Take Me to Your Spot: Willa Bennett @ Via Carota
Judging pastas and talking TikTok with the Highsnobiety editor-in-chief
Welcome to Take Me to Your Spot, a series with a simple premise: food, a fascinating person, and the restaurant connecting them. In each installment, an interesting New Yorker (as well as folks from further afield) takes us to their favorite restaurant—a place where they rank as a true regular—and shows us the ropes.
Willa Bennett likes routine. One needn’t look further than the 29-year-old’s signature uniform—a suit, perhaps not David Byrne baggy, but you get the picture—to know that. She often wears a tie, too. Some of these once belonged to her father, others she finds at vintage stores around the city, or eBay, whose alerts ping on her always-within-reach phone throughout the workday.
“I like having a look,” she tells me from her side of our two-top at Via Carota. Long, straight brown hair flanks her youthful face, and she fixes me with a set of lidded eyes that on her Instagram evoke those of a precocious teen barely tolerating an out-of-touch adult, but tonight, in person, come off as open, warm, and friendly, as does Ms. Bennett herself. It’s a Tuesday, 5:30 p.m., first week of February, and beyond the big window behind her Grove St. glows in a soft, hopeful light faintly suggestive of spring. Already a line of would be walk-ins has formed underneath the restaurant’s dark awning. Back at our table, Ms. Bennett tucks into her salad, the spot’s acclaimed Insalata Verde—one of two salads we’re splitting tonight, the other being Cavoletti, which Ms. Bennett declares the winner. She further considers the significance of the suit. “There's something grounding about it. I don't like having a lot of clothes. It stresses me out.”
This evening, however, there is no suit. No tie either. Just a simple sweater and a pair of jeans — an outfit perhaps hastily thrown together considering she’s just back from LA, the Grammy’s, where she threw an afterparty at Chateau Marmont for Highsnobiety, the Berlin-based media brand and youth culture platform that she’s helmed since 2022. Yes, your math is correct: Ms. Bennett was 27 when she landed the coveted gig, a wunderkindesque fact that has me feeling irrevocably old.
And so, sans suit and tie, the only routine on tonight’s menu is the spot itself — Via Carota, a restaurant that Ms. Bennett has always reserved for special occasions but one that has, ever since she moved into the neighborhood a year ago, become something of her local.
"This is the most beautiful restaurant. I'm completely obsessed with it. I love the chairs and the food. It's always consistent. I think I really crave the consistency. It's like, why I wear my uniform?" She sips her Negroni, schmears burrata onto a piece of bread, the rings on her small hands catching the perennially popular West Village trattoria’s surprisingly bright light. “I also like supporting people I like. So, like, this place is queer-owned, and I'm obsessed with the owners.”
She's referring, of course, to chefs/owners Jody Williams and Rita Sodi, whose sister spot Commerce Inn also belongs to her restaurant rotation, along with spots like Fanelli, Minetta Tavern, and The Stonewall Inn. New classics. Classic classics. Call them what you will, but the through line is clear enough: for someone who’s made her career mastering the ephemeral nature of social media, Ms. Bennett appreciates places with some history.
“Yeah,” she laughs. “I like an old school establishment.”
Ms. Bennett’s own history begins in California. She grew up in LA, Silver Lake to be exact, alongside her younger sister Scout, named after the “To Kill a Mockingbird” character. In keeping with the household literary tradition, Ms. Bennett takes her name from the author Willa Cather. She read a lot as a kid, while also working part-time gigs at ice cream parlors and taco stands, moonlighted as a summer camp counselor, which she credits for giving her the skills to lead a team (along with the parenting books she constantly reads — “I’ll send you some”). But it was dance that soon took over. A ballet career blossomed, and it was the “pink, pink, pink, jeweled tutus,” along with her own burgeoning sense of queerness, that caused her to embrace the suit as the counterpoint to her dance life. Not long after coming out, she came east to Sarah Lawrence on a dance scholarship but gravitated toward creative writing classes, did her senior thesis on magazines—“they feel like this moment in time”—which led to an editorial gig at Seventeen, where she launched the 70-year-old title’s first queer vertical, before moving onto audience development at Bustle and then GQ.
“And that brings us to today,” Ms. Bennett says as our Negronis are refreshed and our mains arrive — pappardelle with wild boar ragu and tagliatelle creamy with a liberal amount of parmigiana and topped with papery-thin slices of prosciutto. She gives me a wry smile, as if to declare: case closed. One gets the sense that, for as much as Ms. Bennett shares online, she’s not entirely comfortable talking about herself, or sharing too many personal details. Chalk her guard up to the insidious and voyeuristic underbelly of social media. While her West Village move had her romanticizing ideas of smoking cigarettes on a fire escape and writing a book, reality was much different. After posting about her apartment during Pride the homophobic hate began pouring in. She deleted the photos. It was a cruel reminder that while being queer might seem commonplace in coastal cities, such acceptance is still far from the case throughout the rest of the country — beyond Grammy parties and hypebeast fashion trends, these are the underrepresented kids Ms. Bennett cares about and, often, for whom she writes. It’s this mission and sensibility that originally brought her to Via Carota — a restaurant she credits, partially, with starting her career in earnest.
"One of my first big profiles at GQ was with Joshua Bassett, and we sat in that room.” She flicks her chin to the restaurant’s private backroom. “It was a story I really fought for. I really fought to interview him, and it was a really unique story. It was essentially a Disney star [of High School Musical fame, as well as the alleged subject of the Olivia Rodrigo breakup anthem “Drivers License”] who came out as queer on the Internet and then got a lot of hate for it. And so I said to my editors, ‘Hey, if we really care about young people, and young male mental health the way we say we do, then this is the biggest story for young people right now.’ It became the second top-performing GQ story in 2021. And it was on the Today Show by, like, 8 a.m. the next morning.”
But beyond the story’s virality, it was the surreal experience itself that stood out. What began as a publicist-mandated 30-minute interview swelled into a sprawling two-and-a-half hour conversation. One that stopped foot traffic outside.
“There was something so beautiful about the interview. We were having this intimate conversation, and these teens kept walking by and stopping. The restaurant wouldn't let them in, so they were just, like, standing there looking through the window while we talked and ate. After the interview, I left, and I opened TikTok, and there were all these videos of us eating.”
Such an experience reaffirmed Ms. Bennett’s faith in social media. At the time, she was running social at GQ, and roughly a year later “Highsnob”—as she puts it—came calling, or, rather, slid into her DMs. After landing the job, she celebrated with friends at—where else?—Via Carota.
"I think what's cool about Highsnob not being a magazine that's been around since before I was born is that as a team we've been able to carve out our lane."
Part of that lane involves ignoring Kanye, always having an informed opinion on everything they cover, no matter how polarizing, and—in the case of reporting they did on the state of trans rights in fashion—“straight up” deleting any transphobic comments. There’s traditional fashion coverage, too. Ms. Bennett ranks Billie Eilish, Grace Wales Bonner, and André 3000 as muses, both personal and for Highsnob, but it’s the intentionality behind what they wear, rather than what they’re wearing, that’s interesting.
“André 3000 has incredible style. Right now, he's only wearing Oshkosh. It's his uniform. And it's, like, yeah, you're André 3000, you don't have to wear anything else.”
It’s dark out now on Grove St., and Via Carota is even busier than before, if that’s somehow possible. Ms. Bennett wants to know what I think of the people in here. Are the couple next to us on a date? And what’s my idea of a romantic spot, anyway?
“Grand Central Oyster Bar,” I say.
“No way,” she laughs. “This is the most romantic place”
Then it’s onto the pastas — which one is better? I go with the pappardelle. She gives me a skeptical look, and now those eyes do seem like the ones from Instagram; the one’s that say, “c’mon, old man.”
I take another bite of the tagliatelle, and it hits me like the platonic ideal of mac ’n cheese. “Fine,” I concede, “this one is better.” Ms. Bennett nods approvingly.
Dessert follows: olive oil cake with fennel and honey plus a chocolate hazelnut semifreddo. When pressed I choose correctly this time, the latter being the clear winner.
“What else do you want to know?” Ms. Bennett asks.
Now it’s my time to demand a verdict. “What’s the move here?” I say. “What should a regular order?”
Ms. Bennett smiles. There’s no hesitation in her answer. “Skip the salads and always order two pastas.”
James Jung
VP, Content
Blackbird Labs, Inc.