Plenty of people dream of quitting the office to open a restaurant. Fewer first spend years clawing their way into the office of their dreams. Anthony Scotto III did both. He engineered his way onto BlackRock’s real-estate private-equity team—a job he says people “would literally die to get”—then walked out to help his family run Italian restaurants. “I fought so hard to get to exactly that position,” he told Fortune.
The result is Pelato, a Brooklyn-style Italian restaurant Mr Scotto opened in Nashville in September 2023, which has since grown into a three-city business employing 300 people. The company expects to serve roughly 450,000 guests this year and has committed to two more openings in 2027. The 30-year-old’s reward for being his own boss is to work seven days a week, rarely take a holiday and carry responsibility for hundreds of staff. “I’ve never worked harder in my life,” he says. “I’ve never been more stressed on a day-to-day in my life.”
Restaurants were in the blood. Both sides of his family arrived from Italy in 1905, settling in Manhattan’s Little Italy before crossing to Brooklyn. His father’s Midtown restaurant, Fresco by Scotto, opened in 1993, and young Anthony spent every summer and school break there—years at the dish pit before he was allowed near an onion. He liked the kitchen’s bustle; some cousins preferred the front of house. A restaurateur’s life, though, was not his plan.
That had been settled by the age of 12. Growing up in Manhattan, he watched classmates’ families build wealth in finance and property, and Fresco sat directly beneath BlackRock’s former headquarters on East 52nd Street, its staff regulars at the family’s tables. “There was no reason to not want to work in that company,” he says. He took unpaid internships at commercial property brokerages as a teenager, cold-called clients and earned his real-estate licence at 18. He picked Northeastern University for its co-op programme, which alternates classes with full-time work, and—because the university had no tie to BlackRock’s property team—spent a year building the internship himself.
It worked. He interned there twice, joined full-time after graduation sourcing, underwriting, acquiring and selling properties, and rose to associate and assistant portfolio manager on one of the team’s largest funds. He was the first in his family to finish college and enter corporate America; relatives regarded him, he says, as “the jewel”.
Then covid-19 redrew the map. Fresco closed for an extended stretch, cutting the immediate family’s main income, and the Scottos decamped to Nashville, where Mr Scotto’s sister was at school and the skyline bristled with cranes. He worked remotely for BlackRock while helping his parents open Luogo, a Nashville rendition of Fresco—he negotiated the lease, built the financial projections and handled the legal and accounting work—before handing daily operations to his father.
When BlackRock summoned staff back to New York, he chose. An “amazing” space in Nashville’s Germantown neighbourhood helped: a former mop-and-broom factory that had housed five restaurants in ten years, whose tenant, a broker told him, was four months behind on rent. “As soon as I saw it, I was like, ‘I want that. That’s my space.’” People thought him mad; within three weeks Pelato existed. His hedge was finance itself—if the restaurant failed, he reckoned, he could always go back. Four years on, he cannot imagine doing so.
The opening was rough. He launched Pelato with his mother Theresa, a former insurance broker; neither had run a restaurant, and they were selling deeply Brooklyn-Italian food to a city short of Italians. QR-code ordering, a pandemic-era choice, flopped and was scrapped. Everyone had an opinion on what Pelato should be; Mr Scotto and his mother instead made what he estimates were hundreds of small tweaks to the greeting, the service and the menu, preserving the family culture at its core.
The numbers turned fast. Pelato broke even in its third month, according to figures the company gave Fortune, and in mid-January—a month they had been warned might prove the “nail in the coffin”—trade suddenly surged. Revenue at the Nashville original rose 76% from its first full year to its second, then 34% the year after; the company forecasts another 10% this year. Newer branches in Franklin, a Nashville suburb, and Charleston, South Carolina, each broke even in their first months, and the firm says none of the three has since had an unprofitable month. Pelato became one of Nashville’s most-booked tables, drawing Morgan Wallen, Lainey Wilson, Sabrina Carpenter, Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton and Billy Joel.
The trader’s habits persist. Mr Scotto still applies BlackRock technique to site selection, leases and financial modelling, though he now spends about 95% of his time on the floor. His pride-and-joy hedge is the host stand, which he considers the most important job in the front of house and staffs with people he trains himself. “They make me more money than any manager or any server ever could,” he says. Hosts learn the dining room’s arithmetic: on a heaving Friday night the aim is never a three-hour wait quoted at the door, but getting more “butts in seats”.
Ownership is the point of the whole exchange. Because Pelato is family-owned and operated, Mr Scotto can change things without waiting for approval and live directly with the consequences.
If we fail, it’s because of us, and if we do well, it’s because of us
That, in the end, is what the assassin’s-hours job at BlackRock could not offer and a former broom factory could. The family wants to open two restaurants a year for the next three years. Somewhere between openings Mr Scotto hopes to reach Ischia, the island his family left, with a handwritten address, to knock on a door and hope he is not told to get lost. “Maybe we’ll find the month in between,” he says. “I’ll just become an old Italian farmer for a month. We’ll see.”