Carbone’s Restaurant

by Rafaele Fierro

In 1938 Charlie and Anthony Carbone ventured to America from Bari, Italy amid a grim period of uncertainty. The Great Depression was raging through both the Italian peninsula and the United States. It was hard to tell which nation fared worse. Immigration to America had virtually stopped during this hard times, making the Carbone’s journey seem all the more improbable. If the “great economic tumult” weren’t enough, they arrived in Hartford, Connecticut the same year the Great Hurricane ravaged southern New England.

The Carbone’s subsequent experiences in Connecticut belie their inauspicious beginning. Their story is in many ways a classic American tale. They worked their way up and would go on to be the founders of Carbone’s Ristorante, an enterprise now synonymous with fine Italian cuisine drawing patrons from all over the state and beyond. It has also become customary for Italians visiting from Italy to frequent the famous restaurant. Charlie and Anthony Carbone’s harrowing experience in a foreign land is exceptional in a variety of ways.

The two men arrived during that terrible year with very little capital and inchoate ideas of how to succeed. Still, they set up a stand serving sandwiches and beer on the corner of Franklin Avenue and Hanmer Street. Bulkeley Stadium, home to professional baseball teams such as the Hartford Chiefs and Hartford Bees, stood right across the street. They therefore sought to capitalize on the opportunity to feed fans trickling out of the stadium as the games ended.

They quickly accumulated enough money to build their own restaurant. Southern Plantation, as they called it, specialized in southern fried “chicken in the rough.” It may seem odd that two Connecticut Italian immigrants established a restaurant featuring southern cuisine. But anti-Italian sentiment ran high in the state in the early part of the twentieth century. Italians may have become a more accepted part of society by 1938, but the criminal label persisted. Old-line Yankees, staid and steady in their habits, kept a close watch over Hartford neighborhoods. Moreover, Italians earned the scorn of the Irish, who competed for space, jobs, and status in the same Hartford community. For the Carbone’s, an Italian eatery might attract unwanted attention. Southern Plantation was simply their way of assimilating.

Change came. After World War Two, Hartford Italians had gained respect in large measure because of their success in the food industry and restaurant business. The past stigma that Italians “smelled of garlic,” they managed to transform into a badge of entrepreneurial honor.

The new reputation was abetted by two major changes that had come by the very early sixties, one personal and the other demographic. Gaetano and Carl Carbone, Charlie’s sons and recent graduates of culinary school, earned their degrees in restaurant management. Additionally, Front Street, Hartford’s first Italian enclave, had been replaced by 1950’s public development projects spanning the downtown area. Franklin Avenue became the new source of Italian migration as a result. As Italians moved in, the bulk of the Yankee and Irish populations were crowded out. Those few remaining appreciated Italians and their penchant for good food. Vinnie Carbone, the current owner, recalled plainly that “Americans were [now] more accepting.” This made it much more palatable for the recently educated Gaetano and Carl to establish formally Carbone’s Ristorante in 1961. A generation had passed and the Carbone’s were fast becoming symbols of Italian success.

The original Carbone immigrants may have come from Bari, an insulated small town on Italy’s southeastern side, but the American environment transformed the provincial villagers into Italians. Regardless of which region in Italy they came from, their shared experience in Connecticut made them co-nationals. Neapolitans, Mellilians, Siricusani, and Calabresi only became aware of their relationship to each other as Italians in America. This reality shaped the famous restaurant’s menu from the start. Food would not be served from any specific part of Italy, but the whole of it.

When Vinnie Carbone took over the restaurant in 2004, it long ago had been established  as one of the most famous Italian landmarks in the city, even as it catered to a variety of diverse people. He represented the third generation to bring the popular and familiar cuisine to area residents. Like his predecessors, Vinnie made it a point to offer food from many parts of Italy. His would not be a regional menu. “My grandmother was Sicilian, and we try to have Sicilian items on the menu too,” he says.

Carbone’s Restaurant has outlived the presence of a strong Italian community in Hartford’s South End. Vinnie himself says that Franklin Avenue used to be an Italian “culinary mecca,” but Italian migration to the suburbs of Wethersfield and Rocky Hill has changed things. “A turning point,” he says nostalgically, “was when South Catholic [the Catholic High School that educated a large segment of Italian youth] closed down in the 1990s.”

Today a diverse blend of ethnic groups resides all around the famous restaurant. Bosnians, Albanians, Puerto Ricans, and a host of others populate the neighborhood. Italians and non-Italians, Anglo and Irish, Bosnians and Puerto Ricans—all are invited to a restaurant that seems to have learned from its own history of being excluded during the days of Southern Plantation. “It really is a melting pot,” Vinnie declares welcomingly.

The Carbone’s have been the embodiment of the melting pot idea that has remained unfulfilled in so many immigrant cultures. Vinnie Carbone has never been to Italy. His home is in Hartford where he has enjoyed serving people whose ethnicity is incidental to their character. “My father always said, ‘you’re an American-Italian, not an Italian-American,’” he adds. It’s also instructive that the Carbone’s website and Vinnie himself refer to the two men who first ventured to America by their Anglicized names, Charlie and Anthony, rather than their birth names, Carlo and Antonio. The desire to become absorbed in American culture has contributed to the success of Carbone’s Restaurant and that of so many Italians throughout Connecticut.