The ones the gossip rags mention when they detail the sorts of juicily priced dishes that C- and B- and A-list celebrities picked at all weekend, come Monday. The ones that aren’t a meritocracy, but rather a haven for the Haves, looked upon longingly by the Have-Somes. The ones you can’t get into on raw desire and a Resy account alone. The restaurant had efficiently blossomed into one of Those Places. Nearly a decade had passed and still, no one could figure out how to get in. Carbone’s name alone had become evocative enough to conjure either eye rolls or elation depending on the company you kept. The subject of her piece? How to get a table at Carbone. “Every single table seemed to have ordered the rigatoni, which was hardly the pink glop of your average red-sauce place-these noodles were dense, curvaceous, bathed in cream laced with tomato and just a whisper of heat,” wrote Helen Rosner about Carbone for The New Yorker. In a blog post from April 2013, Instagram influencer Josh Beckerman (Foodie Magician) wrote, “The hottest restaurant in NYC right now is Carbone.” Citing a recommendation from Kate Krader, Food & Wine’s restaurant editor at the time, he added: “That sauce had the absolute perfect kick. Some vodka sauce evangelists point to the restaurant franchise, which opened its original Manhattan location in 2013, as the single most important turning point in the *She’s All That–*makeover of vodka sauce. And an impossible door, literally barricaded by a bodyguard most nights, and once you got past him, a velvet rope. “Carbone gave vodka sauce the Hollywood treatment.” Even the Cheesecake Factory added a Spicy Rigatoni Vodka Pasta to its menu last September. Carbone has also steadily extended its tentacles into major US cities, most recently Dallas, with plans to expand around the world. In 2022, Arthur & Sons opened in Manhattan’s West Village, and its vodka sauce swiftly gained acclaim on TikTok, with users calling it “f*cking phenomenal” and “the best pasta I’ve had outside of Italy.” This past summer, James Beard Award winner Mindy Segal opened a permanent location of Mindy’s Bakery in Wicker Park, Chicago, with a vodka sauce sliced bialy on the rotating menu. In 2021, lauded Instagram home cook Dan Pelosi took to Good Morning America to demonstrate his lauded “ sawce” recipe (skip the onion rigatoni or bust), which had helped to grow his following from plush to astronomical. Since then, demand has only continued to burble over the sides of Dutch ovens and saucepans. “It’s funny to see how today, pop culture has claimed spicy vodka sauce as its dish.” His alleged review: “I said, ‘Girl, it’s good. Twitter users referred to it simply as “Gigi Hadid pasta.” Six weeks later, BuzzFeed called us “ obsessed” with the tangy, creamy dish, as recipe variations tore through TikTok. Insider, Us Weekly, and Metro UK all ran breathless and immediate features. But Hadid’s video quickly became one of the most persuasive. Arguably, Carbone-a restaurant where Hadid has definitely been spotted-was a major instigator of vodka sauce’s national popularity. It was not the first time many had encountered vodka sauce. The dairy intrusion produced a mottled red-and-white Pollock which, after confident strokes with a wooden spoon, eventually coalesced into a thick, Nickelodeon-orange sauce, velvety enough to coat her conchigliette. Americans watched with bated breath as Hadid added one half cup of heavy cream to a mixture of caramelized shallot, garlic, and tomato paste. To a place where acerbic met sweet, where cheesy met creamy, where all of that met al dente, and where, best of all, it happened in less time than it took to stream an episode of Tiger King. It was a few weeks into the lockdowns, and all over the country, boules of sourdough quivered, forgotten as they sat proofing on countertops, their creators’ attention turned elsewhere. On a Wednesday in April 2020, Gigi Hadid dispatched an Instagram story detailing her recipe for spicy vodka sauce for two.
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