Our Craft NYC Restaurant Review is from our visit during NYC Restaurant Week. Although we've dined at Tom Colicchio's Riverpark Restaurant, we've never dined at Craft, which Colicchio opened in 2001, 7 years after he and Danny Meyer opened Gramercy Tavern. Craft is a Michelin Guide listed restaurant, but doesn't have any Michelin stars.
Craft Location and Hours
Craft is located at 43 East 19th Street, between Park Avenue and Broadway. The closest metro stop is 23rd Street (4, 6 trains) although it's also an easy walk from 14th Street/Union Square (4, 5, 6, L, N, Q, R trains). Craft serves lunch Mondays to Fridays from noon to 2:30pm, and dinner nightly from 5:30pm. Note that you'll be asked to reconfirm your reservation a couple days before your reservation, and you do need to reconfirm, otherwise your reservation will be cancelled.
Craft Menu and Food
A nice thing about Craft's Restaurant Week lunch, as at Riverpark, is that there are several choices for appetizers, mains and desserts, not just a couple, and most do not have supplements.
For dinner, a 5 course tasting menu is offered for $95 per person, and a la carte appetizers are in the $17-30 range (apart from oysters and caviar) and main dishes are $32-55.
No doubt it helps prevent waste to charge for bread, but it did rub me the wrong way not to have any kind of complimentary bread or nibbles brought to the table.
That said, I really enjoyed my first course, roasted beets with blue cheese, yogurt and hazelnuts. Deceptively simple, it was a fantastic pairing of the sweet, earthy flavors of the beets with sharp and creamy blue cheese and tangy yogurt, with the crunchy toasted hazelnuts providing great textural contrast.
My husband enjoyed his generous serving of duck liver mousse, which was pleasant, but nothing special in my view.
Normally we aim to try a couple of different main dishes, but this time we both were drawn to the Craft Burger, so that's what we both ordered. Props to the kitchen for cooking my burger to the “between medium rare and medium” that I requested, although my husband, who ordered his burger medium, thought it was a bit too rare.
The burger was thick and delicious, especially with the caramelized onion and smoked gouda. In fact, it was so filling that we both ended up taking part of our burgers home, so as to leave room for dessert.
Dessert was frankly a bit disappointing, especially my husband's carrot cake–I've made better ones at home.
I ordered the apple tarte tatin, and although better than the carrot cake, I kid you not that Trader Joe's used to sell tarte tatin in the frozen section, that you heated up, and it was much better than Craft's version, which lacked the proper caramelization to achieve any depth of flavor in the apples.
The Verdict
Certainly I enjoyed my beet and blue cheese salad and burger, and overall Craft was about what I expected: solid upscale new American cuisine in a pleasant environment and with overall good service. That said, I missed complimentary bread, at one point a server rather brusquely interrupted our conversation while we were eating our appetizer to ask if we wanted anything (neither of us had looked around, so it seemed bizarre to interrupt us like this) and lunch service needs a better pastry chef, at least based on our desserts.
If you've dined at Craft recently, what was your experience?
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