Tom Colicchio walked up the stairs from the basement kitchen with his apron still tied. The night before Craft closed for good, he had somewhere to be: the table of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had picked the restaurant for a Friday date night without knowing it had one day left.
Colicchio wore a white jacket marked “T.C.” and an apron embroidered with “25”, a nod to the quarter century since the restaurant opened. He had come to congratulate the mayor on another win. The city’s Rent Guidelines Board had just backed Mamdani’s plan to freeze rents on leases held by more than a million New Yorkers. Colicchio could not resist a dig. “Maybe if you’d done something similar for commercial real estate,” he said, “I wouldn’t be closing tomorrow.”
The announcement
He had announced the closure on Instagram less than a month earlier. Craft would shut on Saturday, June 27, and Vallata, the Italian restaurant next door, would go with it. In his statement he called Craft “a radical experiment that worked”, one that “married daring austerity with communal warmth”. Then he turned to money. Doing it the Craft way, he wrote, “cost a preposterous amount”, and the restaurant had struggled to keep pace with the rising cost of a lease in a neighborhood that became “New York’s restaurant gold coast”.
The numbers he gave to Esquire’s writer were blunt. Revenue was down 30 percent for the fiscal year. “Rents are high, labor’s high, food is high,” he said. To the New York Times he offered a smaller measure of how appetites had moved: “Back then, I could sell 26 squab a night. Now, I’m lucky to get two orders.” The National Restaurant Association estimates that nearly half of all restaurants in America are breaking even or running at a loss, according to the Esquire piece. Last year he had switched the menu from family-style pricing, which he decided was no longer workable, to a la carte, and later added a daily tasting menu.
Twenty-five years at 43 East 19th Street
Craft opened on March 7, 2001, at 43 East 19th Street, near Park Avenue South. Colicchio was then still chef and partner at Gramercy Tavern, so he ran two neighboring kitchens at once. Marco Canora, later of Hearth and Brodo, was chef de cuisine. William Grimes gave it three stars in the Times in June 2001, and the James Beard Foundation named it best new restaurant in 2002.
A PBS segment on its opening caught the eye of Bravo producers who needed a head judge for a new show, Top Chef. Colicchio went on to fame on television and in print. He also opened Craft spin-offs in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, Dallas and Atlanta. Craft was the one kitchen where he kept showing up several nights a week.
Canora, who dined there during the final week, put the restaurant’s mark simply: “He set a gold standard when he opened that place.” Clare Reichenbach, chief executive of the James Beard Foundation, saw the closing as a warning. If a 120-seat room with a celebrity chef and a chicken dish at thirty-eight dollars could not hold on, she asked, what chance did lesser-known places have?
Colicchio kept his own tone dry. “It’s a restaurant,” he told her. “It’s real estate. It’s not like a child.” He was not planning to open anything new in the space. The Times reported that he has not given up the lease.
Sources
- Tom Colicchio's Final Service | Esquire (with the Food & Environment Reporting Network)
- After 25 Years, Craft Shutters on Saturday | Eater New York
- Tom Colicchio Is Closing His Legendary N.Y.C. Restaurant Craft After 25 Years | Robb Report via Yahoo Life
