The Rigatoni Is Real, the Reservation Is the Real Problem
Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi's Thompson Street institution serves a genuinely great vodka rigatoni inside a 9.0 dining room. The rest of the menu is a mixed bag, and the Resy drop is the real ticket price.
The Spicy Rigatoni Vodka arrives on a warm plate with a controlled slick of orange sauce and enough chili heat to justify the name. It is the reason this restaurant exists in the cultural imagination, and it is the reason the reservation you spent three weeks stalking on a laptop feels — for about four minutes — worth it.
Carbone opened on Thompson Street in 2013 as Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi, and Jeff Zalaznick's fully committed staging of a 1950s Italian-American dining room, complete with tableside Caesars, tuxedoed captains, and a jazz soundtrack that never lets up. It became the most-photographed table in New York within eighteen months and has stayed there ever since. The room is one of the great rooms. The food is very good with one masterpiece and several expensive misses. It has a Michelin comfort rating and a Drake name-check, neither of which tells you what to order.
Editorial Deep
The Spicy Rigatoni Vodka is the dish. Firm tubes, a sauce built for balance rather than sweetness, real heat on the back end. Order it. The Tortellini al Ragu is the other pasta worth spending on — properly filled, sauce that tastes like it's been on a stove all day. The Beets Siciliana antipasto is a clean, sharp opener.
The dining room is the argument for the whole enterprise. Dark wood paneling, red banquettes, brass fixtures, low pendant lighting that flatters everyone at the table, and a jazz soundtrack pitched exactly loud enough to feel like an occasion and quiet enough to hear your captain describe the specials. Tuxedoed servers move at a specific 1950s tempo. The tables are close but not punishingly so.
Service is properly professional. Captains know the menu cold, pacing is handled with real attention across a long meal, and the tableside preparations are executed with the kind of choreography that separates a Torrisi restaurant from an imitator. There is warmth underneath the formality, which is not always true at rooms this scene-heavy.
What you get for the money depends entirely on what you ordered. A meal built around the rigatoni, the tortellini, and a couple of antipasti feels like a fair trade for the room and the service. A meal built around the veal parm and a marked-up bottle of Barolo does not.
Yes, but selectively. Once every couple of years, for the room, with someone who has not been, ordering the same three or four dishes that hold their price. Not a rotation restaurant. Not a birthday-every-year restaurant. A once-you-know-what-to-order restaurant.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Spicy Rigatoni Vodka, Tortellini al Ragu, Beets Siciliana
“The rigatoni is the real thing; the veal parm is the tax you pay for the room.”
Go for the room, the rigatoni, and the tortellini — skip the veal parm and the wine list's top half. For modern Italian at a comparable level without the Resy theater, Don Angie in the West Village is the smarter table.
The Verdict
