This post is part of Stellar Menus’ On Restaurants series, a collection of interviews with chefs and restaurant owners on how they came to discover food in their bones, how they grew their culinary careers, and the mistakes and lessons they learned along the way.
Long before he tried to “Beat Bobby Flay,” chef Rocco Carulli knew he wanted his life to combine his two primary loves: Food and entertainment.
Early family food traditions and the pull of the kitchen
Born the child of Italian immigrants and raised in New Jersey, Rocco says his earliest memories are of the cooking traditions of his parents’ homeland. “Every Sunday morning I’d be woken up to the smell of the sauce cooking and the meatballs being fried,” he says. “We got buckets of tomatoes from our garden and jarred our own sauce. Every fall my father would go to the train yard and get grapes and we’d make our own wine, and every Easter on Good Friday we’d go to the farm and pick out a couple of baby lambs to have fresh lamb for the holiday.”
The other big tradition was that of dinner parties, lots of them, that would last all day and into the night. “There was always the pasta course, and then this course, and then that course, and just when you thought you were full, my father would fire up the grill. I was always surrounded by all of that,” he says.
For grammar school bake sales, Rocco would make his own cupcakes while the other children’s parents did the baking. And while he baked, he says, the entertainer in him arose. “I’d be playing like I was on a cooking show, doing an impression of Julia Child, as an actual child,” he says.
The journey from the Culinary Institute to R House in Miami
After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, Rocco performed brief stints in New York City and San Francisco before finding a home in Edwige, a seasonal restaurant on Cape Cod, for 13 summers. For most of those years, Rocco spent his winters in Miami working as a server at the restaurant Wish.
When moving twice a year became untenable, Miami won out as a better location to attempt a year-round business, and in 2014, Rocco opened R House, a casual fine dining establishment known for its Latin-inspired flavors, in the Wynwood neighborhood, an up-and-coming arts district.
Soon after R House opened, Rocco competed on Bravo’s “Best New Restaurant,” and while he did not win the show, the exposure from it helped to fill seats.
Discovering a winning differentiation
In R House’s second year in business, Rocco’s husband and business partner Owen wanted to start doing a drag brunch. “It was a huge hit right away,” Rocco says. Before they could celebrate their early successes, though, the Zika virus hit Miami hard in 2016.
“Wynwood was ground zero, all over the news everywhere,” Rocco says. “The streets were deserted.” No sooner had the neighborhood and restaurant recovered from the Zika scare than Hurricane Irma made landfall in Florida, causing $50 billion worth of damage in 2017. The pandemic, of course, followed soon after.
The key to restaurateur success? Be prepared and push through despite difficulties
“Every couple of years something happens, and it always happens right when we’re at the height of our game,” Rocco says. “But the reason we’ve been in business for 10 years is because we’re strong enough to deal with all the things that come our way,” Rocco says. “Another person who doesn’t have the will to go on may just give up. But if you have a good product and the will to push through things that happen, and they will happen, there’s no reason you won’t succeed.”
Rocco has good advice for people who want to own a restaurant. “Be prepared,” he says. “When you’re doing great, just be ready to deal with something that’s going to bring you down. But know that you’re gonna get back up on your feet and do it again and be right back up there.”
Rocco is featured in episode 7 of season 33 of “Beat Bobby Flay” entitiled, “Make It Work.”
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This post is part of Stellar Menus’ On Restaurants series, a collection of interviews with chefs and restaurant owners on how they came to discover food in their bones, how they grew their culinary careers, and the mistakes and lessons they learned along the way.
