York restaurant
MEGA/GC IMAGES
The American dream is a late arrival in London. Two years after the original restaurant opened in Greenwich Village in 2013, Mario Carbone and his team opened a second location in Las Vegas. Branches in Miami, Hong Kong, Riyadh, Doha and Dallas followed. Now, back of the queue, us. “Every major city should have a Carbone. It’s how you define what the major cities are,” co-owner Jeff Zalaznick told Restaurant magazine before the launch. The modern cathedral.
Here’s something else Zalaznick told Restaurant magazine: “We had to be ten minutes from Claridge’s, and if that was not the case we couldn’t open here.” Read: whoever is spending money in Britain, we know it’s not Brits. This is a restaurant for the international super-rich, in a city that increasingly feels like it’s for them too.
The first Friday night in Carbone London screams money. It’s packed with men who look like Eric Trump and women who look like they’d have to hide if the men’s wives walked in. At one point, a novice waiter approaches our table with a cheesecake that we haven’t ordered. Within a millisecond, the head waiter catches him by the arm and sweeps him away. The cheesecake is taken one way, the hapless waiter the other, marched out by smart men in sharp suits. I wonder if we will ever see him again. I wonder if his family will ever see him again.
Inside Carbone London
KEN FULK INC
Our sommelier is over from New York, part of an elite Carbone Seal Team Six who launch new locations. He is, naturally, off to Dubai next week. On opening night in London, he tells us, with equal parts horror and awe, two British men came in and drank a bottle of champagne, a magnum of red, and half a bottle of Château d’Yquem between them. You don’t get that in America.
There is also, behind all the bluster, an air of faded glory about Carbone too. The New York original lost its Michelin star in 2022, and there’s a lingering question as to how cool a restaurant can actually be if it has outposts in Riyadh, Doha and Las Vegas. “Let’s party like it’s 2019,” a New York pal texted contemptuously, when I invited him to join me at the original Carbone last year.
CHARLOTTE IVERS FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
But he did come. And he posted pictures on Instagram. The next day, he came skulking back, shamefaced. “Everyone is asking how on earth I managed to get a table. Everyone.” In a city where all anyone talks about is where they can get a table, late-empire Carbone was still king.
That night, I ate an “eggplant and zucchini scapece” of such exquisite horror I barely want to inflict a description on you. I still wake up in the night, thinking of the plastic shavings of orange and yellow cheese semi-melted on top. “There’s still nothing that looks or feels like us” in London, Zalaznick told Restaurant magazine. I’ll bet. We’re too close to Italy. There’d be a riot.
Thankfully, the food in Carbone London is mostly better. A Caesar salad, made tableside, is impeccable. At £31, it should be. The puttanesca is fiery and excellent. Their famous veal parmesan (£69) looks and tastes like it was made in a cafe in Newcastle. I don’t necessarily mean that as an insult. The chicken scarpariello, however, contains mushrooms — I think they were mushrooms, at least — of a texture so viscerally disgusting that I gagged.
CHARLOTTE IVERS FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
And that’s fine. It’s not about the food. That should have been clear when Victoria Beckham walked in: this is not a restaurant for people who like eating. Carbone isn’t selling food, it’s selling a dream: of glamour, of the golden age of Manhattan’s Little Italy, of the chance you might — as my fiancé once did in New York — find yourself sat next to JLo for dinner. This is the American dream, sold to the highest bidder. This is also, I fear, an ominous vision of London’s future.
Dining and Cooking