Chef Mario Carbone, co-founder of the Major Food Group, is a renowned Italian-American chef celebrated for his theatrical, high-end dining concepts. His flagship restaurant, Carbone, which first opened in New York City in 2013, is famous for its luxurious take on classic Italian-American cuisine. A new location is scheduled to open at Atlantis The Royal in Dubai on October 6, 2025.
As the globally-renowned Carbone opens its doors at Atlantis The Royal, its namesake chef Mario Carbone tells us of the dishes that helped him to create a restaurant empire.
Spicy Rigatoni
The dish that is most associated with me, it’s become the ‘if you go to Carbone, you have to have the Spicy Rigatoni’, but it happened organically and not something we pushed. Not that I’m complaining, it’s a wonderful thing to have a ‘hit song’. The truth is, it was one of the last dishes we put on the original menu in New York. We were lacking a non-meat pasta option and wanted to create an atypical version of a popular favourite. I took ‘penne a la vodka’ as a basis and made it our own, a proper, simple New York-style Italian dish. No way did I believe it was going to be the ‘thing’.
Potato Gnocchi
My grandfather played an important part of my relationship with food. He was incredibly passionate about food and I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with him. It’s hard to single out one dish, but ask any member of my family and his potato gnocchi was a particular favourite. It is such a key dish to me that I actually made it for my final exam at culinary school.
Beef Cheek Ravioli
My first taste of the ‘Big Leagues’, was when I worked at Mario Batali’s restaurant, Babbo. Interning at the hottest restaurant in New York at the time was such a formative experience. The signature dish there was Beef Cheek Ravioli, with a sauce made from crushed squab livers. I had never seen food like that before, and everything about that experience shaped me as both a chef and an entrepreneur.
Pizza (all of it)
I love pizza. I would classify pizza as an entire category of food all on its own—and I love all of it. Like a connoisseur, I try keep afloat of who does what well in my favourite places. If I’m in Rome or New York, I know where to get the best mushroom and sausage pizza; or where to order the marinara; or where to get the best burrata pizza. It is a passion of mine.
Seafood Risotto
This dish is a personal favourite of mine, but I never really serve it, because it is really, really intricate and it takes forever to make. I like to use loads of different ingredients as there is something beautiful about how it comes together—it’s like a symphony. It looks pretty unassuming, but that dish (and the smell of it) takes me back to when I lived and worked in the Italian countryside in Tuscany, which was a really important part of my life and shaped the person that I have become.
Carbone, Atlantis The Royal, Dubai; Tel: +971 4 426 2626. carbonedubai.com
