A Tuesday in late February at ZZ's Club New York, on the second floor above Hudson Yards. Two principals from a single-family office, one of them flown in from Palm Beach for the day, are eating Carbone Privato — the members-only iteration of Mario Carbone's spicy rigatoni vodka — at a table that, downstairs at the public Carbone, would have required four months of waiting. They are paying $30,000 for the year to skip that line, plus annual dues, and they regard it as the most logical line item on the household ledger.
ZZ's Club opened at Hudson Yards in 2023, the first members' iteration of the Major Food Group format that Mario Carbone, Jeff Zalaznick and Rich Torrisi had spent a decade refining downtown. Miami followed in 2024, occupying the upper floors of the Faena District tower they had taken over from the original Faena restaurant footprint. Interior design in New York is by Ken Fulk: heavy velvets, a copper-and-brass bar, the cigar terrace that empties onto a Hudson Yards view nobody bothered to want until ZZ's gave them a reason. The Hollywood Reporter pegged the New York initiation at $30,000 a year, with some membership tiers running higher. Major Food Group has, characteristically, declined to confirm.
What the membership delivers, in practical terms, is access to three things the public restaurants do not offer. The first is Carbone Privato, the members-only menu that runs parallel to the downstairs Carbone canon — the same kitchen, a tighter list, four or five plates the public will never see. The second is Sadelle's Privato on the breakfast and brunch side, the Major Food Group bagel-and-cured-fish brand turned into a private morning room. The third, and the one that actually sells the membership, is the difficult evening reservation at the downstairs restaurant. A member with a guest can, with eight hours of notice, get a Saturday-night table at the public Carbone. The public Carbone takes that same table three months in advance. The arithmetic resolves itself.
The Miami room operates on a different rhythm. ZZ's Miami sits inside the same tower as Carbone Miami, opened in 2021, and the membership floor was designed from the outset for the Brickell-and-Faena crowd that uses the city as a winter base rather than a holiday destination. The cigar room sits above the dining room; the bar curls around a Damien Hirst that was installed before the club opened. The membership has filled fastest among the New York principals who already kept a Miami residence — predictable, and the point of the reciprocity that ZZ's was built around from the start.
The structural critique of ZZ's, raised most loudly by Air Mail and by Soho House loyalists, is that the format is too restaurant-driven to qualify as a club in the full sense. There is no swimming pool, no spa floor, no overnight residence above it. The counter-argument, and the one that has carried the room, is that the restaurant is what the member actually wants. The Aman Club is selling residential adjacency. Casa Cipriani is selling a building. ZZ's is selling the table at Carbone, and the table at Carbone is the most contested seat in the city. The price answers itself.
The club has now stopped publicly accepting applications in New York. The waitlist is closed. The next iteration — Major Food Group has confirmed Los Angeles is next — will be the test of whether the model travels beyond the cities where Carbone is already the answer to a different question.
— Camille Vedy
