“I started to link cooking with love … I’ll say ‘let me cook for you,’ because that is a way for me to tell you I like you.”
—Carla Pellegrino
Carla Pellegrino, once Carla Madeira, was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and fell in love with cooking at an early age. By age ten, she was helping run her mother’s catering business, and when she was sixteen, she moved by herself to her aunt’s house in Liguria, Italy. There, she opened a small fish store and strengthened her passion for Italian cooking by conducting daily cooking demonstrations. In 1997, Carla moved to New York City where she met Frank Pellegrino Jr., the son of restaurateur and actor Frank Pellegrino Sr., whose family owns the more than 100-year-old restaurant Rao’s in East Harlem. The meeting was fortuitous.
Every weekend Carla would have ten to twenty people to her home to cook for them and entertain. Her friends started to encourage her to open a restaurant, and she began to explore the idea. “My fiancé at the time, who was very Italian, said no way, this is not a woman’s job. You’ll become fat and smell like garlic.” She laughs. “It stuck with me. To this day I work out and take care to wash to never smell like [garlic].” In 1999, with the Pellegrino family backing her, Carla started to work on a plan to open a small café somewhere in downtown Manhattan. Carla says, “I never thought I would make money at [cooking]. That was Frank’s vision…. He had that American way of thinking where you see money everywhere, which was a good thing.” And Frank’s vision was especially helpful because by the time all was said and done, Carla’s small café had turned into a 2-million-dollar restaurant with the capacity for 280 people in Midtown on 49th Street. Before the restaurant even opened, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times ran articles about its much-anticipated opening. Carla says, “I had never run a restaurant before. I got so scared. I got cold feet.” Carla tried to back out of the restaurant, but by then it was too late. The restaurant was being built, and many of their friends and family had invested money. Carla agreed to move forward with the project if Frank sent her to culinary school so she could learn to cook on a large scale in a professional kitchen. She attended the French Culinary Institute in NYC, and in 2000, the same year her Italian restaurant Baldoria opened, she graduated with honors. “I did it backwards…. Once you go to a culinary school, it would take usually between seven and ten years for you to become a chef. I actually became a chef before, and I had to go there to learn how to put my food out.” Despite her initial reservations, Baldoria was a major success, and in 2006, both Carla and Frank Jr., who had married in 2002, moved to Las Vegas to open Rao’s Las Vegas. Carla successfully led the culinary team at Rao’s Las Vegas to host significant events, including cooking at the prestigious James Beard House in New York City in 2008 and 2009.
Carla got her first tattoo, a small unicorn on her upper back, in the early ‘90s, but decided to make a change after an elderly woman saw the tattoo while standing in line behind her and tried to wipe it off, thinking it was a bit of dirt. Carla says, “I thought, okay it is time for a cover-up. People don’t even know it is a tattoo anymore.” She decided to cover up the unicorn in 2010 with a tattoo of a storm that wraps around her right shoulder. At the time she and Frank were getting divorced, and the storm reflected the changes that were coming in her life. She says, “I knew I would leave Rao’s, and I knew it would be hard and painful. I thought to do something big and thought if I could get through this, it was fifteen hours, and that if I could go through this pain, I could go through anything.” In 2011, Carla teamed up with the Tropicana Las Vegas to open Bacio. The night of the opening for friends and family, only her sister, her sous-chef, and she were working. In their hurry to turn out food for over 100 people, Carla badly burned her right arm. Once healed, Carla got a scrollwork tattoo with flowers and five names across it to cover the scars. The names—Clea, Carla, Marcelle, Alessandra, Clea—are the names of the women of her family: her mother, herself, her daughter, her sister, and her niece. The tattoo represents the strength and endurance of the women of her family.
Since the divorce, Carla has shown again and again how strong she is. She opened three restaurants: Bratalian, Bacio by Carla Pellegrino, and Meatball Spot. She closed Bacio by Carla Pellegrino in 2012 in order to open Meatball Spot and pursue her other culinary endeavors, and Bratalian is still going strong. Over the years, Carla has been featured on The Today Show, CBS Morning Show, Fox News National, Throwdown with Bobby Flay (which she won), Food & Wine, and Bon Appétit. In 2012, she competed on Top Chef but was eliminated in the third round.
Carla continues to run her two successful restaurants and has started to work on her first cookbook.
