Could this possibly be a good thing?
Everyone keeps calling them The Boys.
You cant keep them down.
The Boys are sellouts, money men, clout chasers.
They are also, the same people will tell you, brilliant.
Masters of theater, dizzyingly charming, a well-oiled machine.
You have to hand it to The Boys.
Still today, it is ranked the No.
Of course, they could be.
Were prompting a conversation, and it creates this exchange.
And mamma mia, is all that texturelucrative.
When men wrote essays!
(As a job, not a hobby.)
The Boys restaurants arent exactly the coolest spots in town, nor the most refined.
But their rise tracks everything thats so fevered about dining in 2024.
Thanks to social media, every asshole is a foodie now.
You could argue whats happening right now isbecauseof Major Food Group,New Yorkerfood critic Hannah Goldfield tells me.
Theyve created an archetype so sexy, so theatrical, so hard to get into, so expensive.
The exclusivity compounds the appeal: Carbone is like Raos now, she continues.
Its really f*cking hard to get a table, if not impossible.
Unless you know someone.
I. Torrisi: Soul Search
I know someone.
An outlier among the crypto bros, an epicure the kitchen will strive to impress.
Cocktails are sweet, servers are aggressively cheerful.
one grins after we devour the salty Italian and American hams with zeppole.
Isnt it themostdelicious dish?
he sings after the clam boule (its quite good).
Yet I get the feeling were being rushed.
Maybe my outfit isnt translating, my non-influencer skin and dry hair outing me as bereft of disposable income.
Or maybe its the crowd.
Tonight I see none of the telltale horn-rimmed glasses of the art collector, nor the billionaires Rolex.
I do see Apple Watches.
Men in crossbody bags, girls in white sneakers, everyone bored by their money.
These are people who are trading experiences like theyre commodities.
Alison Roman, cookbook author and leader of the shallot revolution, has only been to Torrisi once.
Its vibes, she found, were off.
The pasta was fine, she tells me.
But it has no soul, and the clientele is enough to keep me away until I die.
The Boys insist its still there.
Were storytellers, Carbone tells me over Zoom (camera off).
Commodities traders, if you will.
We see ring lights all the time, Torrisi laments, speaking to me from his wood-paneled office.
Some of these people arent even influencers, or people that even get paid to do this.
Its shocking how noxious that is.
I dont really see a lot of upside in the restaurant during the experience.
Dining is a ballet.
The choreography is sacred, and everyone on the floor is both dancer and audience.
I always feel depressed when people arent trying to charm the server, she tells me.
And how about the rush of being seated at the impossible-to-get table?
Arent we all guilty of wanting status?
I feel pure of heart, she says.
Still, she insists, Im in it for the right reasons.
Matthew grins coyly as she pours the bubbles.
And may I ask, he says, whats the cepage?I do not know whatcepagemeans.
I detect the faintest glimmer of panic before she narrows her gaze and gingerly pulls the bottle up.
I believe its an even 33% between all three grapes, she smiles.
Matthew and I, on the other hand, get the best seat in the house.
View of the entire room.
I ask our jocular server if it will suffice.
Ill fill in the gaps, he responds.
Have you ever heard anything more beautiful?
The prime rib arrives with a fat dick of horseradish via tableside trolley.
A second trolley arrives for the pasta a la presse.
(Mario procured the enormous 100-year-old press, were told, on a trip to New Orleans.)
It emits a concentrated jus, poured nonchalantly onto tagliatelle.
The meat is discarded.
We leave nearly four hours after arriving and I understand why men work in finance.
I love theatrics, Alison Roman says of The Grill.
Its such an historic New York establishment, and I do think they did it justice.
But good theater fills in the gaps.
Is it safe to say hes proud of the celeb clout?
Im proud that celebrities or anyone of prominence, athletes, whatever, choose our restaurants.
Everyone I know says Carbone is washed.
In October, theNew York Timeswrote the franchise was overextended.
Would I survive what it had become?
I arrive at Carbone on Thursday at 7 p.m. (enviable).
Dean Martin is blasting.
The room is rigidly gendered.
Im on a heterosexual safari.
You want to impress your boys.
The room is electric.
I ask for a light and tannic red, a little sweaty, Northern Italian maybe?
Ill bring you something beautiful, says the Most Interesting Man in the World.
As far as Im concerned, this is the pinnacle of dining out conspiratorial, communal.
The girls rattle off the other MFG restaurants theyve notched.
By now, Frank Sinatra is roaring.
The music is a little obvious, I suggest to our new companions.
I wish theyd play more Drake, one says.
This is not what I wish for this restaurant, but it is a telling demand for placelessness.
Did they ever see celebs at Torrisi?
We were there a lot and never saw anyone but Woody Allen.
The famous spicy rigatoni vodka.
The famous $89 veal parm.
I dont remember what we ordered and what was bestowed upon us.
Im being fattened like a Christmas goose, doted on and sadistically overstuffed in short order.
I dont see any stars in the room, so maybe I am the celebrity tonight.
Plus the cost of rigatoni.
This is my favorite room!
he gushes as we enter a sushi restaurant.
Founders enjoy the privilege of ordering anything they want from the kitchen, given 48 hours notice.
In the Living Room, our tour guides turn our attention to a marble bar.
Its not actually marble, he explains, but is painted to resemble marble.
A scrappiness that keeps asserting itself in The Boys story.
Everyone (still) wants us to fail.
Nevertheless, we sold $89 veal parm.
Nevertheless, we made you believe wood was marble.
The final velvet enclave is Carbone Privato.
Tableside preparations shift into overdrive.
Our martini-ist tells us the liquor is chilled to -40 degrees.
Throughout the meal, which is fabulous, servers reveal each ingredient conspiratorially (the pink lemons?
Instragams captured, the platter is whisked away and the shells removed for a more frictionless eating experience.
There is no easy way to say this, but the rice was undercooked.
I understand Marios concern.
Perhaps it shouldve said the 50-minute risotto.
The room feels rich, but certainly not a $20,000 bacchanal.
Why is no one smoking a cigar?
And where is the cocaine?
Was it always this transactional?
I need to talk to someone who was there in the glory days.
And yet, no one was dropping even the 1984 equivalent of $89 on veal parm back then.
The idea of being a foodie and doing coke at a restaurant are kind of antithetical, right?
It really was more social in those early years than it was culinary.
The food [at the Odeon] was good enough, but the restaurant was just incredibly sexy.
Fine dining was an uptown pursuit.
It didnt interest hipsters.
Now of course the hipstersarefoodies.
Although not quite in the Carbone empire.
As Jay concedes, veal parm is not a connoisseurs dish.
Its like Rome, for optimizers.
The empire is fading Americas or The Boys?
There was this really exemplary restaurant called Elaines, Jay says, referring to the uptown 1980s mainstay.
Elaine liked the writers.
I also love restaurants.
I do not want to see them prostituted on TikTok and dehumanized via Resy.
