Tom Colicchio Is Closing His Legendary N.Y.C. Restaurant Craft
A New York legend and one of America’s greatest restaurants of the century is closing its doors.
Chef Tom Colicchio announced on Instagram that he would be shuttering Craft on June 27. “Craft was a radical experiment that worked,” the Top Chef judge wrote in his statement announcing the closure. “It married daring austerity with communal warmth, betting on the idea that diners would enjoy having a shared, connected experience and the best food of their lives at the same time.”
The restaurant was revolutionary in the growth of New American cuisine and farm-to-table fare in this country. New York magazine’s longtime restaurant critic Adam Platt has long been effusive about Craft’s impact on the Big Apple’s dining scene. When assessing the most influential restaurants of the ’00s, Platt wrote, “In 2001, Tom Colicchio opened Craft in the Flatiron district, which took the elements cooks revere most (ingredients, sourcing, technique) and raised them to the level of haute cuisine.” The farms Colicchio bought from were celebrated right on the menu, and their wares were not overwhelmed by overcomplicated cooking. It was farm-to-table well before that term would start to feel cliché. It’s why Craft was voted as one of the Greatest Restaurants of the 21st Century last year. However, the way Colicchio operated his establishment ran headlong into modern restaurant economics.
The exterior of Craft.
Craft
“But doing things the Craft way came with a hitch—it cost a preposterous amount to pull it off to our standard,” Colicchio wrote about the closure. “We struggled to keep up with the growing costs of a lease in a neighborhood that over 25 years became New York’s restaurant gold coast.”
Back in 2017, when Colicchio closed CraftBar, the more casual sibling to Craft, he cited similar fiscal pressures. At the time he told Eater his landlord “jacked up his rent 50 percent” to $60,000 a month, making the restaurant untenable. The overall costs of doing business are even higher now, as Dan Kluger explained to GrubStreet this week when discussing why he was closing his farm-to-table Greenwich Village restaurant Loring Place.
“The cost of food’s definitely gone up,” Kluger told New York magazine’s food site. “The cost of labor has gone up. But it’s everything. I mean, our ConEd is up 25 to 35 percent on what it was pre-Covid. Garbage is probably 20 percent or 25 percent up. Our liability insurance used to be, like, $60,000, and then, after COVID, it went up to $100,000.”
That’s not a recipe for success and why Loring Place, along with Craft have announced their closures, perhaps ending an era for farm-to-table restaurants in New York City.
