Interview with Chef Tom Colicchio

Whether it’s a concept for a restaurant which like Craft that invites diners to compose their own dinners, or a cookbook like Think Like a Chef that deconstructs cooking, Tom Colicchio’s projects are always compelling. The industry has long recognized him as one of the country’s most influential chefs. Among numerous awards, he was named 2000 Best Chef in New York City by the James Beard Foundation; two years later the foundation named his restaurant Craft the Best New Restaurant in America. The public, too, has taken notice, voting Gramercy Tavern the Zagat Survey number #1 favorite restaurant in 2003 and #2 favorite in 2004. His newest ventures include Craftbar and ‘wichcraft, casual adjuncts to Craft; Craftsteak in Las Vegas; and a second cookbook, Craft of Cooking, based on his signature style. Chef Colicchio took time this spring to share some insights with The Main Course.

“ Craft” is the name you selected for your second restaurant, but it’s also become your brand. Can you explain what exactly it means to you in relation to cooking?

It's my belief that cooking is a craft. I think that you can push it into the realm of art, but it starts with craft. It starts with an understanding of materials. It starts with an understanding of where foods are grown. It starts with respect for raw ingredients. At what point does that craft become art? I think that's more up to the end user---the diner---and not so much up to the person doing the cooking. At our restaurant Craft, the idea that you can take something as simple as cauliflower, roast it, and put it on a plate with nothing else really appeals to me. Focusing on single ingredients speaks to me more of the crafts side of the culinary equation, not so much to the artistic side.

The first restaurant you partnered in, Gramercy Tavern, was under huge scrutiny from the moment it opened, in large part because of the high profile and past success of your partner Danny Meyer. How did that pressure affect you?

Looking back, we probably made some mistakes, Danny and I, as far as dealing with the media. We allowed Peter Kaminsky (and Peter's still a great friend) to sell a story about opening Gramercy Tavern to the New Yorker, and the New Yorker turned him down after the story was written. So Peter turned around and sold it to New York Magazine. It turned into this sensationalized piece about whether we had the next four-star restaurant. If you can avoid that kind of publicity, I think you should. Of course there would have been some expectations---I was coming off a three-star review at Mondrian, and I was all of 26 years old, and Danny had done great things at Union Square Cafe. So it was a sort of dream team. But I remember being so scared about opening that restaurant, partly because of what we had to live up to. And that’s in addition to the other pressures, like spending the kind of money we did. Ten years ago, $3.2 million was a lot of money. But today, with what's going on at new projects like Time Warner, I guess it’s a drop in the bucket!

Your resume reads like a Who’s Who of American cooking. What’s it like to develop with such great names, and did it ever inhibit your establishment of an individual style?

That's an interesting question. I didn’t have a mentor, partly because I didn't stay at a one restaurant long enough to be mentored. I worked at Gotham for a very short time, and I worked at Rakel for about a year with Thomas Keller. At an early age, probably when I was 24 or so, I remember saying to myself, I need to find my personal style. I think that it was when I went from the Quilted Giraffe in Manhattan to this restaurant 40 Main Street in New Jersey that I really found my own way.

I tell a lot of young chefs today that they need to find their own styles. I think it's harder now, because there's so much more attention to who's cooking what, and you can pick up any number of magazines and see what other people are doing. There's a private club that we're getting involved with, and I’m trying to get one of my crew to go there. A lot of them don't want to go to a private club because it's not going to get press. But on the other hand, I try to emphasize the positive side of spending a year or two developing a style, away from scrutiny or the press. It really gives you a chance to experiment.

Craft opened to more words penned about the unorthodox a la carte ordering process than about the food itself. Can you describe what your concept was, and how you arrived at it?

Well, I think Craft was a logical step after Gramercy Tavern. The food I do at Gramercy is very personal; the menu has dishes that’ve been in my repertoire for 15 years. But every year I’m refining them and changing them. And I found that in doing that every year, I was removing items from the dishes, not adding. Especially when you're young, you don't trust yourself, you're not confident enough, so you add elements to dishes. The idea of ingredient-driven food is something that I've always worked into my style. Why can't you just take five diver sea scallops, roast them, put them on a plate? And I thought that the idea of sharing food and passing food around a table was missing from the average New Yorker's life. How do you eat at home? You put food on the table, and you pass it around and everyone helps themselves. I didn't know who my target audience was. I just thought it would be an interesting way to eat.

Sounds simple enough. Why do you think people were confused?

Eating and ordering like you do at Craft happens at steak houses all over the world. You order your steak and it comes to the table, and it's sliced and you get your side of creamed spinach. I think the media made a little too much about the ordering process, and people walked in expecting to be confused. Maybe coming from a chef of my caliber, they thought there had to be more to the concept. And they worried about making the right choice between vegetable and meat, and then the sauce…. There was a condiment category too. Well, we got rid of the sauce and the condiments pretty quickly because it was really confusing people. And servers were trying to explain it, which actually made it seem more complicated. At a certain point, I had to tell the staff to stop explaining: just put the menu down and come back and answer questions. There are people who don’t like Craft, and there are people who love it. We see some people three nights a week. If you create something that everybody loves I think it's too vanilla. If you really put yourself out there, it’s not going to be for everybody.

In 2002, you opened Craftsteak in Las Vegas. How did the concept of a steak house fit into your restaurant vision?

Interestingly, when we opened Craftsteak, we never explained the menu. It was amazing, there were no issues, people just got it. Gamal Aziz, the president of the MGM Grand, approached me to do a steak house. I said if it was like Craft, I'd be happy to do it, and he agreed but said “Steak” had to be in the name of the restaurant. So it became Craftsteak. We have a lot of meat on the menu, but I think it’s pretty much the same menu as we have in New York. We serve the same roster of vegetables, seafood appetizers, and stuff like that. One condition I had before I agreed to open was that I needed to do all the buying. I couldn’t have the hotel buy for me. I had to use my farmers, I had to use my fishermen, I had to be able to ship the products I wanted in.

Interestingly, Las Vegas Magazine just voted us best restaurant in Vegas. But we didn't win best steak house! Goes to show you....

How do you define hospitality in your restaurants?

Hospitality comes from a desire to make people happy. In fact, that's all we do in this business. And service and hospitality are completely separate things. I've been to restaurants where the service is absolutely correct, but the hospitality's just not there. For example, I just did a dinner at a club in New Jersey. Everything went smoothly, and a hundred people were really happy. But the manager told me one table hadn’t been happy because they thought the portions were too small. I asked why, if he noticed this, didn’t he offer them second portions? I thought it was an example of that knee jerk response: if guests want something, they're trying to get more than they're paying for. That’s the absence of hospitality---hospitality is always being on the side of the guest. Service is knowing the menu and the wine list. Getting the food to the table correctly, clearing from the proper side. Those are all technical things you can teach people. You can't teach people to have a desire to make people happy. We get 300 or 400 people a day calling to make reservations. We never say “No, we can’t accommodate you.” We say, “Can we find another date that works for you?”

And I think it’s important to say that another part of hospitality is not overbooking your tables. Just because you physically have the seats for people doesn't mean that you can actually accommodate them. We have 136 seats at Gramercy Tavern. If 136 people walked in at 5 o’clock and sat down, they wouldn’t get a good meal.

How do you work to keep your staff on the message?

The idea of hospitality really needs to carry through in not only the way you treat your guests, but also in the way you treat your staff. If a waiter walks into the kitchen and he gets reamed out for making a mistake, how can you expect him to go back out there with a smile on his face and be hospitable to your guests? I think that old style of ruling a restaurant with an iron fist was just an excuse for not being able to communicate. I believe that people come to work really wanting to do a good job. I believe that people want to do meaningful work. Mistakes usually happen because people aren’t being trained properly. You need great training and communication policies in place.

I don't feel that the paradigm of the yelling chef or manager works anymore. To tell you the truth I don't know if it ever worked. And I think cooks shouldn't stand for it. Obviously you can't walk out of your job, but I think you can very easily take the chef aside and, not in a challenging way, say that you won’t be treated in that way. I think sooner or later there's gonna be a big shake-out in this industry if things aren’t corrected now.

For a number of years major chefs have moved out to markets like Las Vegas for new projects. Do you think the “brain drain” will continue, or will the success of projects like the Time Warner Center keep New York in favor with restaurateurs?

I don't agree with the brain drain part of it, but we'll get back to that. New York is unique in this country, maybe in the world. And that doesn’t come just from the top end---from having a handful of great restaurants open up in Time Warner Center. It comes from the diversity that we have here: Chinatown and Korea town, all the neighborhood restaurants, and Daniel and Jean-Georges, and everything in between. There's just so much here, and that will never change. New York always attracts a certain type of person who wants to prove themselves, and that’s not changing either. But what I do think is that places like Las Vegas have realized that restaurants are entertainment. You can go to Disney now and find great restaurants all over Orlando. You can go to just about any resort town in this country and find great food. I don't think it will ever take away from what we do here in New York. Does it make it more difficult for us to find great staff? Sure, because now, as a cook, you don't have to work in New York City. Or San Francisco, or LA. You can work anywhere. But on the flip side, our industry's attracting a lot more people.

What was the genesis of Craftbar (Zagat’s calls it “the best spinoff since The Jeffersons) and ‘wichcraft?

A lot of it was just circumstance. We had a space next door to Craft, so we wanted to do something there, and at first we thought of a private dining room. But I thought maybe hitting another price point would make more sense. I figured the Craft experience isn't just about big wooden tables and serving food family-style on platters. It's about honoring the product. I decided we could do that for another price point, but one that held with our brand. So that’s how we got to Craftbar. With ‘wichcraft, we actually had the name before we had the restaurant. When we got the opportunity to get space next to Craftbar, we were kicking around ideas for that, and one of my guys, Shisa Ortuzar, came to me and said he wanted to do sandwiches. I said, fine, as long as it's the Craft experience between two pieces of bread---the product has to be great, and the hospitality has to be great. It's applying what we learned in the restaurant business to a fast, casual, deli environment. Branding for us is seeing how many channels we can plug in to. In a lot of ways Craftbar and ‘wichcraft helped us to understand what we meant by “Craft” as a brand.

With so much emphasis at Craft on ingredient-centric dishes, sourcing must be critical. How do you approach finding the best ingredients for your restaurants?

Well, it's what we've been doing for the last 15 years. Just being committed to ingredients, and always making the decision to use the thing that's better. Occasionally one gets hung up in the business of running a restaurant, and all of a sudden you're not buying the best because you're trying to make a certain food cost. But if we have to charge for the best, I think we just have to charge for it. If Nantucket Bay scallops cost you $24 a pound, you have to charge the customer based on that---there's no way around it. Other than that, though, it’s just been years of going to the Greenmarket, forming relationships with the farmers there. And working with fishermen that we know are only out fishing for 24 hours at a time, and coming back in with the freshest fish. After a while, you get to be known for looking for the best, and people start calling you. And chefs share sources---if you try to keep your source a secret, he or she won’t sell enough to stay in business.

What is your stand on genetically modified foods?

I'm not against every instance of modifying food. There could be a place and reason for it, especially when you're talking about growing crops in third-world countries. But I just want to know if my food has been modified. Why can't we just get that stuff labeled in this country? I just want to know, and then we all can make our own choices.

Has the development of your career mirrored what you expected when you started out as a young chef?

Oh, not at all. I don't think the chefs of my generation had any idea what was in store! I wake up every morning and pinch myself because this is so much more than what I imagined could happen. I started cooking in kitchens right out of high school, and I was lucky to work with a lot of great people, but I had no idea it would turn into this. Of course no one should go into this business because they want to be the next Emeril. It's not gonna happen. You need to go into this business because you love food and because you love to make people happy. If fame follows that, great.

You were one of the chefs profiled in Juliette Rossant’s new book Super Chef. At the end of the book, she brings up the question as to whether the phenomenon of superchefs is more liberating or complicating for young chefs. How would you weigh in on this?

For one thing, I think it's liberating that parents today don’t immediately react negatively if their kid says he or she wants to be a chef. A fry cook in some greasy spoon is probably the only thing that would have come to mind 20 years ago. But in general, for some young chefs I think it's going to be liberating, and for others it’s going to be the opposite. If someone goes into it thinking that they need to be a super star, that's putting way too much pressure on themselves. If they go in there saying, I want to learn how to cook, I think it's more liberating today than ever because you can do it in so many different places and in so many different ways. All in all, I would say if you’re striving to be the best at what you do, and you want to be recognized, that's fabulous.

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