He Quit a BlackRock Career to Build a Three-City Restaurant Group

By Daniel Okafor

Revenue at Anthony Scotto III's first restaurant rose 76% from its first full year to its second, then another 34% the year after. That is the growth rate Scotto produced after walking away from a promotion track at BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, to run a Brooklyn-style Italian restaurant group his family owns.

Pelato now operates in three cities, employs 300 people, and expects to serve roughly 450,000 guests this year. The company has committed to opening two more restaurants in 2027.

The tradeoff is real. Scotto, 30, works seven days a week and rarely takes vacations.

"I've never worked harder in my life," Scotto told Fortune. "I've never been more stressed on a day-to-day in my life."

How did a BlackRock job sit on the family doorstep?

Both sides of Scotto's family immigrated from Italy in 1905, settling in Manhattan's Little Italy before moving to Brooklyn. His father's Midtown Manhattan restaurant, Fresco by Scotto, opened in 1993. Scotto spent summers and school breaks there, washing dishes for years before anyone trusted him to chop onions.

Finance, not food, was his first ambition. Growing up in Manhattan, he watched classmates' families build generational wealth through finance and real estate. By age 12, he had decided that was his world.

The dream was visible from the family's own dining room. Fresco sat on the same East 52nd Street block as BlackRock's former headquarters. BlackRock employees ate at the restaurant regularly.

"There was no reason to not want to work in that company," Scotto said.

He built the path himself. As a teenager, he took unpaid internships at commercial real estate brokerages, cold-called clients, and earned his real estate license at 18. He chose Northeastern University for its co-op program, and because the school had no relationship with BlackRock's real estate team, he spent a year constructing the internship himself.

It worked. He interned at BlackRock twice, joined the real estate private-equity team full-time after graduation, and rose to associate and assistant portfolio manager on one of the team's largest funds. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college and enter Corporate America. Relatives treated him like he was "the jewel," he said.

What forced the choice?

COVID-19 closed Fresco for an extended period and cut off the family's primary income. The Scottos looked to Nashville, where Scotto's sister attended school and where his parents saw a fast-growing city full of cranes and potential.

Scotto kept working remotely for BlackRock while helping his parents open Luogo, a Nashville restaurant modeled after Fresco. He negotiated the lease, built the financial projections, and handled the legal and accounting work before handing daily operations to his father.

Then BlackRock called employees back to New York. Scotto had to choose between the career he had spent years building and the family restaurant in Nashville.

The decision turned on a piece of real estate. While canvassing Nashville's Germantown neighborhood with a broker, Scotto found a space whose tenant had fallen four months behind on rent. The building, originally a mop-and-broom factory, had housed five restaurants in 10 years. People thought he was crazy.

"As soon as I saw it, I was like, 'I want that. That's my space,'" he said.

Pelato opened three weeks later.

"I knew that I had a career path that people would literally die to get," Scotto said of his BlackRock job. "I fought so hard to get to exactly that position."

What made the leap feel safe was a simple hedge: if the restaurant failed, he believed he could return to finance. Four years on, he can no longer imagine going back.

How did Pelato find its footing?

Scotto opened Pelato with his mother, Theresa, in September 2023. Theresa had worked as an insurance broker; neither of them had owned and operated a restaurant before. They were introducing deeply Brooklyn-Italian food to a city without many Italians.

The first months were rough. The restaurant opened with QR-code ordering instead of table service, a pandemic-era decision Scotto quickly scrapped. He and his mother changed the greeting, the service, and the menu, making what he estimates were hundreds of small tweaks.

Pelato reached break-even in its third month, according to figures the company provided to Fortune. In mid-January, a month insiders had warned could be the restaurant's "nail in the coffin," business surged instead.

"If you could bottle the feeling from those months," Scotto said, "there's no better feeling than that on the planet."

Pelato became one of Nashville's most-booked restaurants, drawing guests including Morgan Wallen, Lainey Wilson, Sabrina Carpenter, Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton, and Billy Joel.

The newer locations, in the Nashville suburb of Franklin and in Charleston, South Carolina, each broke even during their first months. The company said none of the three has posted an unprofitable month since stabilizing. The company forecasts another 10% revenue increase at the original location this year.

What carries over from BlackRock?

Scotto still applies his BlackRock training to site selection, leases, and financial modeling. But he now spends about 95% of his time inside the restaurants.

His operating secret is narrow and concrete: he personally trains Pelato's hosts, the position he calls the most important in the front of house.

"They make me more money than any manager or any server ever could," he said.

He teaches hosts the numbers behind the dining room and how to keep as many "butts in seats" as possible. On a packed Friday night, the goal is not a three-hour wait but a way to seat the guest.

Ownership is the other edge. Because the family owns and operates Pelato, Scotto can change things without waiting for approval.

"If we fail, it's because of us, and if we do well, it's because of us," he said.

The family plans to open two restaurants a year for the next three years. Somewhere between those openings, Scotto hopes to finally visit Ischia, the small Italian island where his family's story began, with a handwritten address in hand.

"Maybe we'll find the month in between," Scotto said. "I'll just become an old Italian farmer for a month. We'll see."