I mean, it’s just spicy rigatoni, right?
Carbone is an upscale, old-school Italian restaurant located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Opened in 2013 and operated by Major Food Group, Carbone has been referred to as “the most celebrity-studded restaurant on earth” and is notoriously difficult to get a reservation at.
“At impossible-reservation restaurants, the food is always ancillary to the potent validation of simply being allowed past the door. If I mention that the burger at the Polo Bar is marvelous, what I am really telling you, darling, is that of course I go to the Polo Bar.”
The New Yorker, May 2021
Carbone is iconic and the restaurant’s reputation precedes itself. Without a doubt, Carbone is the spot I most aspired to dine at when I first moved to New York City in 2018.
Fast-forward five years, and I’ve managed to eat here twice! Most recently, I celebrated my 27th birthday with dinner here, planned by my boyfriend (thanks John).
Let’s unpack whether or not all the hype is worth it.
First Things First: How To Get In
Carbone only takes reservations through the Resy app. Reservation time slots are released 30 days in advance. The time slots open up at 10am, so I’d set an alarm for 9:59am. If you are even a minute late to refresh the Resy app, all of the slots will be taken. Unsurprisingly, Carbone does not accept walk-ins!
I’d note that assuming you do successfully make a reservation, Carbone requires a deposit of $50 per person to hold the reservation, which is then applied to your final bill at the restaurant.
Once you make it past the doors and the hostess, you’re finally in. Here’s my view on Carbone’s atmosphere, food, and service, all summed up into a final rating out of 5.
Atmosphere: 4.5 out of 5
Carbone has moody, old-school Italian mafia energy, overlaid with vibes of exclusivity and renown. If you are dining at Carbone, you know that all of the fellow diners around you showed up to dinner with their best: their trendiest outfits, their coolest stories, their most elite social group.
The first time I ate at Carbone, our reservation was for 10:30pm on a Monday night. Obviously, this is not a prime time. Alas, I was so eager to get through the doors that I was willing to eat my spicy rigatoni at midnight.
Hot take: the second time my boyfriend and I ate at Carbone, we secured a table at 7:45pm on a Saturday. How did we nab this prime time, you ask? We elected to sit in the outdoor seating space. Erected during COVID, these outdoor seating areas are all across the city now. I expect they will likely remain a permanent fixture for every NYC restaurant – more diners, more money!
Although the outdoor dining room may have lacked some of the mystique found inside, I enjoyed being seated there. The space was well-decorated and in theme with the rest of Carbone. We participated in some highly entertaining people-watching of the passerby on Thompson Street.
One of my favorite aspects of Carbone is handed to you right after you are seated at your table: the giant menu. This menu is comically large. Holding it, I felt like a dad reading the Sunday morning paper in an old cartoon, and I loved it. It felt ostentatious and fabulous.
When you’re at Carbone, you can definitely feel that it’s Carbone. I’m giving the atmosphere a 4.5/5 because it seems like us normal people have to sacrifice something (either eating at a normal time, or eating inside) to experience it all for ourselves.
Food: 4 out of 5
There are many, many well-known and coveted dishes on Carbone’s menu.
If you were to take a stroll through Carbone on any given night, I imagine that quite literally every table in the place would have a plate of the spicy rigatoni vodka pasta in front of them at one point or another. The rigatoni vodka pasta is quite good. It’s creamy, robustly flavored, cooked perfectly al dente, with just a hint of a red pepper kick lingering in the aftertaste. I did find it a bit odd that they don’t offer you freshly grated cheese to go with the rigatoni. But perhaps Carbone feels that the dish is perfect on its own (I’ll never turn down cheese though).
Other popular dishes include the Caesar salad (punchy with anchovies and prepared table-side), Mario’s meatballs (not listed on the menu, but always mentioned by the server), the prosciutto and mozzarella appetizer, the veal parmesan, and the lobster ravioli.
Personally, we ordered the prosciutto and mozzarella as a starter. We followed this with the spicy rigatoni with meatballs for our pasta course. To round everything out, we ordered a rack of ribs with a side of potatoes as our main course.
All of these dishes were quite good. However, my favorite part about the food at Carbone was completely unrelated to what we ordered off the menu. Instead, the complimentary small bites we were served throughout the meal were what made the dining experience a standout for me.
To start off, they serve you a bread basket with three different types of bread (all delicious). This is accompanied by dish of pickled cauliflower (not really my thing, but objectively I thought it was good for what it is). Alongside the bread and cauliflower we were given a small plate of artfully folded salami to pair with the rest of the starting dishes. I thought this antipasti course was a delightful beginning to the meal.
After we had placed our dinner order with our server, a waiter stopped by our table with a gigantic wheel of Parmesano Reggiano cheese, and broke a few chunks off of the block for us to nibble on. And lastly, we were unfortunately too stuffed to order dessert. However, our check was accompanied by two rainbow-cake cookies (classic Italian bakery style). I felt that these unexpected additions were well thought-out and elevated the overall meal considerably.
As a small note: no one ever mentions the drink list at Carbone, being too busy experiencing the food and the fabulousness of it all. The drinks are pricey ($28 for a glass of white wine…even in New York City, this is steep) but high-quality. We had wine as well as cocktails and enjoyed both.
All in all, the food gets 4 stars out of 5 from me. All of the dishes that are so famous (the pasta, the meatballs) were pretty good. But I thought the best parts were the dishes we didn’t even order.
Service: 4 out of 5
This section was almost a 5 out of 5 – alas, we ran into some hiccups. Our waiter for the outdoor section was very attentive, filled with recommendations about the menu, and ceremonious with his flourishes and mannerisms. I genuinely enjoyed his sightly pompous attitude – it felt like he had been working at Carbone his whole life.
However, he pretty much insisted that we pair the spicy rigatoni pasta with the meatballs, which in hindsight made no sense. The pasta was cooked in a vodka sauce and the meatballs were cooked in a red sauce – they did not match. To me, this felt a bit like Carbone really wanted waiters to push the “secret” meatballs on guests.
More annoyingly, the timing between the arrival of our courses was way off. Our appetizers and pasta came out very quickly after ordering, but the ribs took almost an hour. I know ribs take a while to prepare, but we ordered everything all at once. Unfortunately, by the time the ribs arrived, we were too full to enjoy them. We ended up taking an entire rack of ribs to-go. (Disclaimer: we reheated the ribs for dinner the next night. They were still delicious, but the white tablecloth service was lacking.)
So, pretty good service, but a smidgen of room for improvement in a few areas.
Conclusion: 4/5
So, is Carbone worth all the hype? My view is yes, it is – but only once. I don’t think I will go to Carbone again of my own volition (I certainly won’t say no if someone invites me however). As a result, I’m giving it a 4 out of 5 – for me, this means I don’t plan to go back. I only award 5/5 ratings to restaurants I would without a doubt want to return to.
The best thing about Carbone is the atmosphere, hands down. When you sit down at your table, you feel like you have been welcomed into a prestigious establishment that has been around since the dawn of New York City – however, the restaurant only opened ten years ago. I don’t think Carbone is a famous NYC dining institution because of its food. People want to eat at Carbone because they want to feel like they are experiencing New York City with the best of the best. So if that’s your thing, I definitely recommend setting that 9:59am alarm for a reservation and getting all dressed up for what will surely be an entertaining and delicious evening to remember.
For more restaurant recommendations in NYC, check out my other food posts here.
