Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 107
Carbone: The Most Celebrity-Studded Restaurant on Earth, Headline of the Week, New Yorker Cartoon of the Week, Varsity Pickle, Heartwarming Moment of the Week, Ballplayers and their gloves, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting. Check out the archive of previous newsletters here.
How Chef Mario Carbone Built the Most Celebrity-Studded Restaurant on Earth
From Leonardo DiCaprio, Rihanna, and Jay-Z to Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, and secretive millionaires, it’s as if the rich and powerful simply are not aware that other places exist to get dinner. And it’s all thanks to this man.
Full disclosure: the wife and I ate at Carbone in Manhattan last year around Christmas. It was pretty damn good. She secured the rezzie many months in advance.
We went for lunch. I didn’t know much about the place. Had an espresso martini. Ordered the Ceasar and the meatballs. Both were world-class. They brought out salami and fresh cheese. Had a couple of pasta dishes. Had a negroni. Ordered dessert. It was great. We did not see Kanye or any other celebrities. I enjoyed it very much. My only regret: I probably should have dressed a little more formally.
One more quick story: we had a dinner reservation in the city as well, so I wasn’t planning on a feast. I saw the pasta with shrimp was $25 pp. Hey, that’s reasonable. Family style pasta sounds great, I thought.
When I tried to order it, the waitress asked, “how many pieces?” I said, “excuse me. How many is standard?”
It was then that I realized that the shrimp were $25 per piece. I ordered a pasta without shrimp instead.
This (very long) profile is a wild read about celebrity, entertainment, and glamour. Also, it’s about food. Check this lede:
During the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix in May, the owners of Carbone, the decade-old temple to red-sauce dining in Greenwich Village, opened a pop-up underneath a gigantic tent on the beach. For a lot of reasons Carbone Beach seemed particularly hubristic.
First, there already is an outpost of Carbone in Miami, just a short drive down Collins Avenue, one that’s large enough to pull off close to a thousand covers on a big night. The pop-up went head-to-head not just with itself but with a hundred other global hot spots for customers during the jam-packed race weekend schedule. Then there was the little issue of the cost. To eat at Carbone Beach, the price tag was $3,000 per person. Still, in the days leading up to the races, Jeff Zalaznick, cofounder of Major Food Group, the umbrella company that owns Carbone, was bullish.
“We’ve never seen demand like this,” he said, referring to the restaurant and Miami itself. “It’s going to be a very hedonistic experience.”
Zalaznick knew his market.
Over the four-day Carbone Beach pop-up, the guest list was a remarkable cross section of American wealth and celty: real estate billionaires Stephen Ross and Richard LeFrak, oil heir Mikey Hess; media mega-dealer Aryeh Bourkoff; Gen Z Marvel hero Hailee Steinfeld; directors Michael Bay and Spike Lee; Derek Jeter; Venus and Serena Williams; Patrick Mahomes; and more. LeBron James alone managed to stop by Carbone Beach on four consecutive nights. Even deposed princelings Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were there, enjoying a rare night out insulated from sneering restaurantgoers who can’t afford to drop three stacks to get into dinner.
At 200 heads per night times four, Carbone Beach ostensibly grossed more than $2 million. The brick-and-mortar Carbone down the beach was booked from opening until closing.
At the center of it all is Mario Carbone, a perpetual kid from Queens now approaching middle age, who opened his namesake restaurant in 2013 at the age of 33. All weekend long in Miami—where he relocated with his girlfriend, the powerful TikTok star publicist Cait Bailey, during the pandemic—he was personally plating the rigatoni and flipping the steaks on the grills while also playing politician, greeting VIPs, and introducing the talent onstage.
So how does someone achieve this level of success? Hubris helps.
“I don’t think we had any idea how it was going to happen,” Carbone says to me. “But if you would’ve told me and Rich in our late 20s, you guys were going to be fucking big, you’re going to be huge, we would’ve been like, ‘Yeah, you bet your ass.’
Carbone is the ultimate celebrity magnet. It was the rare room that Leonardo DiCaprio could enter and maybe not be the most famous guy present.
Rihanna’s pregnancy announcement was bookended by visits. Justin Bieber beelined there the day after the Met Gala in September 2021. Kanye West and Julia Fox went on their first date at the Miami outpost on New Year’s Day, and then followed up three days later with another date…at Carbone in New York, as they vamped for the paparazzi. The whole thing bordered on a work of performance art, with Carbone as a backdrop, seen on phone screens the world over. Over the course of a workweek, Page Six wrote no fewer than 17 stories referencing the couple’s dinners there.
So what’s the food like?
The restaurant delivers its highfalutin versions of classic Italian American comfort food hits—ragu, ravioli, rigatoni, calamari, puttanesca, shrimp scampi, lobster fra diavolo, veal Parmesan—with a side of arch referentiality: the red-tuxedoed captain singing along to Frank while his bazooka arms mix a gigantic Caesar salad; the reddest, spiciest, booziest vodka sauce ever served over noodles on white tablecloth; the courtesy-of-the-chef wink wink nod nod free courses coming out to make you feel like you’re a made man in a mob hang.
The free courses were my favorite part of the meal, tbh. What really sets Carbone apart is the service. And the service is based around “the move.”
“Carbone’s like a movie set, where every waiter’s like an actor,” says Daniel Boulud, who once employed Carbone and Torrisi at his own Café Boulud. “Mario and Rich, they’re New Yorkers, and they have this nostalgia for classic New York, and it gives it this joie de vivre.”
The creators know this and relish the hell out of it. When talking about the restaurant, Carbone and Torrisi often bring up a concept they have dubbed “The Move.” The Moves are wink wink mini performances pulled off by the servers that weave together into a narrative, a series of over-accommodation that will charm and overwhelm and crescendo until you have been pomodoro-pilled.
“Generally it means unique service style moments, whether it’s the verbiage we use, how the captain guides you, the spiel they use to rattle off specials,” Torrisi says. “And people might not notice the Move, and that’s the point—the point is that you aren’t thinking about it because we got you, we captured your imagination, we’re pouring wine quickly and we’re getting you a cocktail and you’re having a great time and that’s why you’re coming back. That’s a Move.”
The piece goes on and on and talks about expansion in Dallas.
5-star review of the week
It was truly a pleasure to get Peter to the finish line.
I am Certified Mortgage Advisor and I want to help people experience home ownership. If you or a co-worker are considering buying a home this year, contact me today. Schedule a risk-free consultation today at micahwiener.com.
Headline of the Week
New Orleans inmates barricade themselves in pod, make demands including books, TV to watch Saints games
These demands seem pretty reasonable to me.
Inmates inside the Orleans Justice Center in New Orleans have barricaded themselves inside a pod and have made a list of demands to improve their conditions.
The inmates’ long list of demands for prison officials includes, among other things, better food and medicine, more books, and a second TV to watch Saints games.
The inmates’ other demands include changing the alternating lockdown, and requests for a washer, dryer, and kiosk.
Football can’t get here soon enough.
New Yorker Cartoon of the Week
Varsity Pickle
This week on Mind of Micah, I speak with my friends and the co-founders of Varsity Pickle, Adele Hazan and Karen Alexander. We talk about starting a pickleball apparel brand, the challenges they’ve faced in the wholesale market, pro-pickleball happenings, and more. It’s a nice conversation. Give it a listen.
Varsity Pickle merch is designed to celebrate every level of Pickle player with gear that makes you proud to play.
Check it out at varsitypickle.com and save 10% with promocode: MICAH.
Heartwarming Moment of the Week
Watch this video. Warning: it might get a little dusty.
From Wynton Bernard makes emotional debut after 11-year journey to the majors:
He dreamed of becoming an all-star and an MVP, but over the next decade, Bernard toiled in the minors, spending time in the farm systems of San Diego, Detroit, San Francisco and Chicago. Two of his six stints in foreign leagues took him to the Mexican Winter League and the Australian Baseball League. He played independent ball in the Constellation Energy League, a one-off league in Texas created during the early days of the pandemic in 2020. Most of the way, Janet continued to drive to his games as he pursued the majors.
The call-up came Thursday evening in Albuquerque, the home of the Rockies’ Class AAA affiliate. Bernard was going through his pregame routine — visualizing his at-bats against the opposing pitcher and readying for a quick nap — when Manager Warren Schaeffer made an announcement to the team.
“After 11 hard minor league seasons,” he said, “Wynton Bernard is going to The Show, boys!”
The clubhouse erupted. Bernard cried. He dapped up some teammates and scooped others off the ground. The moment was unexpected. It felt surreal.
So how did that big league debut go?
At 31 years and 322 days old, Bernard is the oldest player to get a hit and steal a base in his MLB debut since 1907, according to Stats Perform. Despite that distinction, he said he feels young enough to accomplish the remainder of his big league dreams.
Precious Leather
Major leaguers form deep relationships with their gloves. You can look, you can touch, but don’t even think about trying it on.
This is a fun story about the relationship between craftsman and their tools. And it’s got a great lede:
When Seattle Mariners third baseman Eugenio Suárez misses a ground ball, he shoves his face into his glove and has a few choice words for his leather companion.
“I’ll say, ‘Come on, come on,’” he recalled recently in Spanish. “‘If I don’t eat, you don’t eat.’”
Yes, Suárez talks to his glove. It doesn’t have a name, but he admitted it is like a person to him. “It’s there with me and helps me give my best on the field,” he said. And as a result, he goes out of his way to make sure his buddy is comfortable.
Suárez, 31, doesn’t put it on the ground, preferring to rest it on a bench or rack. In his locker, he said it always has its own shelf. In his travel duffel bag, it has a case and its own space. But what if a teammate wants to touch it?
“You can, but use it? No,” he said. “A hand inside? I don’t like that.”
Baseball players are a quirky and superstitious bunch.
The Major League Baseball season is arduously long: 162 regular-season games over six months, not including six weeks of spring training and a month of the playoffs if a team reaches the World Series. So players naturally develop routines to add some semblance of order. And when they are successful on the field, habits tend to stick — even if the difference exists only in their heads.
The quotes are great:
“I care for it as if it were my wife,” Willson Contreras, an All-Star catcher for the Chicago Cubs, said with a smile. “It’s my baby. It’s the most precious thing I have in my locker.”
Santiago Espinal, an All-Star second baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays, also sees his glove as family: “It’s like my son. There are even times I sleep with my glove. When I buy a new glove, I sleep with it.” (Technically, he clarified, the glove sleeps on his nightstand.)
“I have to take care of them because they take care of me,” said Molina, 40.
Jeff McNeil, the All-Star second baseman of the Mets, has used the same glove since 2013, the year he was drafted. He originally had two, but he retired one after his first season and framed it. The second is still going.
“It’s flimsy, and it’s not the best. But it works for me,” said McNeil, 30, who reached the major leagues in 2018. “It’s broken in perfect. Once an infielder gets that glove, they use it for a long time.”
“I’m working on breaking in another one right now,” he said, “and it’ll probably be ready in two years.”
Some players — outfielders and pitchers — didn’t worry at all about their leather.
“I’m a pitcher so I don’t care, and I’m not that good of a fielding pitcher,” said Mariners reliever Paul Sewald. Asked about his habits, Aaron Judge, the Yankees’ superstar outfielder, didn’t even know where his glove was in his locker at that moment.
“If I played infield, that’s where I’d probably be a little superstitious with it,” he said. “You’re taking grounders, and you got to have a certain feel for it. It’s a different relationship. In the outfield, it’s just like, ‘Make the catch. Come on, buddy.’”
Did Micah practice yoga this weekend?
Yes. One hour at Headwaters Hub Saturday.
That’s 29 in-person weekend classes in 32 weeks this year.
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