Historic Oklahoma City speakeasy reopens decades later as Carletti’s

OKLAHOMA CITY –

An historic speak-easy turned longtime BBQ joint is now reopened as an Italian restaurant on a hill over Oklahoma City. Carletti’s embraces the history of the building while offering centuries-old family recipes straight from Italy.

Carletti’s restaurant is located on NE 63rd near Grand Boulevard and starts each day by rolling out dough for fresh pasta.

“You can go to a lot of restaurants and get lasagna, but you can’t get the Carletti’s lasagna because that’s a 200 year old recipe,” said consulting chef Chris Becker.

The restaurant story started with the Carletti’s and the Ravaioli’s. The two Italian families emigrated to the U.S. and settled in the Krebs area of Oklahoma, then joined in marriage more than 100 years ago.

The families opened a grocery store called C&R. Now generations later, one of the restaurant owners is actually from the Carletti-Ravaioli family that has these recipes the menu is based on.

“The ravioli bolognese is a very, popular sacred family recipe,” Becker said.“The lasagna is as well, those two dishes are centered around a Bolognese recipe that’s been passed down for over 200 years.

And then, the spicy rigatoni is another popular pasta dish,” Becker said.

The recipes were passed down by word of mouth – nothing was actually written down, so Chef Becker had to get the women of the Carletti-Ravaioli families in the kitchen to make these dishes from memory in order to write out instructions to repeat it in a restaurant setting.

“When I was making the Bolognese, I had to chase them around with the scale for the garlic,” Becker laughed. “I had to basically go through and document everything in a snapshot, in a moment of time when the dish was being made,” he said.

Carletti’s is where the notorious speak easy The Kentucky Club once was — which offered illegal booze, illegal gambling and shady ladies during the Prohibition Era.

The remodeled space kept the iconic horse stalls from the 1930s you can now dine in.

“It’s very much like a celebration of family and heritage and recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation,” Becker said.