Carla Pellegrino and members of her kitchen team are shown in the kitchen at Rao's at Caesars Palace. Photos by Jeff Scheid.
Rao's, with its iconic sign shown at top, is the only offshoot of a 110-year-old, 10-table East Harlem landmark that has been in the same family since it was founded.
Rao's legendary meatballs are served in tomato sauce.
One of the restaurant's two "Rao's Rooms," which re-create the historic and cozy feel of the New York original.
Carla and Frank Pellegrino Jr. stand outside their new restaurant, Rao's, at Caesars Palace.
Never has a pair of size-6 1/2 white clogs moved so fast.
They were in constant motion in the kitchen at Rao's one afternoon last week, wading through the water spilled from a wine bucket, zipping to a prep station for a brief inspection, then moving on to the cooks' line for a consultation on the evening's dinner service.
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Then they took a whirlwind tour of the front of the house, leading a florist through the dining rooms and lounge so he could see exactly what was required to refresh the restaurant's decorations. At long last they paused near a red bar stool and their wearer, executive chef Carla Pellegrino, allowed herself a brief sigh as she perched for a quick interview.
"I'm kind of lost," Pellegrino said, as somewhere in the restaurant a phone rang unceasingly. "I'm kind of numb. It's too much work for me."
Why should she be daunted? Pellegrino and her husband, owner-partner Frank Pellegrino Jr., have a four-generation, 110-year family tradition to uphold -- on the international stage that is Caesars Palace. The Las Vegas restaurant is an offshoot of the legendary 10-table, 50-seat East Harlem original in New York. The only other Rao's, which has a loyal clientele -- many with standing reservations -- has one seating nightly, so that even the glitterati sometimes have trouble getting tables.
But Frank Pellegrino Sr., who is co-owner of Rao's with his cousin, attorney Ron Straci -- both of them great-great-nephews of founder Charles Rao -- isn't exactly worried about the new venture.
"There weren't two better people in the world that I could have," Frank Pellegrino Sr. said. "Carla is a brilliant chef. I think the food is better here than in New York. My son just knows this business."
Rao's didn't have its grand opening until last week, but its doors were quietly unlocked in December. And Carla and Frank Pellegrino Jr. were at work in the restaurant for weeks before that. Last week, Carla Pellegrino was delighted to report that she had had three consecutive Mondays off. They were preceded by three months of seven-day weeks -- 13- to 15-hour daily seven-day weeks -- as they readied for the opening.
"Not to five days yet, but six," she said with a laugh. "We're going to get there."
It seems that the long hours have paid off. The response, said Frank Pellegrino Sr., has been "really great -- even better than expected."
Carla Pellegrino said that even in its first weeks, the restaurant has served 400 to 450 dinners a night.
"It was supposed to be a soft opening," she said. "It wasn't soft."
Most exciting to them?
"People already are eating three, four days in a row," Frank Pellegrino Sr. said.
"Repeat customers in Las Vegas? That's unheard of," Carla Pellegrino said. Caesars' reservations people have told her "same people six, seven times already," she said.
And that's important to the Pellegrinos, who want their customers to feel like family.
"We trained everyone and expect them to create relationships with the customers in the hope that they'll come back -- and come back often," Frank Pellegrino Sr. said. "We want that relationship, even if it's once a year," from conference attendees.
Of his Las Vegas offshoot, he said, "the reality is I'm overwhelmed by it. This was a fantasy. To actually be here in Las Vegas and look around at how this was done and exactly what we set out to accomplish -- I think we did it. I'm quite proud of it. I have trouble believing it."
But if the road to Las Vegas was long for Rao's, it was even longer for Carla Pellegrino, 38. Born in Brazil of a Portuguese father and Italian mother, she was cooking at age 10, helping out with her mother's catering business.
"I had to miss school to cook with her," she said.
At 14, her mother sent her to family in Italy, where "I fell in love with Italian food" as she grew to adulthood. She knew food was her future. "That's all I did with my life." For seven years, she had a fish boutique in Liguria, and "made a little kitchen behind the counter" where she produced sauces for local families to serve with the fish she sold. She wanted to do more -- maybe a little cafe -- but her husband at the time insisted that the work would be too hard.
By 1997, she was in the midst of a divorce and making yet another major move, to the United States.
On her third day in New York, she managed to get into Rao's, and there she met Frank Pellegrino Jr., who also was going through a divorce. They started to date.
She told him about her dream of opening a cafe. After about six months of eating the food she cooked, he decided it was a dream that was within reach. Frank Jr. told his father he was thinking of opening a cafe she could call her own. Frank Sr. said things were well in hand at Rao's, and Frank Jr. should go along on the new adventure.
And then other people heard of their plans.
"Everybody started to throw money at us," Carla Pellegrino said. "We just wanted a small thing downtown." They ended up with a 158-seat restaurant called Baldoria. Problem: She wasn't trained in cooking on a large scale.
"I got scared," she said. "I said, 'I'm not going in that kitchen.' He said, 'You have to, everybody's watching.' "
And so, reversing the path of culinary students everywhere, "I went to school to take over the restaurant."
She chose the French Culinary Institute, partly because she already knew Italian food. Her instructors included culinary lions Jacques Pepin and Andres Soltner. It was a one-year program, and more intensive than usual.
"I knew I had to take over the restaurant," she said. She told them, "Please use me."
And so late nights became frequent. "I had to do all the parties at the French consulate."
But then she was ready for Baldoria. And the larger restaurant prepared Carla and Frank Pellegrino Jr. for the scale at the new Rao's.
Baldoria birthed the new Rao's in another way. It was there that the couple met John Unwin, a Caesars executive who's now the property's general manager. Unwin dined at Baldoria six times, Carla Pellegrino estimated, eventually found out about their ties to Rao's and proposed a Las Vegas outpost.
"And here we are," she said.
The Las Vegas Rao's may be much larger than the New York one, with about 250 seats, but it has retained a cozy feel.
From the massive central bar with its 25-foot-high domed ceiling, three dining rooms radiate to the sides and rear, with the two flanking spaces dubbed "Rao's Rooms" because their size, seating capacity and decor -- dark wood booths, lots of signed photos and a Wurlitzer jukebox -- resemble the original. At the rear is a sunny, open room that overlooks a bocce court and a resort pool.
At Rao's entrance are "patio" areas that overlook a Caesars Palace walkway instead of East Harlem streets, and a shop selling sauces, pastas, Rao's clothing, cookbook and other merchandise.
And fronting it all, next to the entry, is the open-to-view kitchen, where the softball-sized meatballs; pork or veal chops sauteed with hot and sweet cherry peppers; osso buco alla Milanese; pasta with marinara sauce; and other staples of Southern Italian cuisine are produced.
Carla Pellegrino and her father-in-law see a link between the coziness and the cuisine.
"It's a very happy thing," she said of the food. "Something your mother would do. I think Las Vegas needs a comfortable place, because you have cheap cafes and you have fancy places."
And while he knows most everyone who frequents the New York Rao's, Frank Pellegrino Sr. conceded that his Las Vegas customers will be strangers -- "to begin with."
But, he said, "we want the people who live in Las Vegas to come to Rao's and make it their favorite Italian restaurant. That feeling of warmth, of camaraderie, of family, will ultimately happen.
