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here are A-list restaurants, and then restaurants for the A-list. Carbone is a rare instance of both. It is a New York- Italian puttin’ on the Ritz, somewhere straight from Scorsese’s Mean Streets,


only dressed in a tuxedo instead of a leather blazer. It is not just fully booked, but booked with the right people. Tony Bennett went in the early days, and soon Barack Obama swung by for a dirty mar- tini. The Beckhams are oſten spotted, Taylor Swiſt too, but even the A-list don’t always get in: George and Amal Clooney famously couldn’t snag a last-minute reservation, and Justin Bieber and his wife Hailey Baldwin were once turned away. Its ap- peal spans the generations, from Olivia Rodrigo to Leonardo DiCaprio to Goldie Hawn. It draws the rich, and the even richer: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are such fans that for a time a rumour went round that Carbone was doing their wedding catering. And now it has made it to London. Finally, that is. The New York original – the one


that picked up a rare rave review from the New York Times and for a time held a Michelin star, opened in 2013. Since then have come outposts in Miami, Dallas, Hong Kong, Doha and Riyadh. To comple- ment the existing Las Vegas hit, a second, seafood- oriented Carbone is coming to the Bellagio where, pre-dinner, guests can take a cruise across the casino’s famous fountains in a 33-foot Riva power- yacht. How come London has been missing out all this time? ‘London was actually always the city we wanted


for our second Carbone,’ says Jeff Zalaznick, who co-founded the restaurant and its parent company Major Food Group alongside chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi. Zalaznick – quick to offer a marti- ni, and as bullish and drawling as might be expect- ed for a scion of the billionaire Milstein family – says they had to make sure everything was perfect. ‘We always knew we’d probably land in Mayfair, but we did our time in Whitechapel, Shadwell, in da da da da’ – he stirs the air – ‘but, because we were spending so much money coming here looking for spaces with very little success, we realised we need- ed to be something we’re not very good at, which is patient, and let the opportunity to come to us.’


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