15. Josh Pickard, Andrew Camerini and Luke Ostrom
Over the past 17 years, Andrew Carmellini, Luke Ostrom and Josh Pickard have built NoHo Hospitality into 23 locations in New York and Detroit, setting a number of trends along the way. The run barely started. In late 2008, with the market in freefall, Camerini and Ostrom inspected the former Ago space at the Greenwich Hotel and nearly walked away. “I think I did see a tumbleweed in North Moore,” Ostrom told the Observer. They took the space anyway, ripped off the white tablecloths, and opened Locanda Verde in 2009, with Pickard joining as the third partner.
Those trends include the ubiquitous whipped ricotta ganache, a Day 1 staple at Locanda Verde, according to the group. Carmellini did not claim to have invented it; He traces the dish back to a team picnic in Abruzzo in the 1990s, which used ricotta ganache imported from Sardinia. There’s also the cult New York roll, a round, cream-filled croissant that was originally launched in Lafayette in April 2022 and has since been copied by bakeries from Singapore to London. Within about 30 days, imitations were popping up in California, then Japan and South Korea, and Camerini once spotted one being sold as a “Lafayette donut” while on vacation in Costa Rica. “At first, we were uneasy about it,” the partners said, before admitting that others had invented waffles.
This year, the partners expanded their presence in New York and Detroit while retaining the restaurants that made them famous: Locanda Verde (co-owned by Robert De Niro) since 2009, The Dutch, an all-American oyster room since 2011, Lafayette since 2013, and the pasta-focused Bar Primi Primi Primi since 2014. Their flagship store is Café Carmellini at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, with the opening of Carmellini’s first restaurant of the same name in 2023. After years of building the lounge, he designed it as a return to the fine dining he embraced, named in honor of his family’s 120-year coffee importing business in Tuscany. Opening night, he said, was “chaotic, fun, and very scary.”
Detroit came to Detroit through the native Picard. “In Detroit, you have to work harder to earn people’s loyalty, and loyalty is everything,” he said. There, they already operate four venues at the Shinola Hotel, adding Saksey’s (a basement cocktail lounge) and Gilly’s Clubhouse (a sports and entertainment venue). In September, they partnered with Authentic Hospitality to open Ray’s Detroit, a local bar with a welcoming theme. In New York, two new locations at the Public Theater demonstrate the co-founders’ determination to expand successful brands while developing new ones: a second location of all-day Italian cafe Bar Torino, and The Astor, a downtown bistro that will replace the library on September 15. Both locations continue their relationship with the institution at Joe’s Pub, with the partners describing their roles there as part of a larger evening, with dinner or drinks a “natural extension” of the show. They’re always busy, with about 35,000 covers a week, and lines at the Lafayette bakery can be as long as half an hour. Carmellini still preferred to be on the floor; he once thought the group could hold meetings in private dining rooms, and as the portfolio grew, Ostrom and Pickard pushed for the construction of corporate offices.
Carmellini’s kitchen also trained some of the biggest names in the industry, including Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi and David Chang, all of whom worked for the man known as AC during his time as executive chef at Cafe Boulud. “These are just three of the 10,000 names that have come through the ranks,” he said. “This is not for the faint of heart.” When asked where he would take his harshest critic, he mentioned Tetou, a restaurant that closed in Bay de Juan and recently reopened in Cannes, “so that he can understand what a real bouillabaisse is.”
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