Hi there. We’re paying tribute to Craft on its final weekend today and spotlighting a few pieces of intel, including where the Take Root duo will open a restaurant. Keep an eye on this space next week, as well, since we’ll be giving away a dinner for two in the Hamptons. Thanks for reading. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast
Tom Colicchio's Craft helped shape how New Yorkers dine out. As it closes on Saturday, June 27, its influence is everywhere, particularly in the chefs who passed through its kitchen. The restaurant at 43 East 19th Street, at Park Avenue South, closes just months after celebrating its 25th anniversary in March.
When Colicchio opened Craft on March 7, 2001, he was still the chef and a partner at Gramercy Tavern, running two neighboring kitchens, according to Florence Fabricant’s 2001 preview in the New York Times. The name, she wrote, referred to the materials used in the restaurant’s design — stone, wood, bronze, leather — and to a menu built around simply braised, roasted, and poached ingredients meant to be mixed and matched with garnishes, vegetables, and sauces. There was also, from the start, a five-course tasting menu. Marco Canora, who would go on to open Hearth and Brodo, ran the kitchen as chef de cuisine.
William Grimes awarded Craft three stars in his June 2001 review for the Times. He notes the menu had already been simplified, with main ingredients organized by type (fish, meat, mushrooms, potatoes) and subdivided further by preparation method (marinated, roasted, braised), requiring what he called “a very necessary orientation lecture” just to order dinner.
He lamented how choosing a meal was an ordeal. “Which would go better with leg of lamb — braised escarole or sauteed Swiss chard? Perhaps a little truffle jus would be in order. Or would that spell disaster?” Grimes wrote that he “grew restive” under the weight of so much choice. Yet he awarded the restaurant three stars anyway, because the food kept overriding his objections to the format.
Exceptional ingredients, demanding format, and a hefty check for the time mirrored a bit of what was going on at steakhouses during Craft’s heyday. As Danny Meyer told the Times earlier this month, Colicchio “wanted to challenge the notion that only steak houses could offer a naked protein with sides.” Meyer declined to partner on the project and called the arrangement — Colicchio running two kitchens in two restaurants — “certainly unusual.” Now it has become standard, with scores of chefs running multiple kitchens at once.
A decade later, then-critic Sam Sifton followed up with a three-star review for the Times in 2011, detailing why simple food is unforgiving. “There can be no hiding behind artifice,” he wrote. “No lipstick is available for the pigs.” Running the kitchen was James Tracey (who is now at his own restaurant, Monterey) and Jennifer McCoy was turning out desserts, of which Sifton said recalled “the best work of her most noted predecessor,” Karen DeMasco. The dry-aged porterhouse, still paired with the same gnocchi Grimes had praised a decade earlier, remained a signature dish.
Around that anniversary, Colicchio gathered Craft alumni — Four Twenty-Five’s Jonathan Benno, Alta Calidad’s Akhtar Nawab, Momofuku’s David Chang — for a reunion chronicled in the New Yorker. Canora spun a dish towel on his finger, calling it his “signature move.” Damon Wise recalled the night the meat oven wouldn’t close and Colicchio’s response — “I’m not a mechanic. What do you want me to do about it?” Chang declared it “the tenth anniversary featuring the assholes of Craft.”
By the time former Eater critic Robert Sietsema revisited Craft for the “Is It Still Good?” series in 2019, the empire around the restaurant had contracted. Craftbar and Colicchio & Sons had closed. ‘Wichcraft had shrunk from several locations to a few. But Craft remained, in Sietsema’s accounting, a genuinely good restaurant if you knew how to order — strategically, with restraint, treating the menu’s side-dish section as potential entrees. Craft was still worth the splurge, with dinner for three running $283 before tip. The key was taking on the menu “like a general approaching a battle.”
Last year, Colicchio shifted Craft’s menu to an a la carte format, having concluded that family-style pricing had become untenable. He later announced one more addition: a daily tasting menu. Colicchio framed it as a response to changed habits — fewer diners sharing plates post-pandemic — and his own creative restlessness after years of paring things down.
Earlier this month, Colicchio announced on Instagram that Craft would close three weeks later, on Saturday, June 27, taking the Italian restaurant Vallata next door down with it.
“Twenty-five years is a long time in New York,” he told Fabricant. “I’m grappling with the situation. Things have changed; rents and expenses for everything keep going up. You can’t function.”
He pointed to how dining habits have shifted: “Back then, I could sell 26 squab a night. Now, I’m lucky to get two orders.”
Colicchio hasn’t given up the lease, according to the Times. “He set a gold standard when he opened that place,” Canora said. Few restaurants make such a mark in training the next generation of chefs. Fewer still shape the way a city eats. Craft did both.
Rakish internet chef Thomas Straker — who will be opening a Manhattan restaurant any day now — kicked off a pop-up series in the Hamptons at the Surf Lodge as part of the Sunset Supper Club. Future events are scheduled on Thursdays, including: Orianne Ani Shapira (Shmoné, July 9); Dustin Everett (Fish Cheeks, July 16); Gaz Herbert (Comal, July 23), and more through September. Reservations are on Resy.
Starting this Saturday, June 27, Stars opens at 10 a.m. on weekends with espresso beverages and other specialty coffee drinks. It’s a serious program, says a spokesperson: They’ll be pouring a custom bean blend and serving an egg custard tart and pastries, too.
From the Take Root duo in Brooklyn, Vale will be opening soon: Elise Kornack and Anna Hieronimus will debut a 30-acre farm and restaurant on the Esopus Creek in the Catskills. Kornack had been named a James Beard Rising Star more than once, and Take Root closed at its peak, having earned glowing reviews.
Barbetta, the legendary Theater District restaurant, may be closed after more than a century, but its award-winning wine collection will live on. Prize bottles from the cellar, considered among the most extensive Barolo and Barbaresco troves in America, have been scooped up by wine retailer and curator Zachys, and will be auctioned off, online only from Tuesday, June 30 through Monday, July 13. The collection will be offered by the estate of Laura Maioglio, daughter of Barbetta’s founder, who ran the restaurant for over 60 years. — Beth Landman
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