Review at a glance: ★★★☆☆
Choose one: Ray Liotta in Casino, Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, Carmela Soprano or whatshername in Scarface. Picked a favourite? Swell. This is your Carbone character. It is required; you cannot visit simply as yourself. The thing with Carbone, everyone says, it that you “must embrace it” — and there was me thinking restaurants were meant to impress their customers, not the other way around. Handily, the script never wavers: dress up, listen to Dean Martin, order the martini, have the vodka pasta, take a bow. It’s not a complex show, you’ve seen this one before.
Carbone is a New York import, the big-ticket opening in the redeveloped American Embassy on Grovesnor Square, now a hotel with an unforgiving nickname — at a party last week I heard it called the Chancery Premier Inn. The Carbone story is by now well-covered: an upmarket red-sauce Italian famous enough that at one point it turned away George and Amal Clooney. Celebrities either used to go or still do. Such fame means Carbones have opened around the world and, though the owners say London was always their dream, it’s taken 12 years to get here. Last week Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Moss went in.
The name is for Mario Carbone, who stalks the room in his immaculate chef’s whites, smiling in a flat line. What a room to stalk. It too is pure film set and slightly unreal — you enter through a cartoonish double-height door of red leather and brass studs, half expecting a hologram of Frank Sinatra nursing a bourbon at the bar. The room is a canteen of red velvet and chequered marble and jazz club lamps dialled as low as candlelight. There are a great many people in braces. On the back of the chairs are brass handles, the kind more usually seen on a chest of drawers, or coffins. It is not a subtle look — and truly, the paintings suggest a lifetime of trauma — but there is no denying its glamour. It feels like dining in an outtake from the Rat Pack’s Ocean’s Eleven, a feeling helped by waiters wearing the kind of bowties that last had their heyday with the late Don Rickles. Don’t remember Don Rickles? You take the point.
No Rickles — truly, that would have been a story — but Victoria Beckham and her brood sat on the next table. Who else? People eating bread with a knife and fork, and types spending the evening watching reels of themselves… taken earlier in the evening. I can see why celebrities like it, though; it’s an easy restaurant to hide in. The oversized, enormous menus help. They’re so big I wondered if I’d find a crossword on the back page, though what I really wanted was a packet of crayons and some lines not to go over.
On that menu, aside from staggering prices (a £98 lasagne, lamb chops for £77, barely a bottle of wine under a ton), is New York-Italian food. But no one is coming here for the kitchen, which is best for everyone involved. The famous spicy rigatoni vodka, was, you know, fine. Lots of pepper and chilli, but otherwise a tomato sauce I think I last had with spaghetti hoops. The scallops rosmarino, a dish exclusive to London, were burly little things, sweet under a strip of lardo. There was some very fine tuna with breadcrumbs the size of gravel. Potato Louie — a side at £15 — was a gorgeous mess of garlic and duck fat. But lobster ravioli was characterless, and the veal masala had such an absence of flavour I momentarily wondered if Covid was back doing the rounds. I suspected the artichoke hearts were sent out as a threat. Still. There was a tremendously good martini, and a perfect Grasshopper for pudding, made on the spot with fresh mint.
For a restaurant famous for service, ours was patchy, despite the best efforts of the aptly-named Sunny, our waiter. Is it a vibe? Mostly. But it feels a cop-out to say a restaurant’s fantastic just because the playlist is good. In the end you remember you’re in a chain, Pizza Express for the rich. I longed to be dining at the Dover instead, which is half the price but twice as good. This was a night of glitz, glamour and ennui: I did not leave angry or elated, just bored, doing the DeNiro shrug of indifference. I think I’d go as him next time, not that there will be one.
30 Grosvenor Square, W1K. Meal for two about £450; carbonelondon.com
