by John Mariani
                                                                                                    Photos by P.Lewis for Bloomberg

    They actually pick up the phone at Carbone and a very affable person tells you that they book tables 30 days out. The food has gotten mixed reviews thus far, but the stratospheric prices have been causing sticker shock.
  Yet Carbone, on the premises of an old Italian-American joint named Rocco’s in Greenwich Village, is easily the hottest restaurant of the moment in New York and getting a rez is only slightly less difficult than getting an audience with the new Pope, which says a lot more about a kind of feeding frenzy driven by two sectors: the food media that hyped Carbone’s opening for months in advance and those people who always need to be the first to say, “I ate there already . . . and you didn’t.”
    Private numbers and email addresses are being passed around; secretaries will be fired if they can’t snare a table for six at eight on the ninth;  IPhones snap fuzzy photos tweeted on the spot. Bloggers boast,  “u GOTTA have the meat-a-balls,” and “veal parm is 50 freaking dollars but AWESOME!”  And this is before the NY Times has even reviewed the place.
    Plenty of new places get their three months’ of hype, but not since Keith McNally opened Minetta Tavern around the corner from Carbone has a restaurant been as eagerly awaited, as if Tom Brady was coming to the Jets.
    Carbone’s owners, Rich Torrisi, Mario Carbone and Jeff Zalaznick (above) have been the food media’s darlings since debuting their tiny storefront Torrisi Italian Specialty Restaurant on Mulberry Street, serving a 5-course meal for only fifty bucks (at first).   They refused to use any imported products, not even prosciutto, and the media proclaimed Torrisi’s a welcome antidote to the high-priced Italian ristoranti in the city like San Pietro,  SD26, and Marea. Torrisi and Carbone then opened Parm, a little shop selling veal parm for $25 and baked ziti for $12. Once again the media raved that the food was cheap and delicious—just the way Italian-American food should be! Not like those uptown truffle-oiled $26 pastas and $40 caviar-topped branzinos. This, despite the fact that the same media have largely ignored popular Italian-American restaurants like Patsy’s and Il Mulino in Manhattan and a slew of others in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn.
    So why is Carbone getting such attention? It’s certainly not the location or the décor. The premises certainly didn’t cost millions of dollars to renovate and Greenwich Village rents are not (yet) as high as they are in midtown. Carbone did not cost $20 million to build like Lincoln Ristorante at Lincoln Center.  And they’re not paying $22 an hour to union dishwashers.  Yet Torrisi and Carbone, who once championed good, inexpensive Italian food, are now charging $50 for veal parm,  $28 for penne primavera and  $33 for chicken scarpariello—not to mention  $87 and up for lobster fra diavolo.
      According to Torrisi and Carbone, they really just wanted to showcase and refine the old-fashioned, out-of-fashion red sauce Italian-American restaurants of the post-war period, where families shared a cold antipasto plate, got a big plate of spaghetti with meatballs and expected a side order of spaghetti with the veal parm, watched the waiter whip up zabaglione tableside, and finished off with drip-pot espresso with a lemon peel and a bottle of Sambuca on the side.
    Torrisi and Carbone want people to have fun. There’s a neon name sign outside, superimposed on the still visible Rocco's sign. Inside there are three small, cramped, loud rooms, made to look like stage sets. The waiters are outfitted in shiny maroon Zak Pozen tuxedos and Adidas sneakers. The rear room (supposedly the VIP section, made to look like one where goombahs would meet) has no windows, just brick walls, tables so close you have to move them to get out. It’s a certain kind of aesthetic that borrows equally from a nostalgia for Little Italy eateries like Angelo’s (where veal parmigiana sells for $24) and S.P.Q.R. (where linguine with clam sauce goes for $18) and the cool modernism of artwork curated by Vito Schnabel. There are white tablecloths—three of them--on each table. The menu is about three feet wide. The huge wine list has very few red bottlings under $95 and the corkage fee for BYOB is $50 a bottle. They play 1960s doo-wop. You get Sambuca at meal’s end.
    I ate at Carbone last week (my editor at Esquire snagged a 6:30 rez) and had a pretty swell time. Everybody was cordial, the kitchen graciously sent out some dishes to try, and the crowd seemed giddy to be there.   There were tables of women dining together, tables with raucous Wall Street guys in shirtsleeves slugging back $400 bottles of Barolo and a table of slouching Eastern Europeans with Maria Sharapova wannabes. By 6:30 the place was packed and it didn't let up when we got up to leave nearly  three hours later.
    We had some excellent langoustines in a “scampi” sauce, glorious carpaccio, a first-rate Caesar salad (above), and the $50 veal parm was terrific, though not enough so to make me forget plenty of other versions at half the price.  Not everything clicked: a nugget of Parmesan cheese was served cold; salty, smoky Kentucky ham was bewildering in an Italian-American restaurant;  “Spicy rigatoni vodka” (right) was good but insanely rich; ravioli with chicken livers Caruso swam in a pool of butter, and the lobster fra diavolo (below), de-shelled and put back, sat in a puddle of oily sauce.
    Was any of it transformative? Does Carbone make a strong case that Italian-American food should cost as much as French haute cuisine? At this point I’d say no, not because Torrisi and Carbone aren’t using top-quality ingredients but because for our bill of $543.41 for two people that night (two cocktails, one bottle and one glass of wine, plus an $80 tip), I should have been blown away by food way better than any Italian restaurant’s in New York.
    In an online interview, Torrisi and Carbone defended the now notorious $50 veal parm insisting that they are using the finest veal, buffalo mozzarella, and “tomatoes we canned last summer,” and that “we’re not making tons of money off this.”  But is there any question that their high-end competitors use anything less than the finest, most expensive ingredients? Of course they do, yet SD26 sells a veal loin chop with cipolline, asparagus, and smoked pancetta cream sauce for $37; Armani Ristorante of Fifth Avenue sells a bone-in veal cotoletta alla milanese with arugula salad and Sicilian pachino tomatoes for $44; a "Roman Style" veal piccata with asparagus, capers, lemon, and potato puree at the Maccionis’ new Sirio Ristorante in the Pierre Hotel goes for $30; and at Il Mulino, where the tuxedos are black, veal Marsala runs $30.75.
    And if I wanted first-rate Italian-American fare—which has never stopped evolving ever since the first Italian immigrants passed through Ellis Island after 1880—I’ll order the nonpareil fried zucchini and stewed tripe alla napoletana at Patsy’s on West 56^th Street at $28; or the linguine with baby clams for $19.75 at La Masseria on West 48^th Street; or the veal parmigiana at Mario’s in the Bronx, for $17.95. Not all the prices at Carbone are so outrageous—you can get octopus pizzaiolo for $17 and pork chops with peppers for $27—and portions are generous. But it’s tough to swallow Carbone’s hot and cold antipasti at $48 per person, $45 zuppa di pesce and the $52 veal Marsala when no one else in New York dares charge such prices.  And you’re not getting a view of the Hudson or Central Park or Times Square or the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn side.
    So, go figure.  Carbone is the restaurant of the moment so it can charge whatever it likes to people who will pay anything to be there right this moment, but to call it a place that redeems, improves upon, and sublimates Italian-American food to a level it has never before achieved is simply not the case. Torrisi and Carbone’s hearts are in the right place and they produce delicious food. But the irony is that its current clientele is composed mostly of people who would never think of eating in Italian-American restaurants in Little Italy, Arthur Avenue, or Bensonhurst.  And few Italian families are going to take the kids, grandma or Aunt Teresa to any place that charges $50 for veal parm. 

    The International Organisation of Wine and Vine estimated global consumption in 2011 to be 1.7 million hectoliters, with a decrease among several EU nations, including Spain itself. Germany, the UK, and the U.S. are still Spanish wines’ biggest customers, and producers are finding that better quality and sensible prices are key to an increasingly sophisticated wine drinker now becoming familiar with varietals like

Luis Cañas Crianza 2008 ($15)—A crianza from Rioja is a red wine that must spend at least 12 months in oak and not be sold until its third year, which allows for mellowing before release. Five percent garnacha added to 95 percent tempranillo with a spark of bright fruit helps balance the tannins, while the acids that make this Rioja Alavesa wine wholly pleasurable to drink with anything on the grill this summer. The Canas family has made wine for generation but has only been selling it since 1970, and they have been pioneers of modern Spanish viticulture ever since.

Viñedos Valderiz Ribera del Duero ($34)—Bodegas y Valderiz’s Esteban family prides itself on its commitment to ecological and biodynamics processes. Their Juegabolos vineyard, said to have a complex soil structure with a limestone bottom, gives their Barricas Seleccionad 2006 estate wine a rich minerality, made from 100 percent tempranillo (also called tinto fino). Today you can easily find it for $34, where just a couple of years ago it hit $75 a bottle. For something bolder, though with a little less finesse, the 2004 Valderiz Ribera del Duero is a real delight, so good with pork and beef, and a good buy for so well-balanced a red wine of this age.

Bodegas J.C. Conde Vivir Vinos de Fabula Vivir 2007 ($14)—On first sip, this Ribera del Duero from 100 percent tempranillo doesn’t reveal much and the acids are weak, but for $14 and at 14 percent alcohol, it is the kind of wine you stick in a picnic basket with a loaf of country bread and enjoy with cold chicken and cole slaw. The vines date back as much as 60 years in the Burgos District, and the wine is aged 10 months in tanks.

Alta Banderas A10 Crianza 2008 ($16)—This wine reveals many layers of dark cherry and toasted caramel notes, having spent more than 16 months in French and American oak. At 14 percent alcohol it is rich without being in any way cloying.

Dominio de Atauta 2008 ($34)—This tempranillo is not filtered, which explains the dark color, rustic style and excellent acidity to cut through the durable tannins, for which the tempranillo grape is justly admired. There is a great deal of ripe berries in it, but the surprise was that there was, after only four years, a lot of sediment in the bottle. It needs decanting.

The Duero River of Northern Spain

Xavier Flouret Pavo Real Crianza 2005 ($20)—Winemaker Nuria Pena Albillo has given this winery from the 1920s a boost in reputation, but you’ll have to be patient. I found the 2005 still very tannic and not yet giving up its mellow fruit.  The label says it should be drunk “now and up to ten years,” and I’d agree with the latter date for this wine to mature. Its high alcohol, 14.5 percent, is of a style a lot of young Spanish winemakers are going for to compete with the big reds of California and South America.

NEVER SEEMS TO BOTHER LINDSAY LOHAN
Wolfgang Puck told Eater DC that he once served Jack Nicholson, who asked, "'You know, Wolf, can I eat in the kitchen?' I say, 'Why would you want to eat in the kitchen?' He says, 'I don't like eating outside because people take pictures with me with my mouth eating or having a funny face eating something. It's not good for an actor to get pictures like that.' "

AND AFTER ALL THOSE PAY-OFFS TO THE POLICE,
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS?

Mexican Federal Attorney General Humberto Benitez Trevino issued an apology for "the inappropriate behavior of [his] daughter Andrea" after she threw a temper tantrum at Maximo Bistro in Mexico City when asked to wait for her table, without a reservation. The woman then called city officials and, within hours,  official inspectors came to the restaurant and posted "suspended" signs. Benitez Trevino added, "Immediately upon hearing of the situation, I ordered the raid suspended, to avoid any excesses."

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