Carbone

Carbone, opened by Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi, and Jeff Zalaznick in 2013 in a narrow Greenwich Village townhouse on Thompson Street, has become the most talked-about restaurant in New York City and one of the hardest reservations to secure in the United States. The restaurant is an elaborately staged love letter to mid-twentieth-century Italian-American restaurant culture — the dining rooms are plush with red leather banquettes, the waiters wear tuxedos and move with theatrical precision, and Caesar salad is prepared tableside with a fork and spoon. But Carbone is not merely nostalgic: the cooking is genuinely exceptional, deploying precise techniques and premium ingredients in service of the greatest hits of Italian-American cooking. The rigatoni alla vodka, enriched with house-made tomato sauce and finished with a lavish amount of cream, has become an emblem of the New York dining moment. The veal Parmesan — an enormous, breaded, fried escalope lacquered with tomato and stretched mozzarella — is the platonic ideal of the dish. Spicy rigatoni and lobster fra diavolo round out a menu designed for sharing at the table. The dining room is loud in the best way: a triumphant, joyful cacophony of conversation, ice clinking, and tableside theater. The beverage program features Italian wines with particular depth in Barolo and Amarone, plus a selection of retro Italian-American cocktails executed with care. Reservations open on the first of each month for the following month and are exhausted within minutes; the RESY app and being ready at midnight on the release day are the only reliable strategies.