Set the Alarm for 10 AM or Take the Bar Stool
Major Food Group's Puck Building project trades Carbone's scene for a more ambitious kitchen — and a Resy drop that sells out in seconds.
The tortellini pomodoro arrives in a shallow pool of tomato so glossy it looks lacquered, each parcel pinched tight enough to hold the ricotta at temperature. It is the dish everyone photographs and the dish everyone talks about afterward, and both reactions are correct. The kitchen is doing an Italian-American canon and then bending it — chicken livers with Manischewitz, cavatelli in a Jamaican beef ragu — without letting the bending become the point.
Torrisi is Major Food Group's Puck Building project, from Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone with Jeff Zalaznick, the same team behind Carbone. It sits under the vaulted ceilings on Mulberry Street with waiters in dinner jackets and pressed linen on every table. Charlie England runs the kitchen. It is the more serious sister to the more famous room downtown, and the reservation math has caught up accordingly.
Carbone gets the scene and the phone calls, while Torrisi gets the kitchen doing the more interesting work.
Editorial Deep
The Italian and American hams with zeppole are a fine opening plate and not much more — the zeppole are good, the hams are what hams are, and the whole thing reads like a warm-up the kitchen included because it had to. Skip it if you're ordering tight.
The approach is the first thing the room does for you. You come down Mulberry past the Puck Building's red-brick bulk, through a door that gives away nothing from the sidewalk, and only then does the ceiling open up — vaulted, plastered, the height of a room built for a different century. The scale registers before anything else, and the dinner-jacketed floor staff moving under it register second.
Service is where the dinner-jacket dressing justifies itself. Pacing is calibrated, the pasta arrives at temperature, and the floor knows the menu deeply enough to steer you off the ham plate and onto the cavatelli without making a thing of it. Warm rather than performative — the Major Food Group house style, tuned a click more serious than Carbone.
The cavatelli with Jamaican beef ragu is the plate that justifies the pricing on its own. It is the dish that could not exist at the neighborhood Italian a block over, and it is priced against a menu of dishes that have to hold up to it. Once that plate lands, the rest of the check follows: the tortellini justifies its price, the tuna and the chanterelle penne justify theirs, the ham starter is the line item that doesn't.
First visit is the tortellini pomodoro, the cavatelli with the Jamaican ragu, and the affogato because everyone should see it once. Second visit is the linguini in the pink Manhattan clam sauce, the charred clam boule to open, and the Dover sole francese if it's on — the plates the pasta course crowded out the first time. That's the case for coming back: the menu is deep enough that a single dinner only surfaces half of what the kitchen is doing.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Tortellini Pomodoro, Cavatelli with Jamaican Beef Ragu, Affogato
“The Major Food Group project where the kitchen, not the scene, is doing the interesting work.”
Go for the cavatelli with Jamaican ragu and the tortellini pomodoro; skip the ham starter. If the Resy drop is a bridge too far and you're a party of three or more, Carbone books the same way and delivers the room instead — or Don Angie in the West Village, where the food ambition is comparable and the door is meaningfully easier.
The Verdict
