when you want, where you want.
Chef Carlo Mirarchi Never Thought He’d Become a Pancake Guy
Illustration: Margalit Cutler
In the 17 years it’s been open, Roberta’s has grown from a Bushwick pizza-and-tiki-bar pioneer to a citywide institution to a full international empire with outposts in L.A., Nashville, and Singapore (plus two other restaurants in New York). Overseeing it all since the beginning has been chef Carlo Mirarchi — who also opened Foul Witch in the East Village in 2023 and will open Ezio’s in Miami this fall. “The challenges never really go away,” Mirarchi says of expanding the business. “They’re extreme.” He’s still at the restaurants every day as well, solving many of the same problems that might have come up in the early days (how best to plate some homemade lardo) and getting as excited about plums at the Greenmarket as he is for high-grade salumi from Italy. One detail that has changed lately: He bought a Ninja ice-cream maker during Prime Day and, as you’ll see in this week’s Grub Street Diet, he’s absolutely obsessed.
Wednesday, July 30
I wake up pretty early, around 5. I make coffee and I go to the gym. I’m a total fruit freak, so this time of year is my favorite. When I get home, I have a bunch of strawberries, blueberries, nectarines, and yogurt. After that, I head to the Union Square Greenmarket. I have to get husk cherries for this aged tuna carpaccio we’re doing at Roberta’s Penn and also for a stone-fruit dish we’re doing at Foul Witch. I eat some of those, obviously. They’re really good.
I have a call with our accounting team. That’s about an hour. And I have a call with our marketing team, also about an hour. After those, I head to Foul Witch. Lucas Rogers, our executive sous-chef, and I make stracciatella, and we end up eating a bunch of that. Then we try making this stone-fruit thing with emerald-green plums, splash plums, and husk cherries. It works really, really well.
I’m still at Foul Witch a few hours later, so I make myself a very big salad with red-wine vinegar and tomatoes. I really like salads.
We started doing pizzas for pickup and delivery at Foul Witch on Monday and Tuesday, which is nice, because on Wednesday we usually have leftover dough, so we have pizza for family meal. Garret Culver, who works at the restaurant, makes a bunch, and I dig in.
During service, I am just tasting constantly. If it seems as if I never eat, like, a real meal, it’s because I’m trying stuff all day. It’s weird: I’m full but always feel like I’m hungry.
It’s a really good service, and here is where things get crazy: I decided to get myself a gift and ordered a Ninja Creami during the Amazon sale thing. I had made a base for myself that morning with blueberries, milk, protein powder, and yogurt. So when I get home, I am so fucking excited for this. There’s a mix-in setting. I add peanut-butter chips and dark-chocolate chips. Let me just tell you: I am shocked by how good this is. I slam the whole pint down in, like, five minutes. I want to make it clear, too, that this isn’t some ad. I paid for this fucking thing.
Thursday, July 31
I wake up very early again. I’ve never been a big sleeper. I go for a quick bike ride before work.
We haven’t ever had real photography of the food at Foul Witch, so we’re shooting a bunch of stuff today, along with things for a new restaurant, a Miami steakhouse called Ezio’s, which is my dad’s name. A very good friend of mine, Brandon Harmon — he worked on my Still Cookin’ book — is shooting it all. We meet for coffee to go over the shot list, and by 9:15 I’m cooking with Sam Pollheimer, our executive chef at the company. Chef Lucas is there, along with Chef Garrett and the rest of the team.
Whenever I do photography, I cook the food as I would for service, and it’s rare to be able to have the entire menu plated at one time. It’s a good opportunity to taste everything. We’re eating all day.
We’re getting really nice lamb saddles and dry aging those for Ezio’s. We’re also making a dressed Dungeness crab with crudité that Sam came up with. It’s really, really good. And we have a salad that is kind of a play on a wedge: Little-gem lettuce with guanciale and Sungold tomatoes, warmed through just enough to get juicy. We have Stilton cream and finish it with Gorgonzola.
For Foul Witch, we have house-aged wild sea bream coming out of the wood oven; our testa, which we make every week; a new heirloom-tomato dish with pistachio milk; summer chicories and Romano beans with plum vinaigrette; wood-roasted wild shrimp with garlic and lemon; Wagyu carpaccio with cherries that photographs really nicely; and celery salad that’s been on the menu forever that’s like a play on puntarelle.
We’re also doing brunch now, so we made a Spanish tortilla with Parmigiano Reggiano. It tastes so good. And we do a pancake. We spent well over a month just working on this fucking pancake. Before we opened for brunch, all us chefs were all like, We don’t even eat pancakes. We don’t know what they’re supposed to taste like. Like my favorite pancakes growing up came from IHOP. We ended up playing with the different flours and leavening and came up with something that skews a little more savory with some nice texture. Pancakes are a different animal from pizza.
Right now, we’re working with an Italian guy who is bringing in some really nice black-pig salumi from Calabria, where my dad is from. We got a whole bunch of spalletta nero, so it’s from the shoulder, and I’ve been waiting on it for a while. I’m super-psyched when it comes in and start to break it down right away. It’s blow-your-socks-off good. I get it on the menu tonight.
What I’m even more excited about — this is going to be a theme — is the roasted-banana ice cream I make in the Ninja at home. It’s roasted bananas, cardamom, milk, sea salt, and yogurt. I maybe go a little overboard with the cardamom, but it is very tasty and it puts me right to sleep.
Friday, August 1
Drink a bunch of water, go nuts on the fruit again, and then have a call with the Singapore team, which I love. We go over menus and we troubleshoot some things, some staffing stuff; we talk through pickups and beverages, and that’s fun because we do a lot of nonalcoholic stuff there, and the products that are available are just amazing. All kinds of wacky tropical fruit.
I always have rice in my rice cooker. It’s a Cuckoo from Korea. This week, I have some garlic rice with chicken and black vinegar. Danny Bowien gave me a summer kimchee he made that’s very crispy and refreshing. I can’t stop eating it.
At Foul Witch, I help Lucas with the stracciatella again, which means eating a lot of it again. That leads into service, and I go to Roberta’s in Bushwick because we have a big event in the garden. Chef Sam is cooking off whole Sasso chickens over oak, and we taste one of those. We’re so happy with how it comes out that we decide to run it on the menu in Williamsburg the next day. Roast chicken, for whatever reason, is a hard sell for us. It’s incredibly puzzling, but what are you gonna do?
I missed family meal at Bushwick, so I make myself another giant stupid salad and I eat a bunch of bread that we’re getting from Frenchette. I finish my night there and then head home because I have to prep my bike.
Saturday, August 2
Race day. I have to wake up at 3:45 a.m. because the race starts at 5:40. I have a giant bowl of white rice and a big bottle of water with electrolytes. I stretch, I answer some work emails, and I make black coffee in a V60 like a nerd. Then I ride over to Prospect Park.
It’s a big field with 60 riders, most of whom are half my age. I manage to stay mid-pack, but movement to the front is tough with a lot of teams blocking. I’m feeling pretty tired, but I get lucky in the last three laps and score second place — the green jersey got past me just at the line.
I do a cooldown lap, head to the podium, get a black coffee at Winner in the park, and then … what am I most excited about? You guessed it: The ice-cream base I made at home that I’d told myself would be a reward if I got a podium. This one is strawberries, yogurt, protein, whole milk, vanilla extract, and peanut butter with a dark-chocolate mix-in. This is the best one of the week.
I go to Foul Witch for brunch. Chef Lucas is a total brunch freak. We’ve got really nice yellow watermelon that I’ve been trying to get my hands on for a while, and we decide to work on it for a dessert.
My parents and niece end up coming to the restaurant, and it’s super-nice to cook for them. We get this really great beef from older animals — five-plus years — that is super beefy. Intense isn’t even the right word for it. We age it for 60, 65 days, and it has a nice amount of funk on it. It’s so delicious. I cook that for them, some of the salumi we make, fresh bread, the spalletta, and, of course, I make a pancake for my niece, which I have a hard time not eating myself. She houses it.
I get Foul Witch set up for dinner service and then go to Bushwick because we’re putting porchetta on the menu, and it’s that tricky thing where you want the skin to get crispy but you don’t want it to over-render, so I just have to keep rotating them in the oven. It’s a lot of in and out, in and out.
I head to Williamsburg and try a few things there. We have these really nice melons we’re using for melon with prosciutto with stracciatella cream. It’s great. My notes on it are “live, love, LOL.” Then back to Foul Witch. Chef Sam had put some Mangalitsa lardo on cure. We pull that and try to figure out where we’re going to put it on the menu. We try it with a couple of different garnishes, but we decide just by itself is the best way to do it. That goes on the menu the next day.
Sunday, August 3
I’m up at 5:45 a.m. Black coffee, stretch, yogurt, fruit, and a Zone 2 ride with some friends. I get back home, and you know what time it is: This one is strawberry, yogurt, protein, banana, and coconut-almond milk.
More coffee, and then I make my way to Penn to check in with Chef Kayzer. He’s been working on a kind of condiment using soppressata. It’s really interesting and we need to figure out the best way to use it. I try it on a pizza, and it’s tasty, but I get overzealous with the stracciatella and it’s a little too intense. Eventually Kayzer figures it out.
Pre-shift is at Foul Witch, and our ops director, Cameron, is there with his daughter. She’s lovely, but I think she’s had too many pancakes, or maybe just too much syrup. She keeps challenging me to a foot race inside the restaurant.
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