Rao’s – the 10-table East Harlem eatery with food so good, some would kill for it – exists in a realm beyond trendy and exclusive.
To get a table, even the famous need to know someone.
Madonna has been turned away. So has Felix Rohatyn, long one of the city’s most powerful movers-and-shakers and a former ambassador to France.
Not until last February – more than two years after he left office – did Bill Clinton get to eat there.
Rao’s is so hard to crack, co-owner Frank Pellegrino – a singer and actor with a recurring role on “The Sopranos” – has one of those mob-style nicknames: “Frankie No.”
It’s because he says no – a lot.
Rao’s regulars have included Elizabeth Hurley, Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, Tommy Mottola, Mariah Carey, Willie Nelson and Ron Perelman and Ellen Barkin.
They’re assigned tables on particular nights of the week – and if they don’t show, they are responsible for finding people to take their place.
The mob eats there, too – Rao’s served John Gotti and Paul Castellano.
By some accounts, imprisoned mobsters Gregory DePalma and Sam “Fat Man” Cagnina ordered a hit in 2001 on Nicky LaSorsa, a Bronx car dealer, partly because they thought LaSorsa was trying to muscle them out of their Rao’s tables.
The hit was thwarted because the feds knew of the mobsters’ plans.
Rao’s, at the corner of East 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue, was founded in 1896 by Charles Rao, on the heels of an Italian influx into East Harlem. Rao’s was right in the middle of what in those days was a predominately Italian area, bounded by East 119th Street, East 99th Street, the East River and Third Avenue.
After Charles died of a heart attack in 1909, his brother Joseph took over and ran the place until the 1930s.
By then, Charles’ sons, Louis and Vincent, became the operating owners of the restaurant. Rao’s Web site describes Louis as having been, “by neighborhood standards, very suave. He had his hair cut at the Waldorf-Astoria.”
By contrast, his brother Vincent “preferred a cowboy hat and casual clothes.”
By the 1970s, even as its East Harlem neighborhood went into decline, business got so busy at Rao’s that Vincent’s wife, Anna Pellegrino Rao, took over. She eventually brought in her nephew Frank Pellegrino, who today co-owns the restaurant with Ron Straci, a nephew of Vincent’s.
Rao’s reputation as a spot for the famous and the well-connected seems to have grown markedly since Pellegrino and Straci took over. In 1980, it took a few days to get a reservation. In 1993, a reviewer for The Post wrote that she’d been trying to get a seat at Rao’s for six years.
Although reservations are impossible, you can buy Rao’s pasta and sauces over the Internet: Arrabbiata sauce, made of crushed red pepper, is “perfect for pasta and seafood,” or Puttanesca sauce, “an exciting combination of tomatoes, capers, anchovies and olives.”
If you must visit without a reservation, the Web site advises, “You can always have a drink at the bar.”