‘Let’s Call the White House’: How Mario Carbone Meticulously Created the Grill’s Kennedy-Era China
Mario Carbone is rather particular—and not only when it comes to his food.
The celebrated chef best known for his eponymous Carbone is behind more than 40 restaurants in dozens of cities around the world, and he has a hand in everything from the menu to the décor to the outfits that the staff wears. (At the Grill in New York City, it’s custom Tom Ford suits, natch.) It’s this sort of attention to detail and service that makes him one of the most powerful people in American fine dining.
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“What we do is most similar to theater,” Carbone said during a discussion at Robb Report’s House of Robb at Miami Art Week on Tuesday. “We tell a story, we set a stage, we have uniforms—those are the costumes. It’s set to music. It’s done at the same time every day, and the only thing that changes is the audience. So it’s theater—telling a really believable story, a story that people want to consume.”
Carbone shared one example that demonstrated his detail-centered ethos when it comes to creating restaurants that transport customers into another time and place. The Grill was largely inspired by John F. Kennedy’s White House—in its former life, the space was the iconic Four Seasons Restaurant, which Carbone called “the most important fine-dining American restaurant in history.” It was there where Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to JFK, a rendition that still holds strong in the American cultural memory.
Below, Carbone explains how the Grill’s china came to be in his own words:
At the Grill, I was working on the china, the plates of the restaurant, and what that would be, and I knew that it had to be custom because everything in the old Four Seasons was custom-made. So I wanted to custom-make everything. The decree to my team was nothing that we have at this restaurant can be purchased in any store.
So we got to the china and they asked, “Well, what do you want to do for the plates?” And I said, “Let’s call the White House and find out what President Kennedy’s china was,” because that’s the period we’re working with. John F. Kennedy celebrated his 45th birthday there the night Marilyn famously sings “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” So he was the president at the time of the opening. I said, “Call the White House and find out what JFK’s presidential china looked like. I want to see it.”
The answer came back that the china actually never got made. Jackie [Kennedy] went through a long process of figuring it out. But then, unfortunately, he’s assassinated in the third year of the term. So there is no plate in the White House cabinet for his administration. I said, “Okay, well, what was Jackie working on?” Then I went to the company called Lennox in America, who would have made that china. I said, “Do you have a file from Jackie from 1962 on what the plate was going to be?” They found some images of some plates that she liked and a single strike-off that they made for her. And I took all of that information and I went back to Lennox and I said, “Let’s make something that could have been his china.”
And ultimately we did. We put it on the same plate, the same cream/bone palette that it would have been for the White House, gold trim, with all the details that Jackie liked, that we think may have been the plate had he not been assassinated. And then on the bottom, Lennox put their old logo from the ’60s on the bottom, and it says “Presidential china made for the Grill.” So the plates at the Grill are as close to JFK’s plate that it would have been.
I got there because I remember reading that James Cameron, when he made Titanic, made custom plates for the movie that were the plates for the Titanic. So at the bottom of the plate it said “Custom-made for the Titanic” on the plates for the movie that just randomly sat on tables. And I just thought that if you’re that obsessive over all the details, if you inundate a person with the textures of all those details, they can’t help but recognize—whether they know it or not—they can’t help but recognize it and be transported to that thing, to that place.
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