New York City’s hottest restaurants have long operated as semi-private clubs, even if you didn’t know it. The Nines has a VIP number for reservations, as does Balthazar and Minetta Tavern. There’s in-the-know emails for Polo Bar, and a special status for hard-to-get bookings on Resy. For the back room at Emilio s? You pretty much need to know Emilio himself.
Money can get you into these places, sure. Amex Black and Platinum Cards come with reservation perks. Dorsia promises you entry for a pricey minimum spend. Slipping the maître d’ a stack of bills is always a classic. Access, however, is mostly granted through a combination of cult, cash, and clout. Come here a lot, bring a cool crowd, and put your card down? Your table is right this way.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that Major Food Group’s Mario Carbone, Jeff Zalaznick, and Rich Torrisi—the founders of Carbone, the crown jewel of the city’s social dining scene—decided to make what was unsaid, well, said. Loudly. Last week, their second location debuted in Hudson Yards. But only to a select few: ZZ’s Club, which features two restaurants, the Japanese-focused ZZ’s and Carbone Privato, is members only. The cost of entry? A $20,000 initiation fee, followed by $10,000 yearly dues.
If that seems steep, it very much is: the median income for New York City is $70,663, meaning ZZ’s is only accessible to the upper, upper echelon of the wealthiest people in the world.
Yet, Major Food Group is betting they’ll pay. They’ve already been paying. Since opening in 2013, the 110-seat Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village has built so much buzz it’s become an empire: Carbone Miami location has a two-month-long waiting list, and during the F1 Grand Prix, reservations went for $3,000 a head for a pop-up on the beach. In 2021, Major Food Group opened the first ZZ’s Club in the Design District. Reservations were by application only. This December, a sales gallery will open for their multi-million dollar condos in Edgewater.
Why? People love the food, sure. But they also love being in a room where influence and affluence intersect; where at any given night, Leonardo DiCaprio could be sitting at the table next to Barack Obama, or Rihanna next to Jeff Bezos. If the Illuminati really does exist, they’re eating at Carbone.
So maybe—more than the spicy rigatoni alla vodka—that’s their secret sauce. The barrier of entry into the Major Food Group microcosm is so high that, once you do get in, the feeling of missing out ceases to exist. You know it’s the most exclusive place to be. And if you had unlimited funds—how much would you pay to make FOMO go away?
Regardless, they face stiff social competition. ZZ’s is just the latest private club in a city suddenly booming with them: Over the past three years, New York has welcomed Casa Cipriani, Zero Bond, The Ned, the Aman, and Casa Cruz. The London-based 5 Hertford Street and Los Angeles’s San Vicente Bungalows will arrive in the next several months. Yet, Carbone and his team see a gap within this modish market. “They’re fun and they’re cool, but generally, food and beverage is where it falls short,” Carbone says. “We should be the preeminent members club for food and beverage.”
Carbone along with his chefs, who held a Michelin star from 2013 to 2022 for his namesake restaurant and currently have one for Torrisi, certainly have the talent to execute a club that serves a great meal. (“Carbone has a technical prowess that can make you giddy; a lust for excess that can, at times, make you a little queasy; and an instinct for sheer entertainment that makes a lot of other restaurants seem like earnest, unimaginative drones,” Pete Wells wrote in his three-star review of Carbone for the New York Times in 2013.) But, as Carbone explains further, they just don’t want to make a great meal. They want to make you the best meal. If you want one of their famous pasta dishes off the menu, go ahead. It’ll be delicious.
But maybe you don’t want their pasta. You want the pasta with bolognese that your grandma served you as a small child on Sundays, or perhaps the linguine alle vongole from the cliffside restaurant in Capri where you got engaged. Give them the recipe—or just recall it to the best of your knowledge—and they’ll make that for you too. A culinary concierge is also on hand to source rare, gourmet items, from truffles to cuts of steak to bottles of wine. (Although their on-site cellar already has more than 30,000.) “So on the smaller scale, it s ‘Can I have this like this?’ ‘Of course,’” explains Carbone. “But on the grander scale, it s, ‘Give me the recipe. We’ll make it for you.’"
ZZ’s also allows Carbone to exercise more creative freedom. Knowing how hard it is to get into his public restaurants, he is wary of switching up what he serves there: “I don t want to take a dish off of a Carbone menu for someone who’s waited a long time to go there,” he says. Here, he plays around with entirely new entries, such as a lobster risotto alla arrabbiata that takes forty minutes to make. Others have been dusted off from the archives, like the ravioli Caruso that was served at the original Torrisi.
He gets to dream up concepts beyond breakfast, lunch, and dinner too. “I like to envision all the different scenarios, like the member could be having just a coffee and a meeting, or a pre-dinner cocktail. What are we going to have at our disposal to make sure that they’re pampered in all these different ways at all these different times of the day,” he says.
The ambience was the next thing they had to nail. Both ZZ’s and Carbone Privato are designed by Ken Fulk, whose showman style attracted high-profile clients like Mark Zuckerberg and Pharrell Williams. His main goal in decorating the 25,000-square-foot space? “I wanted to make sure that it lived up to the hype,” says Fulk. He suspended a giant, gilded chandelier resembling an upside-down palm tree from the ceiling, and wrapped a seascape mural by James Boyd around the walls. (It’s like if the pop of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic met the romanticism of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea met the woodblock prints of Hokusai.) Banquettes are swathed in a rich tropical palette of turquoise and corals.
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At Carbone Privato upstairs, Fulk envisioned a room “surrounded in a sea of red”: plush crimson curtains reveal a room filled with damask velvets, brash accents, and dramatic chandeliers. Art curated by Vito Schnabel hangs on the walls, while white tablecloths are accented with Ginori 1735’s pastel Oriente Italiano dinner plates. A lounge nearby features a roaring fireplace with a bar decoratively painted to resemble pietra dura. Soon, a small after-hours room, Leo’s, will open for late-night revelry. “We always try to create spaces that are transportive, that do have a sense of fun and whimsy to them—but also are glamorous and a little bit old school,” says Fulk.
Connecting the two restaurants is a sleek, scaling stairway enclosed in glass where you can see anyone who walks up or down. At first, says Fulk, the team wondered if people would rather take an elevator. “No, people want to see and be seen,” he says. “They’re going to make their way down that staircase.”
On a Friday night in November, people do. A man in a suit at a table of men in suits looks longingly at a beautiful blonde descending. Upstairs, she makes a grand entrance into Carbone Privato: her friends spy her several steps away and call her name. They’ve ordered her a martini, which she slips into a green velvet booth to drink. A clubby playlist—the work of in-house musical director Stretch Armstrong—plays in the background.
The group knows the one next to them, too, and they know the people three tables over, who’ve ordered Carbone Privato’s signature lobster risotto dish. They’re heaping spoonfuls onto their plates while downing a bottle of red wine. Their sincere, familial greetings—It’s so great to see you!— indicate that these reservation run-ins were entirely coincidental.
Yet they don’t seem surprised. After all, the circle in this city that can afford entry into places like these is small. This is just the latest room they’ve been together.
