I will be real with you. I’ve had trouble getting a handle on what Carrello is all about. The sister restaurant to fabulous Altura opened across the street in 2022, and I know the intended bent is Italian-ish, and that chef Nathan Lockwood is a big meat guy who’s finicky about sourcing and breaks down whole animals himself. But what is the concept?
I love ending up at Carrello, but the memory of the meal is always slippery. Meaty pasta and beautiful cocktails, no complaints—it’s all a savory, flavory blur. Like, a carrello is a cart. Great, love carts, use them all the time. What exactly is in this cart?
There are two things I do always remember about lovely Carrello. One is the dreamy eastern-facing patio and adjacent curated chef’s garden, with all the kaboingy telephone-cord squash tendrils climbing up the fence. And one’s the Iota.
A new friend recently suggested we hit Carrello to try their happy hour menu in its entirety, and I don’t really need to know what kind of cart we’re getting in before accepting this prompt. This is my kind of lady right here.
What I didn’t realize is that Carrello’s doing a thing called Abbinamento (Italian for “coupling”) where you can get mini versions of each HH drink and each dish, as a pairing, for $79 total. We let all six drink/snack sets flow all over us, and while it was all a tone poem in hedonism, there were two big standouts.
The lamb ribs and peppers are dressed lightly with mint, chili, and toasted rice powder that added a tiny crunch. A mouse stepping on a leaf. You get three small ribs in the mini HH version, stacked like Jenga blocks, with the roasted baby peppers tumbling around them, glistening and winking at you in the candlelight. The rendered lamb fat is so grassy and herby and flavorful, it’s like an umami compound butter all by itself. My word.
And that Iota, which is called the Greek Melon Punch on the HH menu; on the full cocktail list, we learn its true name. Bar director Derek Danley explains that this is a cover of a clarified milk punch. He uses cucumber-infused gin with Acqua di Cedro citrus liqueur, freshly juiced cantaloupe, and Fino sherry infused with four different types of mint from the chef’s garden, along with lemon juice and “our house ferment.”
Your what?
“Well,” he says, “our kitchen makes this by mixing a ton of seasonal veggies like carrots, celery, onions, and garlic, as well as seasonal stuff like fennel, lovage, radish.” He keeps some of the strained liquid behind the bar to add tang and richness to his cocktails.
So Danley takes some that active, funky garden juice, adds all the cocktail’s ingredients to it except the Greek yogurt and milk, and then pours this boozy potion into the dairy mix. “I let that sit for about 30 minutes and then filter everything,” he says. “It’s a process that usually takes about two days to fully filter, but it leaves the cocktail looking crystal clear, while giving it an incredibly luxurious, velvet texture.”
The beverage itself is the palest yellow, made of opalescent sunlight. Not sure why it took society this long to figure out that cantaloupe is the ideal melon for cocktails, not honeydew, but I’m thrilled to live in this era. The aroma of its cousin, the cucumber, hangs in the air over the drink like an enchanted mist, and it’s all imbued with a barely-there minty, milky, citrusy tang.
The garden brine is fucking heavenly. With apologies to my nephews, the word that comes to mind is dank. I want to stick my face in the forbidden, ever-changing pickle jar. Put a crazy straw in there that spells out my name.
Okay. Now I see. The actual point of Carrello is the garden. This is, I’ve decided, a garden restaurant where they serve various rustic Italian dishes that are accented by the dreamy onsite urban food garden.
After we finish the six-course Abbinamento mini-food/mini-cocktail pairing experience, I order a grown-up Iota for dessert. I want to drink it some more. For this one, Danley serves the drink in a poco grande glass over a custom ice cube, embossed on which seems to be the screensaver maze from my family’s mid-’90s IBM 386. My friend leans in and reveals that she knew I’d love this cocktail and it’s the specific reason she brought me here. I feel known.
I think this is gonna work out. We just get each other now—my new pal and Carrello both.
