The 50 Most Powerful People in Restaurants and Nightlife 2026
15. Josh Pickard, Andrew Carmellini & Luke Ostrom
Over the past 17 years, Andrew Carmellini, Luke Ostrom and Josh Pickard have built NoHo Hospitality into 23 venues in New York and Detroit and launched a range of trends along the way. The run nearly didn’t start. At the end of 2008, with the market in free fall, Carmellini and Ostrom scouted the former Ago space at the Greenwich Hotel and came close to walking away. “I think I literally saw a tumbleweed blow across North Moore,” Ostrom told 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 ubiquity of whipped ricotta, a day-one Locanda Verde staple, according to the group. Carmellini doesn’t claim to have invented it; he traces the dish to a picnic the team put together in Abruzzo in the ’90s, with ricotta imported from Sardinia. Then there’s the viral New York roll, a circular, cream-filled croissant that began as the Suprême at Lafayette in April 2022 and has since been copied by bakeries from Singapore to London. Copies surfaced in California within about 30 days, then in Japan and Korea, and Carmellini once found one on vacation in Costa Rica sold as a “Lafayette donut.” “At first, we were upset about it,” the partners said, before conceding that someone else invented the muffin, too.
This year, the partners expanded their presence across New York and Detroit while keeping up the restaurants that made their name: Locanda Verde (co-owned by Robert De Niro) since 2009, all-American oyster room The Dutch since 2011, Lafayette since 2013 and pasta-focused Bar Primi since 2014. Their flagship is Café Carmellini at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which opened in 2023 as Carmellini’s first namesake restaurant. After years of building casual rooms, he designed it as a return to the fine dining he trained in, and the name honors his family’s coffee importing business, which operated in Tuscany for 120 years. Opening night, he said, was “chaos, fun and utterly terrifying.”
Detroit came through Pickard, a native of the city. “In Detroit, you have to work harder to earn people’s loyalty, and that loyalty is everything,” he said. There, where they already run four venues at the Shinola Hotel, they added Saksey’s, a speakeasy cocktail lounge and Gilly’s Clubhouse, a sports entertainment venue. In September, they partnered with Authentic Hospitality to open Ray’s Detroit, a local watering hole designed with an emphasis on welcome. In New York, two new spots at the Public Theater showcased the co-founders’ determination to extend successful brands while developing new ones: a second location of all-day Italian café Bar Torino, and The Astor, a downtown tavern that replaced The Library on September 15. Both extend a relationship with the institution that dates to Joe’s Pub, and the partners describe their role there as part of a bigger evening, with dinner or a drink serving as “a natural extension” of the show. And they’re keeping busy, with about 35,000 covers a week across the portfolio and a line at Lafayette’s bakery that can run half an hour. Carmellini still prefers to be on the floor; he once figured the group could hold its meetings in the private dining rooms, and it was Ostrom and Pickard who pushed for a corporate office as the portfolio grew.
Carmellini’s kitchens have also trained some of the industry’s biggest names, among them Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi and David Chang, who all worked for the man many call AC when he was executive chef at Cafe Boulud. “Those are only three names out of 10,000 that have passed through the ranks,” he said. “It’s not for the weak at heart.” Ask where he’d take his toughest critic, and he names Tetou, which closed in Golfe-Juan and recently reopened in Cannes, “so he could understand what a real bouillabaisse actually is.”
