It’s 7 p.m. in Miami — 6 p.m. in Dallas, 4 p.m. in Las Vegas, 2 a.m. in Riyadh, 7 a.m. in Hong Kong — and the scene at Carbone, the red-sauce Italian joint turned Kardashian-esque brand, is as spicy as the rigatoni vodka.
Waiters weave through the crowd. Guests squeeze into green leather banquettes. The throng spills out the door, into a pop-up cigar bar. The man choreographing it all moves through the place, dressed head-to-foot in casual-chic black.
“This is Miami,” Jeff Zalaznick says. “Right here.”
Zalaznick, scion of a prominent New York real estate family, has big plans for oh-so-hot Miami, and for all those other cities and more. He wants to build a LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton of hospitality.
He’s talking a globe-spanning conglomerate of celebrity-filled restaurants, clubs, VIP events, hotels and condos akin to the Tiffany-to-Dior luxury empire of French multibillionaire Bernard Arnault.
You have to wonder: Has all the money sloshing around Miami gone to this guy’s head? Restaurants are a notoriously brutal business. Even celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver have stumbled. (Oliver’s global Jamie’s Italian chain went bust in 2019.)
“It’s a highly difficult thing to replicate fine dining,” said Aaron Allen, founder of restaurant consultancy Aaron Allen & Associates. “When you start to get multinational, as they have, there are a lot of moving pieces.”
And yet, since opening the first Carbone in New York in 2013, Zalaznick and his partners, chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi, seem to have defied the odds, Allen said. They’ve transformed their pricey take on mid-century Italian-American cuisine into a global operation.
The numbers are startling. Eleven cities. Forty-plus restaurants. There’s a Carbone in New York, Miami, Dallas, Vegas, Hong Kong, Doha and Riyadh. Each serves more or less the same menu. They cater to A-listers (or wannabes) willing to pay up for southern Italian comfort food, like veal parmesan ($91) or the signature rigatoni ($34).
The trio’s company, Major Food Group, today is a $500 million-a-year-plus business, people familiar with the company’s finances say. (Zalaznick declined to comment on MFG’s revenue.) It’s cut deals with names like billionaire Michael Dell; Related Cos. Chairman Dolphins owner Stephen Ross; and Miami developer Craig Robins, a local partner with none other than Arnault.
Next up: pulling a Carbone with one its Italian rivals in New York, Marea. In January, MFG announced a deal to replicate Marea beyond Manhattan.
What Zalaznick is really selling is a glimpse behind the velvet rope. Carbone’s lobster ravioli ($52) is good. Eating it next to Rihanna is better. And being so exclusive that Justin and Hailey Bieber reportedly couldn’t score a table at the original Carbone in Greenwich Village really helps.
Zalaznick, 40, moved to Miami in 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, and he can still come across as a bit of a New York snob. When he arrived, he says, there was nowhere to eat (Miami has about a dozen Michelin-starred restaurants). He says the same about other places MFG is targeting: cities light on taxes and regulation like Houston and Scottsdale and flush foreign ones like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. “No California, no Chicago,” he says.
Zalaznick got this far via JPMorgan Chase, where he worked a two-year stint in investment banking. He disliked the job but says it taught him some business basics. Later, he took a job at the front desk at the Mandarin Oriental in New York.
Zalaznick seems to be after the business of buzz. He wants customers to feel they’re among the privileged few who are rich enough, famous enough or simply lucky enough to step into this world. It’s a place where old-school meatballs meet new-school money.
Zalaznick calls this dance The Moves. At Carbone, the host knows your name. The head waiter plonks down at the table to review the over-sized menu. The Caesar alla ZZ salad ($29) is served with bad jokes.
To Zalaznick, regulars — even billionaires — are his “boys.”
A big question, of course, is how to replicate The Moves — over and over — without reducing the whole thing to a glorified Olive Garden. Both Carbone and Marea were stripped of their Michelin stars in 2022.
MFG’s bets haven’t always worked out. Plans to develop a luxury condo/hotel with four MFG restaurants and kitchens designed by Mario Carbone collapsed. Zalaznick says MFG still plans to develop hotels and is looking at several potential deals.
Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck says expanding so rapidly can be very risky because you can easily spread yourself too thin, imperiling the quality of the food and service that keeps customers coming back. Puck started building his empire in Los Angeles, opening Spago, which quickly became a celebrity magnet. After four decades, he’s got about 20 fine-dining restaurants from Beverly Hills to Budapest and Singapore and regularly turns downs offers to open more.
“Opening is easy, but staying open is really hard,” Puck said in an interview. “It’s kind of like being married.”
MFG tends to find investors to stake new spots — a normal financing path for restaurants. But, now MFG is looking into raising capital in a big way. Zalaznick doesn’t rule out a public stock offering.
“We are thinking about everything and looking at everything,” he said.
On this late February evening, money is seemingly no object. Carbone Miami has been rented out by some of the deepest pockets on the planet: Saudi Arabia.
His Excellency Yasir Al-Rumayyan, gatekeeper for Saudi Arabia’s about $900 billion sovereign fund, has invited hundreds of people from a conference he’s hosting nearby. Guests dig into fist-sized meatballs in red sauce. Oysters are piled atop mountains of ice.
It’s no coincidence that Al-Rumayyan has picked Carbone. Zalaznick has known him since MFG opened a pop-up Carbone in Riyadh prepandemic. Last fall, MFG opened a full-blown Carbone, Sadelle’s and L’Ami Dave inside the Mansard Riyadh hotel.
Zalaznick is cultivating other deep pockets too. He’s helping Miami developer David Martin design a luxury condo on Biscayne Bay. Dell tapped MFG to run four restaurants at his Boca Raton Resort & Club.
Last May, with the blessing of Miami Dolphins owner Ross, MFG built and ran the members-only Palm Club at the Miami Formula 1 Grand Prix, above the 50-yard-line-seats at Hard Rock Stadium.
Entry price: as much as $30,000.
For that, people could watch the race and watch Tom Cruise dote over Shakira and her kids and Vin Diesel chat with Queen Latifah.
“How did we do it?” Zalaznick said of the turnout. “We invited them.”
Ross also brought Zalaznick into his Hudson Yards development in Manhattan. Their project: a mega-branch of ZZ’s Club, MFG’s private supper club in Miami, complete with an invitation-only club-within-the-club with a $50,000 initiation fee.
ZZ’s in Miami started out with Zalaznick’s longtime friend Robins, who co-owns the Miami Design District, a swath of ultra-luxurious shops backed by Arnault. Zalaznick had bought a $15 million mansion a few doors down from Robins and approached his neighbor about some vacant restaurant space.
“I will say that I was skeptical,” said Robins. So, the lease had a clause that Robins could evict Zalaznick if he didn’t get a minimum 100 members.
Today, ZZ’s, with its $15,000 initiation fee, has 2,000. And it just expanded to Brickell, Miami’s financial district.
“These are my boys,” Zalaznick said earlier, as the F1 racers roared by. “This is where it all happens.”
Michael Smith, Bloomberg , 2024-03-19 17:03:04
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