The restaurant that made me

Last Sunday, casting about for a dish to prepare for dinner, I settled on an old favorite: thịt kho. This is one of the most basic, delicious, and quintessentially Vietnamese recipes there is. You start by making a caramel, cooking sugar (brown or white) until it’s almost almost on the verge of burning, then tossing in a lot of chunked-up pork belly and simmering it in coconut water (or coconut soda, if that’s your thing) with several whole cloves of garlic, a quartered onion, and just about all the black pepper that happens to be in your pepper mill. The goal, at least for me, is to get the pork soft and bouncy, but not yet falling apart; this takes maybe an hour, sometimes a little more if your simmer is extra-slow (and it should be). Once you’ve hit that point, you turn off the heat and add in 4–6 shelled boiled eggs—then you just leave it to soak in the flavors for as long as you can stand before you serve it with rice and a little bowl of finely chopped red chilies. Make it once or twice, and you’ll never even need a recipe again.

There was only one problem with my plan, and that was Jean, my wife. She likes the thịt kho fine, but for her there’s just not enough stuff in it. Why not daikon? she suggested. When she makes Taiwanese soups, everything goes in them: spareribs, daikon, mushrooms, tofu, eggs—whatever we have in the house. If I’m doing a Thai curry, it needs to have meat and bamboo shoots and fishballs, and maybe those zucchini in the crisper that we should use up now before they get too soft, and eventually, what I’d imagined as a shimmering red-yellow lake of gaeng, studded with nuggets of pork, shards of bamboo, and wisps of slivered makrut lime, becomes a damp, heaping pile of flotsam and jetsam. Flavorful flotsam, sure, but definitely not in line with my culinary philosophy.

But where did that culinary philosophy come from? I’ve been a streamlined cook for almost as long as I can remember. In my mind, a good steak needs little more than salt, pepper, and the intelligent application of heat. Good vegetables deserve good olive oil (or good butter). Bread doesn’t need seeds or nuts or fruit or exotic grains—water, salt, flour, and yeast (or sourdough starter) are all the magic I could hope for.

I’m not a minimalist. I don’t reduce just for the sake of reducing (although this does make for easier, faster meals). And there are plenty of things I make that have a lot going into them. Ragù bolognese, for instance. But what I like is focus—I want to have my attention directed to the unified dish in front of me, so I can give it the appreciation it deserves and not be distracted by unnecessary elements. If the fridge is full of things we need to cook before they go bad, I’d rather make half-a-dozen different dishes with them than lump them all in one. I’m not a minimalist, but I may be a monomaniac.

And when I turned that focus back onto my own eating history, I came up with a surprising origin point—a restaurant I ate at only once but whose food and whose legend clearly set the course of my cooking life. That restaurant was Craft.

When Craft opened in 2001, it became instantly famous for its schtick: The menu featured lots of ingredients—pork chops, scallops, Jerusalem artichokes, and so on—alongside cooking techniques (braised, sautéed, fried, roasted, steamed), and it was up to the diners to decide how they wanted them combined, whether as appetizers, mains, or side dishes. The kitchen, run by a pre–Top Chef Tom Colicchio, who had come over from Gramercy Tavern and hired Marco Canora as his chef de cuisine, would then run with the order, transforming what might have been a whim or a fantasy or a joke (deep-fried ramps! butter-braised maitake! steamed ribeye!) into an exquisite and deeply focused presentation of those ingredients and that technique.

Reviewers loved the food, less so the conceit. Although the New York Times’ William Grimes gave the restaurant three stars (“Every meal I ate at Craft was wonderful”), he also “grew restive”:

Meanwhile, over at New York Magazine, where I was just about to start working, Adam Platt was less skeptical (and less authoritarian-leaning), but still, in his characteristic way, bemused:

To me, a nearly 27-year-old making his way through pre-9/11 New York City, this all made perfect sense, especially when I heard Colicchio’s oft-repeated Craft origin story:

The question Colicchio had formulated was a revelation, tapping in to how actual people—not chefs or restaurant reviewers—thought about food. Yes, sometimes we just want to eat mushrooms! Or duck confit. Or radishes. We all have these occasional food jones, and while we might satisfy them at home, after a trip to the grocery store, there had not been, until Craft, a way to experience this as fine dining. And in that era, when farmers markets were bringing new ingredients to the public as never before, we all had fresh curiosities, burgeoning monomanias, to explore. Craft was a locus of possibility: What happens when amateur diners pitch dishes to professional chefs? What can be accomplished with foods both old and new when we disentangle them from the rules of tradition? What does a highly considered culinary philosophy actually look like as a restaurant?

I’d like to imagine that I ate at Craft in the summer of 2001, soon after the reviews came out, but it’s more likely I went there a year later or more, when my parents came to visit. And I’d also like to regale you with lavish descriptions of every dish we consumed, but sadly I remember little of those details. I’m sure we ordered the mushrooms, though—Craft’s roasted hen-of-the-woods were the stuff of legend. But whatever we ate that night, I came away absolutely satisfied, both by the quality of the cooking and by the fulfillment of the promise Craft had made. Thereafter, I wanted to cook and eat at home like I had that night at Craft.

For various reasons, though, I’ve never been back. It’s New York, and there are always new restaurants to try, and in any case, Jean and I don’t go out all that much anymore, and even then rarely for fine dining. But the Internet assures me Craft remains impressive. Sam Sifton renewed its three stars in 2011, and Eater’s Robert Sietsema—the least reliable food writer in New York City, but occasionally not wrong—declared it “Still Worth a Splurge.” Both noted that the DIY menu concept had long ago been retired. “This is to the good,” Sifton wrote, “since it is unlikely that many diners left to their own devices would have come up with a dish as sneakily delicious as the restaurant’s soft pork ravioli paired with butter and Steen’s cane syrup, or its spellbinding risotto with bacon and corn.“

I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a fair point. Even I get tired of making decisions, especially the nightly ones about what to cook for my family. Sometimes I, too, want an iron will to submit to.

Which is why, after much internal hemming and hawing, I cheerfully gave up on the issue of daikon in the thịt kho. Once the pork belly had reached the right level of bounciness, I removed all the meat from the braising liquid and transferred it and the boiled eggs to a serving dish. I added to the liquid a whole daikon, cut into 2-inch chunks, and simmered it until it was soft, then poured everything into the serving dish, and we were done. Was it focused? No. Could I have made something entirely different with the daikon? Definitely. But did it taste good? Hell yes.

What’s more, it fit the spirit of the original Craft: A diner had chosen the ingredients from what was available, and the skilled hand in the kitchen—i.e., me—had to figure out how to make it work. Tom Colicchio, I think, would be proud. 🪨🪨🪨