On a swaying-palms kind of night in January, I hopped into the back seat of Jeff Zalaznick’s Range Rover to accompany him on his evening rounds to seven of Major Food Group’s major Miami restaurants. Jeff, a born-and-raised New Yorker, had relocated to Miami at the start of the pandemic and instantly proved himself to be such a distracted driver—talking or texting as you might expect one of the three partners of a company with annual revenue in excess of $500 million to talk or text—that his wife and his partners, Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi, were afraid he was going to kill himself, which would have been very bad for business. Thus Chris—the semiretired former member of the Miami PD SWAT team, who serves as Jeff’s driver, security detail, and advance man, all-in-one, was tasked with ferrying us back and forth across Biscayne Bay all night.
Jeff and his two chef partners, Mario and Rich—who head up the empire behind Carbone, The Grill, and a rapidly expanding roster of restaurants, hospitality experiences, and bottled marinara sauces—have been celebrated and criticized, since Major Food Group’s founding in 2011, for cultivating a new brand of bombastic, delicious, high-priced, high-energy dining establishments, where, as the tagline for Carbone (and the sauce) likes to remind us: “Dinner is the show.” Over the last 15 years, Jeff, Mario, and Rich have harnessed and built upon that energy to create one of the most successful restaurant businesses of all time. If you think of Major Food Group as a New York phenomenon, it’s time to catch up. Since COVID, MFG has expanded with abandon beyond New York, nowhere more so than in Miami, where Jeff and Mario both moved, but also to many other countries, the dream of a Carbone on every continent (or at least in every emirate) not so distant. Beyond its dining establishments, MFG has also ventured into living establishments, like condos, clubs, hotels, and wellness pop-ups. The embodiment of an ethos—characteristic of a company known for appetite and indulgence—of more is more is more. The critical question at this juncture, though, is: Is it?
Jeff’s and my first stop for our night in Miami was ZZ’s Club, the members’ club and private restaurant in the Design District that bears Jeff’s nickname (ZZ = Zalaznick). Inside, Jeff proceeded to check in with multiple members of the front-of-house staff, the head chef, and several diners. Each he greeted with a sort of benevolent insouciance, picking up their conversation on page 6 or 7, like they’d just seen each other last night, which they probably had. In a dining room of well-heeled patrons and staff, Jeff stood out for his height (he’s big), his gravity (he owns the joint), his voice (it’s booming), and his uniform (a black hoodie).
We sat at a table where Jeff waited for the chef to deliver some dishes he was working on. Jeff is not a trained chef, but he is a trained eater, with a palate praised by Mario and Rich—making him, in many ways, the consummate proxy for a patron of an MFG establishment. We drank martinis, and Jeff told me how he’d spent his day—up in West Palm Beach, looking at a real estate opportunity being developed by Stephen Ross, the owner of the Miami Dolphins. These days, this is one of the primary functions of Major Food Group—to figure out when, where, and how to come in when people express interest, as they do constantly, in having an MFG restaurant in their ecosystem. Jeff described the 86-year-old Ross as “one of my closest friends.” This was not the only octogenarian billionaire Jeff described to me as being one of his closest friends. You have a lot of 80-year-old billionaire best friends, I told him. And he agreed he had a type.
Jeff, who is a grandson of Paul Milstein (the financier and real estate developer after whom the Whale Room, a.k.a. the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life, is named at New York’s Museum of Natural History), ended up in Miami by accident. He and his family were on spring break that week when COVID hit and the world shut down. They decided to stay to weather the storm—and then, practically speaking, they just never went home. If you recall, COVID was experienced differently in Miami than in New York. In New York, Mario and Rich were on the ground figuring out ways to keep staff on the payroll. But in Miami, COVID was over in like three weeks—and Jeff recognized an opportunity they could’ve never anticipated. Several establishments had shuttered and their spaces were up for lease. They moved quickly to take over a space in a prime location on South Beach, at First and Collins—and Carbone Miami was born.
