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My name is Carlo Mirarchi. I have two restaurants in Brooklyn, Roberta’s and Blanca.
Roberta’s started about five years ago.My partners had found this space in Bushwick.
It’d always been a really interesting area to me; it was very desolate but still
sort of had this sort of energy to it.
We quickly sort of realized that what we really had done was opened a restaurant that we wanted
to hang out in ourselves. So that a lot of our personalities would show
through in the service, in the food, in the music.
But most of all we wanted to make a place that was really, really fun and had really,
really good food.
You can come and spend ten dollars or come and spend, you know, a thousand dollars with
twelve of your best friends and have an amazing party.
So as far as seasonality goes, we design our menu based around what’s available and what’s
sort of peaking at that time. We were not satisfied with some of the stuff
we were getting and we decided to just start doing it ourselves.
So the garden basically is based on shipping containers. So everything from tomatoes, eggplant,
carrots, radishes, all different kinds of lettuces, nasturtium.
We honestly can’t grow enough for the whole restaurant, but
everything we grow gets used in the restaurant.
We get a lot of overlap. We get a lot of people who go to Roberta’s on a regular basis and,
you know, also want to come in to Blanca. We basically would do like a, you know, twelve
to eighteen to sometimes twenty-one, twenty-two course tasting menu.
It’s pretty rare that we get people to come in that have never been to Roberta’s.
We have a cookbook coming out this fall. It’s sort of a, sort of visual history of what
we’ve done in the past five years. I’m really happy with it, just because it’s
a lot of pictures and things that we haven’t talked
about in a long time and it’s really nice just to kind of go back and see all the different
sort of processes we went through to get to where we are.