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The Red Sauce Juggernaut

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The three men behind Major Food Group are (from left) Mario Carbone, Jeff Zalaznick and Rich Torrisi. In Mr. Zalaznick’s words, the trio has “an explosive year” ahead, with new restaurants at the High Line and on the Lower East Side, as well as other expansion plans. They hope to turn Parm, their Mulberry Street sandwich shop, into a Shake Shack-style franchise.

Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

Slide 1 of 14
The three men behind Major Food Group are (from left) Mario Carbone, Jeff Zalaznick and Rich Torrisi. In Mr. Zalaznick’s words, the trio has “an explosive year” ahead, with new restaurants at the High Line and on the Lower East Side, as well as other expansion plans. They hope to turn Parm, their Mulberry Street sandwich shop, into a Shake Shack-style franchise.
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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The team’s dreams began in late 2009, when chefs Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone opened Torrisi Italian Specialties, a wisp of a deli on Mulberry Street. Within months, the restaurant was offering an affordable but game-changing tasting menu. For Mr. Torrisi, the cramped kitchen beneath the dining room still feels like a refuge. “This is why I started,” he said. “I’ll always be here. I’ll never stop.” (In early 2015, the trio will temporarily close Torrisi Italian Specialties to upgrade the kitchen and improve the flow of the restaurant.)
Credit...Evan Sung for The New York Times
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The trio’s mission — think of it as the Italian-American Gastronomic Recovery Project — reached its apotheosis last year with Carbone, a Greenwich Village boom-boom room in which the massive platters of food and the animated tableside patter seemed like a new form of downtown street theater. At Carbone a veal chop “needs to be huge, otherwise it’s not an Italian-American restaurant,” Mr. Carbone said.
Credit...Daniel Krieger for The New York Times
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The Major Food Group is also creating a bakery and restaurant with Melissa Weller, a veteran of Per Se and Roberta’s whose bagels became a sensation at Smorgasburg — and caught the attention of Mr. Carbone, Mr. Torrisi and Mr. Zalaznick. “We’re all partners in it,” Ms. Weller said. “We meet and we do tastings and we talk about ideas.” It’s useful, she added, “to have two really amazing chefs tasting what I’m making and giving me really valid feedback.”
Credit...Tina Fineberg for The New York Times
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A plate of spaghetti with blue crab, which will be served at Major Food’s forthcoming restaurant at the foot of the High Line, where the menu will focus on the cuisine of the American and Italian coasts.
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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A salad with radicchio that will be served at the High Line spot. The Major Food trio competed with a number of top restaurateurs in a bid to be selected for the High Line space. “It felt for us like a David and Goliath thing,” Mr. Torrisi said.
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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Dirty French, another new restaurant from the Major Food threesome, will make its debut this summer in the Ludlow Hotel on the Lower East Side. (Here is a chicken dish that will be served with crepes.) A sort of roughed-up bistro, Dirty French found its genesis when Mr. Torrisi just dreamed up the name. “The first time Rich said it to me, he didn’t even explain what it was,” Mr. Zalaznick said. Added Mr. Torrisi: “It just sounded cool.”
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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Lamb carpaccio with apricot and goat cheese will be served at Dirty French. “You’re going to recognize everything on the menu, because they’re classic bistro dishes,” Mr. Zalaznick said. “We’re just going to dirty ‘em up a little bit.”
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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A Chai cocktail made with bourbon, amaro and Cocchi Americano at ZZ’s Clam Bar, the Major Food Group’s tiny Greenwich Village grotto devoted to deluxe cocktails and raw seafood.
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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Toast with trout roe at ZZ’s Clam Bar.
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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At ZZ’s Clam Bar, the beef carpaccio with sea urchin, razor clams, Scottish langoustines and caviar sells for $105. The Major Food Group has come in for sniping because of the steep prices at ZZ’s, as well as the doorman who tends to stand sentinel outside. “We are very passionate and confident about what we do,” Mr. Zalaznick said. “We don’t worry too much about what people say. If there’s not someone criticizing what you’re doing, then you’re probably not doing anything exciting.”
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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At ZZ’s Clam Bar, a Pistachio cocktail made with gin, honey and kumquat.

Last year ZZ’s was also the site of a fuss involving Adam Platt, the restaurant critic from New York magazine, who was asked to leave in the middle of a meal.
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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Another cocktail at ZZ’s Clam Bar: the Cranberry, which is created with rye whiskey and grilled lemon. “What matters to us is that the people leaving our restaurants are making reservations on the way out,” Mr. Zalaznick said.
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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A planter’s punch for two at ZZ’s Clam Bar, where a doorman checks customers’ names on a list before they’re cleared for entry. “The man who stands outside is not there to keep people out,” Mr. Zalaznick said. “He’s there so that the people inside of here are not constantly being disturbed.”
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

By Jeff Gordinier

March 18, 2014

In the beginning it was all about smallness and stealth.

Late in 2009 they opened a lace-curtained wisp of a deli on Mulberry Street called Torrisi Italian Specialties. Months later, they quietly began offering an affordable but game-changing tasting menu.

Gradually they shifted the sandwich-making over to Parm, a few steps away, where they gave old-school meatball heroes and ice cream cake a stylish revamp. And last year their mission — think of it as the Italian-American Gastronomic Recovery Project — reached its apotheosis with Carbone, a Greenwich Village boom-boom room in which the massive platters of food and the animated tableside patter seemed like a new form of downtown street theater.

But as the three men behind this restaurant company, Major Food Group, sat down one recent afternoon at their newest grotto, the tiny ZZ’s Clam Bar in Greenwich Village, they made something abundantly clear: big is the new small. With a blast of the brio that has come to be seen as a hallmark of their style, they unspooled a blueprint for metropolitan domination.

“This is the year of Major Food,” said Jeff Zalaznick, flanked by his partners, the chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi. “This is an explosive year. All the things that we’ve been working toward are coming to fruition.”

Plenty of restaurateurs are building empires, many of them spanning the globe. But so far these men, all in their early 30s, are confining their colossus-creation to the city that dazzled them when they were children — and they are doing so with distinctively New York style (a fondness for red sauce and raw oysters) and swagger.

In the early summer, with the opening of the 187-room Ludlow Hotel on the Lower East Side, they will break away from Italian food and (thanks to Mr. Torrisi’s training in classic French cooking) hatch a roughed-up Gallic bistro called Dirty French. On the other side of town, at the foot of the High Line and inside a new Renzo Piano-designed building complex that will house the Whitney Museum of American Art, they will introduce a spot focused on the light, healthful cuisine of the Italian and American coasts.

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