Craft

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A Restaurant Built Around the Ingredient

The origin story of Craft begins with a mushroom. When Tom Colicchio — then leading the kitchen at Gramercy Tavern — cited morels as his favorite food in an interview, a question followed naturally: where could a diner actually go to eat mushrooms at their peak, or sweet spring peas at the precise moment they deserve to be eaten? That question became a restaurant.

Craft opened on East 19th Street between Park Avenue and Broadway with a clear philosophy: seasonal American cooking, ingredient-first, stripped of unnecessary complexity. "Simple doesn't mean simplistic," Colicchio writes in Think Like a Chef, and the menu has always served as the proof. Perennial dishes — pan-roasted diver scallops, braised beef short ribs, Greenmarket fruits and vegetables sourced heavily from the Union Square Market — have endured not through reinvention but through consistency and precision.

The Space Reflects the Cooking

The dining room, designed by the award-winning firm Bentel and Bentel, follows the same logic as the food. As Colicchio writes in his memoir Why I Cook: "We left as many spaces unvarnished as we could — stripped of disguises, the building materials carried a rustic beauty all their own, just as a perfect mushroom or radish or sea scallop does before sauces and garnish." The room doesn't try to impress. It lets the materials speak, much as the kitchen lets the ingredients do the same.

Recognition That Holds

Craft earned a James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant nationwide in 2002, received three stars from the New York Times in 2001 — a rating reaffirmed by a second critic a full decade later — and in 2004 appeared on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list. That kind of sustained recognition is rare, and it reflects something real: a seasonal American kitchen that hasn't chased trends because it never needed to.

Today, the team behind Craft includes Chef de Cuisine Rigoberto Saloj, General Manager Bryce Vaughan, and Beverage Director Cheron Cowan, working alongside Colicchio on a newly composed à la carte dinner menu. Twenty-five years on, the story continues.