Above, from left: Josh Pickard, Robert De Niro, Andrew Carmellini, and Luke Ostrom at The Greenwich Hotel. When the original Locanda Verde opened in 2009, no one expected it to be a hit. The New York City restaurant, which occupies the ground-floor corner of Robert De Niro’s Greenwich Hotel , debuted amid the fallout of the Great Recession.
At the time, the bankers and bigwigs who’d traded near its Tribeca address were either out of work or had seen their expense accounts gutted. It didn’t help that the space’s previous dining concept, Ago, got awful reviews (example: “No pig should perish for a pork chop as dry as one at Ago”) and shut its doors in under a year. De Niro, as famous for his unflappable pragmatism as he is for his award-winning film roles, pushed through the noise and came up with a plan B.
He hired Andrew Carmellini , a Michelin-starred chef’s chef, to take the lead in the kitchen. Carmellini answered the call by serving a soul-satisfying take on urban Italian food , which was so good that the place started getting packed. On more than one occasion, “I think I ran out of chicken,” Carmellini says of those early days.
Supply shortages notwithstanding, the restaurant quickly developed a reputation as the place to see celebrities: Beyoncé and Jay-Z; Posh and Becks; Meghan and Harry, all diners. But Locanda Verde didn’t just sell stacks of crab crostini and gallons of Sicilian sheep’s milk ricotta to boldfaced names. It also united De Niro,.