The Exchanges

Q I don't think people understand these, these products, now you're essentially selling products, right? They can scale to insane, like insanely large degree.

A Yeah, so carbon tomato sauce, you know, for example, which is sold in thousands of doors across America, right? More than you could ever penetrate with a restaurant. Only so many people can come to a restaurant in a day or a month or a year, right? So, you know, Carbon sauce has become an enormous business for us, which is growing at a pace we never even expected, you know, and it's really put us at the top of kind of the premium sauce category, and it actually has worked incredibly harmoniously, where even though that's a product that you sell, that you buy in the, uh, store, you know, and costs less than 10 dollars, right, it's a little A piece of what people see and aspire to, you know, at the restaurant, and they don't contradict each other, right? One is, at the end of the day, they're both standing for the same thing, which is being the best expression of something that you're familiar with, right? When I say that, I mean that, you know, carbon, everyone's had jarred tomato sauce, right? Whether it be ragu or whatever it might be. We make the best one. It's not going to be something you've never had before. It's going to be the best version. That's our entire thesis around restaurants, right? And food. If you look at our menus, very rarely am I going to serve you something that's the first time you've ever had these foods or this dish. Our goal is just to make you the bes…

AI assessment note: “sold in thousands of doors across America, right? More than you could ever penetrate”

Q for a long period of time, because like anybody can succeed for a year, for five years. It's like you've been doing for 15 years. You're at the top of your game. Your, your, your, your, I think your future success is going to be much greater than what's behind you. But you were even saying it's like, that's even more true in the restaurant business. Can you explain why?

A Yeah, because I mean, listen, the restaurant business, especially in today's day and age is, you know, it's, it's a trendy business, right? And everyone wants to try something that's new, right? I mean, and everyone's excited to go to an opening. Everyone's excited to go to a place for the first time to say that they went here. But the big question is, after they've done that, after they've checked that off their list, after they've taken their Instagram photo to prove they went to this place and whatever else, which is, you know, we could talk as a whole other topic, but do they still want to come back, spend money with you, right? And feel good about the money that they spent when they left, right? Because at the end of the day, that's what we're, we're in the business of providing people With an incredible evening, right? We're, we're here to entertain you. We're here to delight you. We're here to feed you. And we're here for you really to walk out with a smile on your face, feeling like, when's the next time I can come back? When's the next time I can get a reservation? I always say the perfect thing is someone that comes to the desk and makes a reservation on the way out for the next time they're going to come. That's one of the many factors that makes this business so hard, especially in New York. There are so many restaurants. There's so many seemingly great restaurants …

AI assessment note: “the restaurant business, especially in today's day and age is, you know, it's, it's a trendy business”

Q Who's pitching you and what are they pitching you?

A Everyone you could imagine under the sun, generally people that are building new cities, new developments, new neighborhoods, whatever it might be, new stadiums, you know, whatever it might be, um, where food and beverage plays an integral role and hospitality plays an integral role, and so that, that's all around the world, right? So globally, so, you know, we're constantly looking at different opportunities, And geographies that make sense to us. You know, I always say it's, for me, it's not such a, you know, hard equation, right? If you, if you tell me, is this an interesting city to open a restaurant in? All I say is, you know, find me two or three restaurants doing twenty million dollars or more. And then it's an interesting city. There's not that many cities in the world that have restaurants doing 20 plus million dollars a year, fine dining restaurants. And when you can find those places, you, you already know that you can come in there with a great expensive concept that if you do your job well, you can blow away the competition in those markets because the business is there.

AI assessment note: “generally people that are building new cities, new developments, new neighborhoods”

Q this obsession when you're a thirteen-year-old kid about being obsessed with food, But now you have restaurants, maybe higher status. There's like celebrity restauranteurs or celebrity chefs. So I can't help but wonder if like the people that you see coming into this are doing it. You said, you know, for their, their motivations and why they're doing it are completely different than yours. Do you see that as well?

A Yeah. I mean, I think that To your point, what we were talking about, right? My generation, myself and my partners, Rich and Mario, like, when we came in and started coming up with our own restaurants, right, you know what I mean? That was kind of the last generation of, you know, of people that were doing this solely based on blind passion for this business It was the only thing that, you know, we could imagine doing. And, you know, it's the type of thing that, you know, if you love this business, it is, you know, by, you know, by math, like the hardest business you could go into. But if you love it, and if you're passionate about it, And you study it, and you do the work that's necessary, which is critical. You have a chance of being successful, and you have a chance of creating really special places that you're proud of and that you love sharing with people. And that's truly the essence of hospitality, right? You know, we love to bring people together and serve them great food and have, you know, make people happy and have them have a great time and leave with a big smile on their face, and we, that brings us great joy. I think that for better or worse, what's happened is that with the rise of social media, with the rise of, you know, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, It did two things, right? You know, so two things happened. First, you had food TV going back 20 years, right? A…

AI assessment note: “That was kind of the last generation of, you know, of people that were doing this”

Q Is that one of your highest grossing restaurants?

A Yeah. And so, I mean, that's an amazing story. I mean, I basically found a restaurant that Had closed down during COVID because they were afraid about what was going to happen. It was sitting there relatively new and, you know, relatively unknown, you know, in the sense that I knew that I could come in. It was in a perfect location. Everyone says, how did you find this location? And I say, well, A hundred yards in each direction, exactly, basically, from this restaurant are two of the highest grossing restaurants in America. Joe's Stone Crab and Prime One 12, since I've been a kid, ok? These are two of the highest grossing restaurants in America. Every time that list comes out, here are two of them. We're directly in between the two of them. That's all the math I'm doing. They're like, oh, well, what about the thing across the street? I'm like, I don't care about the thing across the street. You got the two highest grossing restaurants in America on either side of me. How bad can this be? You know what I mean? Like, this is gonna, of course, it's gonna be a great location. So I basically told them, You can change any, I knew they couldn't do that much in that amount of time, right? So I was able to say things I don't normally say. It's like, I like, you know, I had like an Ocean's 11 style. I flew, everyone was all over the country, and we flew them in from all over the, you kn…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. And so, I mean, that's an amazing story.”

Q Carbone's gonna be the first restaurant you would do?

A The idea of this elevated Italian-American restaurant was my big idea, right? Because what, what I saw was the following, and you know, to me, everything made perfect sense, but other people didn't see it, right? I, I saw that I'm, some of my favorite restaurants to go to, you know, Molino's, Colina Tella, Rayo's, etc. These are the best experiences, but like, at the end of the day, the food is not that good, and they were very expensive restaurants, and I would spend as much time, as many times I could go there, spend all my money going to these places. That's how much I love them. I love the moves at the beginning of the meal. I love what they put down. I love, I love the whole thing. And as a New Yorker, that's like the most classic style, you know, New York restaurant, right? These, these kind of finer dining Italian restaurants. My idea was, what if I take this But we take the entire thing to a different level. So instead of a veal chop being the shittiest veal you could buy pounded this thin, right? You know what I mean? It's gonna, why don't we buy the best veal you can buy and make it a beautiful chop and still make a veal parm out of it, but not pounded so it's just, you're eating breadcrumbs. You know, these little ideas. What if I made a lobster fra diavola, but the lobster was perfectly cooked. Never had happened at that point in time. Never, ok? It never had happen…

AI assessment note: “The idea of this elevated Italian-American restaurant was my big idea, right?”