Craft

Working from the ingredient outward

Peak produce sets the terms at Craft in New York City, where Tom Colicchio has been executive chef since he opened the room in spring 2001, one block south of Gramercy Tavern. The founding question was how far a kitchen can go when it lets morels, sweet peas, mushrooms, radishes and sea scallops remain legible, without heavy sauces or disguises. Colicchio came up in the mid-1980s as sous-chef to Thomas Keller at Rakel in Manhattan, co-founded Gramercy Tavern with Danny Meyer in 1994, and has taken five James Beard Foundation Awards, including Outstanding Chef in 2010.

The name is the argument. Craft treats technique as the means of clarifying a product rather than covering it, and the room was built to match: the materials left as unvarnished as the kitchen could manage, mirroring food stripped of disguises.

The long way through a simple plate

The program still asks a cook to make restraint visible. Pan-roasted diver scallops, braised short ribs, hamachi crudo, hen of the woods mushrooms and heirloom tomato salad sit in a language of heat, cut, seasoning and timing; the ingredient is not hidden under a second idea. The kitchen has moved from its earlier family-style format into a composed à la carte dinner menu, while keeping large-format cooking in the house for pieces such as ribeye. The rib-eye is dry-aged 30 days, trimmed before service and cooked to order.

Braising gives the short ribs their place in the lineage, a slow method that rewards patience more than novelty. Pasta has entered the recent work: celery root ravioli, celery cannelloni drawn from king crab cassoulet scraps, and hand-pulled pumpkin agnolotti. Those dishes show a bench-side logic, where trim, filling and shape have to answer to one another before they reach the pass. The wine program is curated for the same purpose, chosen to sit beside heirloom tomatoes or mushrooms rather than over them.

Warm wood, open kitchen, clear sightlines

The room, by Bentel and Bentel, keeps the craft in view. Warm wood tones, clean lines and an open kitchen give the dining room a working transparency without turning the cooks into theater. The counter and pass carry the tempo: pans moving for scallops, braises finishing their last reduction, vegetables arriving with enough structure to hold the plate. The sound stays conversational, which suits the food; nothing in the room needs to shout over the ingredient. Floor-to-ceiling windows on East 19th Street place the house close to Union Square, and that proximity has shaped the seasonal habit since the beginning, with Greenmarket produce giving the kitchen a changing set of materials rather than a fixed script.

A quarter century without losing the method

Craft marked its 25-year milestone in early 2026 by changing the menu architecture rather than abandoning the discipline that made the place durable, and Colicchio has been plain that a restaurant has to keep moving to avoid stagnation. The New York Times gave the room three stars in 2001 and again in 2011, and the James Beard Foundation named it Best New Restaurant in 2002. The work still at hand is narrow and specific: vegetables held at the center, braise, roast, crudo and handmade pasta kept in conversation, and pan-roasted diver scallops that still belong to Craft.