Tom Colicchio’s Final Service

This story was published in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit news organization.Tom Colicchio climbed the gray staircase from the basement kitchen and made his way toward New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s table. Colicchio is compact and lean, and he moves with purpose. You could spot him easily enough in his white chef’s jacket with “T.C.” on the left breast, under a special-edition apron embroidered with “25” to mark a quarter century since the opening of this, his signature restaurant, Craft. The anniversary had just passed, in March. For all those years, the restaurant has been the anchor of Colicchio’s reputation—the James Beard Award winner for Best New Restaurant in 2002; three stars from The New York Times. A PBS spot on the opening of the restaurant caught the eye of producers at Bravo who were looking for a head judge for a new show called Top Chef.Today he’s probably more famous for who he is on television and for his best-selling books than who he is in the kitchen, but he never took that as an opportunity to leave life as a working chef behind. Colicchio has opened (and closed) other restaurants across the country, including alter egos of Craft in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta, but this is the one where he’s continued to show up and cook, several nights a week.Winnie AuTom Colicchio in the Craft dining room before it opened for dinner.When Colicchio reached the mayor’s table, he didn’t untie his apron. After his election as mayor, and the recent primary-election victories of many of his handpicked candidates in local races—and, sure, give him the Knicks too—Mamdani’s stock has never been higher. But this dining room was Colicchio’s domain. And here he was to congratulate Mamdani, who was seated across from his wife, Rama, on yet another victory. The city’s Rent Guidelines Board had just voted in support of the mayor’s proposal—and most well-known campaign promise—to freeze the rent on leases paid by more than a million New Yorkers. “Maybe if you’d done something similar for commercial real estate,” Colicchio joked, “I wouldn’t be closing tomorrow.

”The mayor was surprised. He picked the restaurant for a Friday date night not realizing that Craft, maybe the most iconic restaurant in the cutthroat and cannibalistic New York City dining scene, was now barely twenty-four hours away from shuttering—another victim of steep taxes, mounting food costs, and an economy stumbling toward recession. Less than a month earlier, Colicchio had announced he was closing the restaurant on Saturday, June 27. “Rents are high, labor’s high, food is high,” he’d told me. But I’ve known him long enough to know it wasn’t just about economics. We met more than a decade ago, when he reached out to me to talk policy after reading my book The Chain, an investigation of labor and environmental abuses in the meatpacking industry. For him, food was always more than a business.Colicchio is intensely smart and well-read and fiercely opinionated. And he could see that what people expected from restaurants—from food, from hospitality—was changing. As he cheekily put it to The New York Times, paper of record in a city where pigeons are considered next to rats, “Diners were more adventurous when we opened. Back then, I could sell twenty-six squab a night. Now I’m lucky to get two orders.” And with beef prices soaring, even menu stalwarts like the roasted rib eye and the braised short rib have seen slumping orders.Across the room from Mamdani, I was sitting with Clare Reichenbach, the chief executive officer of the James Beard Foundation. Colicchio had invited me to come observe Craft in its last days, and tonight I was trying to make sense of the dining room before what I knew would be an intense focus the next day on him and the kitchen. Reichenbach pushed her plate of roasted chicken toward me. “Just eat,” she said in her gentle British lilt. “Here’s the sauce,” she said. “It’s delicious. Here’s a nice morel. You gotta eat, my friend.” The chicken was perfectly tender and moist, the spring onions and morels fresh and delicious, and the sauce? Well, the sauces were always the thing, to me, that explained Craft.

I knew enough about food and enough about Colicchio to know that that tiny tureen took days of work, not to mention years of apprenticeship and training, to create. The sauces at Craft carried the essence of how he cooked. This one on the chicken was heavenly.“To excel at all these levels requires a lot of investment. It requires a big team. It requires a depth of training,” Reichenbach said. She scanned the room. “And there’s a limit to how much you can pass on to the diner and the plate.” Even a year ago, Craft seemed impervious to such pressures. No longer so, Colicchio told me. His revenue was down 30 percent for the fiscal year. And he’s not alone. The National Restaurant Association estimates that nearly half of all restaurants in America are now just breaking even or operating in the red.Winnie AuThe people of Craft, on its final day of service.To Reichenbach’s eye, the closure of Craft is a portent. If a 120-seat dining room with a celebrity chef like Colicchio—with his Emmy and award-winning cookbooks and eight medals from the Beard Foundation—and a menu offering some more modestly priced options (that chicken was thirty-eight dollars) has to close its doors, then how could restaurants with less swagger and allure hope to survive?Colicchio left the mayor’s side and strode across the dining room. He slipped between tables and plopped down on the padded bench next to Reichenbach. She immediately brightened.“So what’s going to be the ceremonial saging, the rite of passage, the closure thing?” Reichenbach asked.“You know,” Colicchio said with a shrug, “it’s a restaurant. It’s real estate. It’s not like a child.”“Oh,” Reichenbach said, “but it’s imbued with people’s lives.”“Of course,” Colicchio said flatly, his piercing blue eyes surveying the room almost warily. It was hard not to read his coolness as a guard-up defense against sentimentality when there were still meals to be served, a job to be finished. And maybe against something else.When I heard Colicchio was closing Craft, I made a reservation to come in for dinner before the end.

We had a table-side conversation about his plans, and he told me something that wasn’t part of the other announcements that he was closing Craft: He wasn’t planning to retool and open another restaurant in the space. He was letting the space go. So as he sat there next to Reichenbach, the realization seemed to be setting in: The next day would be Tom Colicchio’s last in the kitchen where he changed America’s culinary scene.“We have nothing planned,” he insisted to her. “Whoever’s here at the end of the night, they’re here. We’ll have a bunch of drinks.”Winnie AuAt family meal, the staff pushed tables together so they could eat side by side—though Colicchio opted to sit back at the bar and reflect on the restaurant’s twenty-five years.About 3:30 the next day, Colicchio arrived for family meal. He loaded his plate with sirloin and lobster in a bath of lime and fresh herbs and then climbed the stairs again to the dining room, chewing as he went. At the landing, he gestured to me. “Go get some dinner,” he said. I went down and piled my own plate with steak and arugula salad. (There was a carrot cake—Colicchio’s favorite—on the dessert station that read, 86 CRAFT.) Then we sat together in the dining room at the corner of the bar while the staff joked raucously over my shoulder. “You know, when I woke up this morning, when I opened my eyes,” Colicchio said quietly, “I was like, ‘Okay, this is it—last day.’ It’s hard.” He said he’d just had a similar moment in the basement. “I stood in the kitchen, just looking, going, ‘Twenty-five years.’ ”“A lot of people come through the kitchen over the years, and they’ve learned some things. They’ve gone on to great things—and that’s part of the legacy,” he said. “And, you know, seeing all these people reaching out, listening to people talk about the anniversaries and birthdays, weddings, and deaths—everything here—it’s like the restaurant almost meant more to them than me.

”The staff had shoved a bunch of four-tops together to make one long banquet table where everyone could eat side by side, a break from the usual family meal, when people were on their phones, eating on their feet, talking in scattered groups. From the bar, Colicchio could survey them all there together.“It changed his career,” he said pointing to one line cook who had quit his job in finance for the oil-and-gas industry to pursue his passion for food.“It changed her life,” he said pointing to a server who had arrived in need of help with her immigration status.“To me, that means more than these four walls.”Family meal usually ends around 4:30, but this time it lingered a little longer, as long as it could with service starting at 5:00. Finally, one of the managers called out, “Okay, everybody.” When they had no choice, the laggards rose. The tables were pulled apart. The chefs descended into the kitchen.When Colicchio opened Craft in 2001, he was already New York City’s hottest culinary commodity. Seven years earlier, he had founded Gramercy Tavern with co-owner Danny Meyer, bragging to New York magazine that he intended to “reinvent the four-star restaurant.” When Ruth Reichl reviewed Gramercy for The New York Times, she suggested that Colicchio “would probably like to bite his tongue.” She wrote that “eating at Gramercy Tavern is a bit like drinking a great wine when it is still in the barrel.” She gave him two stars. Colicchio redoubled his efforts—and eighteen months later, Reichl returned to a transformed environment. “Colicchio’s cooking has lost the tentative quality of the early days,” she wrote in a follow-up review. “He is now cooking with extraordinary confidence, creating dishes characterized by bold flavors and unusual harmonies.” She awarded the restaurant three stars.“The last hour … it’s been dragging, really dragging,” Colicchio said. In fact, the orders had been steadily picking up. I asked if it isn’t just that the hours feel longer than they are.But Colicchio was already feeling restless.