On Saturday night in New Orleans, chef Mario Carbone was waxing poetic about a muffuletta bread stick. “It’s so Italian-American, but it’s New Orleans Italian-American,” he said. Since the original location of the chef’s iconic namesake red sauce boîte opened in Greenwich Village in 2013, a global appetite for spicy rigatoni and gigantic caesar salads prepared tableside (and consumed to Sinatra tunes in a VIP-heavy room) has brought Carbone to Miami, Las Vegas, Dallas, and Hong Kong. But not to New Orleans—at least not until GQ Bowl weekend, when GQ partnered with Vuori to host an exclusive one-night-only Carbone residency at the historic Hotel Peter and Paul.
Though chef Mario was working the pass in an unfamiliar kitchen, everything about the evening was quintessential Carbone: There was the stacked dining room, where the likes of Livvy Dunne and Vuori founder and CEO Joe Kudla dined alongside Alix Earle, Anthony Ramos, Duke Riley, Leon Bridges, Benito Skinner, and Emily Adams Bode Aujla; the nostalgic soundtrack, courtesy of DJ Kitty Ca$h, who dialed up the Allen Touissant and Fats Domino; the menu mainstays, like plump beef-and-veal meatballs enrobed in exquisite marinara sauce; and a few surprises, like those olive-and-mortadella-studded muffuletta bread sticks, which the Carbone team sourced in collaboration with local bakery Ayu. Said chef Mario, “On a night like this where where I get to do the food in a city that’s not my home, I want to use as many of the local places and food artisans to help with my menu, to give people a little taste of both Carbone, of course, but also the city of New Orleans.”
