Carbone Succeeded by Inventing Nothing New

Jeff Zalaznick, the co-founder of Major Food Group, the company behind Carbone, was explaining the bet behind the restaurant he opened in 2013. He loved old New York Italian restaurants such as Rao's and Scalinatella, and spent all the money he could eating in them. The rooms, the rituals, and the welcome were the best experiences in the city, he said, but the food was not that good.

His answer was not to invent a new cuisine but to make the best version of dishes people already knew. Instead of the cheapest veal pounded so thin that veal parmesan becomes mostly breadcrumbs, he argued, buy the best veal and serve it as a beautiful chop that is still veal parmesan. Instead of tough, overcooked lobster in lobster fra diavolo, a spicy tomato and lobster pasta, cook the lobster perfectly. Instead of a tired Caesar salad, use perfect baby lettuces and sharp ricotta salata, a firm salted cheese.

He said he applies the same rule outside the dining room. Carbone tomato sauce is now sold in thousands of stores across America for less than 10 dollars, and has become a large business at the top of the premium sauce category. Zalaznick said it works because it stands for the same thing as the restaurant. Almost everyone has already had jarred tomato sauce, and almost no dish on his menus is something a guest has never tasted, so the job is to make the best version they have ever had.

His model for that approach, he said, is James Dyson, the British inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner. Dyson built 5,127 prototypes before his cleaner worked, then kept reengineering familiar products instead of inventing new markets. Describing Dyson's lesson, which he said is also his own thesis, Zalaznick put it this way, “your mediocrity is my opportunity.”

In restaurants, that means starting with things people are already eating, like the spicy rigatoni vodka that people were eating long before Carbone made its own celebrated version, and asking whether it has been done the right way.