Oh my god what if it's a pattern
In "Goodbye" Carmy tells Sydney that he did this so he wouldn't have to do other things.
"Opened a restaurant?!" she blurts, incredulous.
He nods yes, opened a restaurant.
She goes off on how everybody in the restaurant business, generally, is dealing with some shit, and then continues freaking out about series of other issues.
But put the avoidance aside for a minute.
Carmy is such a very specific talent that "opening a restaurant" (by all accounts a very challenging, emotionally wearing process) is the comparatively relaxing distraction from "dealing with his mother" or "bookkeeping" or feeling the lyrics to "I Want to Know What Love Is" by Foreigner.
Opening a restaurant with (or more truthfully, it seems, for) someone he loves is what he was trying to do with Mikey. He knew Mikey was struggling. He wanted to fix it. He would sort the restaurant out and implement systems and then Mikey would get better. Mikey was not so naive.
Ross Geller is the guy who gets divorced.
Carmy Berzatto is guy who opens restaurants as a form of emotional intimacy.
Sydney told him she wanted to make beautiful food without a psycho terrorizing her all the time, which is exactly what Carmy offered her when he proposed in "Braciole" (except the psycho in this case is her favorite man on earth except her dad, so yikes, complicated).
But what if there was a third instance? Sydney, Mikey...and his dad
In "System" Marcus shows us that Carmy won a James Beard Award for a restaurant called Fairest Creatures, located in Malibu, California, in the year 2018. This restaurant has never been mentioned or even suggested in conversation in the time since.
"Fishes" is December 2018. People mention Copenhagen. No one says anything about California just that he's been busy and they're glad he's home and he's a big deal chef already.
OK.
So it's perfectly on brand that Carmy would go somewhere new and do something amazing. But the silence is interesting. The default assumption is "the writers forgot about it and it was never important."
OK.
But in season 4 we get two new pieces of information about a heavy part of Carmen's backstory:
* In the "Groundhogs" flashback with Mikey, which is probably the second-earliest in the timeline, after "Ceres," Carmy asks about their dad. Mikey tells him to cut it out. He says he's a piece of shit and don't worry your pretty little head about it. There is the slightest sourface undercurrent of Mikey despising something. Is it Carmy's naïveté? Is it the dad? Is it Mikey's self-loathing? Is this just a glimmer of Mikey's envy of Carmy's rapidly accumulating success? We don't know.
* Three episodes later, Carmy tells Marcus that he used to wonder about his dad but he doesn't anymore. Marcus again. Marcus who found the Fairest Creatures citation and Marcus who is narratively Carm's son and protégé in that restaurant's legacy tree.
Why doesn't Carmy wonder anymore? What changed? It could be literally nothing changed, Carmy just grew out of it.
Or. It could be that Carmy agreed to some restaurant developer's pitch that Carmy organize and be executive chef at a new high-end destination restaurant for the rich in Malibu because Carmy wanted to go to California, and he see this asshole for himself.
What if the dad lives in California, and Carmy did Fairest Creatures in Malibu as a pretext for visiting? They did spend some modest amount time together, and Mikey was right. He's a worthless asshole. There's just no relationship to be had there.
And then either the Malibu place failed for whatever reason, or my guess, Carmy left an established success in the hands of his CDC and it persists to this day (fictionally), and hell maybe Carm is a part owner and gets dividends.
(There's also the side quest to New York City looking for love from his Ever "cousin" David Fields or from his Berzatto cousins Michelle and Stevie but that was never quite right either.)
But that's why Carmy doesn't talk about the California restaurant and that's why Carmy doesn't wonder about his dad anymore. Maybe be went out west to find Pop and discovered he was missing nothing at all.
