Tom Colicchio constructed the American restaurant. Now he is watching it come aside

That is how a buddy instructed him about Bending Spoons.

The Milan-based know-how conglomerate closed a $710 million fairness spherical in October 2025 at an $11 billion pre-money valuation, making it certainly one of a handful of European tech decacorns. Colicchio acquired in early, exited round that spherical, and walked away with what he says was roughly a 15x return.

“Essentially, Bending Spoons covered everything else that I’ve done, and then some,” he instructed me, sitting in his workplace above his flagship restaurant in Manhattan’s Gramercy neighborhood. The firm is now reportedly preparing a U.S. listing that might worth it at practically $20 billion.

Bending Spoons is finest understood as a software program rollup: it acquires underperforming client apps—Evernote, WeSwitch, Vimeo, Meetup, Eventbrite, AOL—and aggressively re-monetizes them, usually with deep employees cuts and worth will increase. It is strictly the sort of efficiency-first operator that, in one other setting, Colicchio will inform you has helped hole out inventive industries. He doesn’t fake the stress isn’t there. He simply took the commerce.

It is the sort of return that, in a standard 12 months for American effective eating, can be a enjoyable footnote in a chef’s biography. In 2026, for Colicchio, it’s the a part of the portfolio that’s working.

“It used to always be fun. It’s not really fun these days”

Colicchio is direct concerning the state of his personal business in a means most operators aren’t. “Craft’s been open for 25 years, and last year was probably our worst year ever,” he stated of his Flatiron flagship. “It is what it is. The restaurant business has never been easy, but it used to always be fun. It’s not really fun these days.”

The math, as he described it, is unforgiving. Food prices that ran comfortably at 34% of income when he began out now must be held at 26%. “The only place to get that is to lower your food cost,” he stated. “That’s one variable cost you can lower.” Fixed prices, he defined, you actually can’t. Beef is up roughly 30% over the previous 18 months. Olive oil from Italy has repriced sharply. Spirits and wine have been disrupted by tariff retaliation. “A lot of liquor went up because of tariffs,” he stated. “Wine prices have gone up. Certain American liquors are not affected by tariffs. But they’re all affected because a lot of other countries pulled stuff off shelves.”

Bryan Hunt, Craft’s director of culinary operations, stated the price of some luxurious elements “has just gotten so exorbitant” that the restaurant makes use of them just for special-occasion menus. “We might have one or two dishes that feature some of those things,” he stated. “The stations have gotten a little smaller. I would say some of the dishes are not quite as involved, and there’s not as many touches on the dishes.”

Lunch close to the nineteenth Street flagship has develop into practically inconceivable to fill—a everlasting consequence of hybrid work schedules which have thinned Manhattan’s noon workplace inhabitants to a fraction of what it was. Tuesdays at the moment are one of the best night time of the week, Hunt stated, as a result of that’s when staff are again within the workplace. Thursday and Friday nights, as soon as dependable, have softened.

The system has narrowed in ways in which transcend the numbers. “So many restaurants are doing — it’s like the formula,” Colicchio stated. “A cup of pasta, a pizza, some salads, and that’s it. Because no one wants to take risks. Taking a risk is expensive.” Diners, he argued, have develop into as risk-averse as operators. Back within the day, he claimed, he may put something on the menu, and it might promote: squab, offal, no matter. “I put squab on the menu now, I can’t sell it.” He described a vicious cycle the place diners and eating places alike are much less adventurous, and cooks comply with go well with. “You try to please everyone, and you end up being like the Gap.”

He linked this to a broader cultural compression he sees taking place throughout each inventive subject without delay, in opposition to an financial system reshaped by AI nervousness and tariff disruption. “What’s interesting to me is that there’s more money sloshing around than ever before,” he stated, “and usually you had people who were really wealthy who were the ones financing independent films and financing restaurants. And I just don’t know if that’s still happening.”

Which is, in a roundabout means, how Colicchio ended up an investor in 30 corporations. He is simply too disciplined to name it a hedge in opposition to his personal business. But he’s additionally a person who, at each fork in his life, has refused to guess on a single monitor.

The portfolio, constructed over roughly the previous 5 to seven years, runs to about 30 corporations: a Brown University–affiliated angel group targeted largely on medical know-how; a company meals companies platform referred to as Hungry; a sizzling sauce firm that bought to McCormick at a modest return; and Bending Spoons, which by his personal account paid for all the things else.

“It’s interesting,” he stated of the founder class he works with now. “Some people, you put some money in, you hear from them, and they’re really good about keeping in touch. And some founders, it’s like you never hear from them again.”

The son of a corrections officer who turned a union president, Colicchio got here to his skepticism of unearned benefit truthfully. Bending Spoons, he stated, was an ideal story to observe as the corporate went from power to power, which isn’t at all times the case with enterprise investments.

The child who couldn’t sit nonetheless

Everything about how Colicchio operates at this time—the restlessness, the parallel bets, the refusal to be outlined by the establishment in entrance of him—traces again to a child in Elizabeth, N.J., who couldn’t get by way of a faculty day.

“I didn’t go to college because I had undiagnosed ADHD,” he stated, with the bluntness acquainted to followers of his long-running Bravo present, Top Chef. “So I hated school for that reason.”

Some issues got here straightforward. Competitive swimming, for one. “I didn’t lose a race from the age of 9 to 13,” he stated—till he began partying, stopped training, and the youngsters he had been beating recurrently started ending forward of him. “It pissed me off,” he stated, flashing the aggressive facet that has develop into a Top Chef trademark. He made himself a non-public promise: if he ever discovered one thing else he was good at, he wasn’t going to let that occur once more.

Before the swim membership snack bar, there was his grandfather. Colicchio grew up in a four-family redbrick house constructing in Elizabeth; his grandfather lived within the house behind theirs. On Saturdays, they might fish collectively—out to Toms River and Barnegat Bay, an hour-and-a-half every means—and the boy’s job on the experience residence was to maintain his grandfather awake on the wheel. His different job, beginning at age seven, was to fillet the catch. Someone, he recalled with fun, “thought it was okay to put a knife in a 7-year-old’s hand.”

The catch—crabs, clams, typically fish — would come residence to a desk of 20 or 30 individuals, prolonged household gathered for a summer time meal. He didn’t perceive how a lot these meals formed him, he stated, till the pandemic, when he was doing Zoom cooking lessons and being requested time and again why he cooks. “Food, I think more than anything, has the power to bring people around a table,” he stated. “I think that’s why I was attracted to it.”

Then the Gran Centurions swim membership in close by Clark, N.J. — the place his mother and father have been members—wanted a short-order cook dinner. Colicchio was quick with a knife. The kitchen confirmed him what the classroom couldn’t.

“The frenetic pace of the kitchen worked for me,” he stated. “For some reason, that calmed me down. When it would get busy, I would slow down instead of speeding up. And it just kind of worked.”

He stated he thinks he began cooking at precisely the proper second. From the vantage level of 2026, with an financial system reshaped by AI nervousness and tariff disruption, it may be exhausting to recollect how peripheral cooks as soon as have been. That modified within the Eighties. Nouvelle delicacies in France had begun to liberate cooks from the tightly wound traditions of French cooking. New American delicacies was arriving in New York. The final days of disco have been fading, and Andy Warhol and his ilk wanted one other place to hang around.

“My theory is that once people got a little older and stopped going to clubs, they realized they can’t just live on cocaine,” Colicchio stated. “But they still wanted to go out. And so restaurants became a thing.” He was well-positioned, he added, as a result of from age 13 onward, he had been training that rarest of issues: a real talent.

He picked up knife work at an Italian restaurant that did a variety of butchering. He discovered the best way to make a sauce that will maintain collectively, even going head-to-head with cooks of a sure pedigree. “I worked in another restaurant with two recent culinary grads,” he recalled, nearly shaking his head, “and, like, I would have to make the sauce because they would break hollandaise every time.”

He was nonetheless considering of going to culinary faculty himself when he landed at a New American restaurant referred to as 40 Main Street that wouldn’t appear misplaced in at this time’s listings—redoing its menu each night time, doing elevated issues. He was promoted to sous chef inside 4 months. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to culinary school now.’”

By 26, he was the chef on the Mondrian in New York and had acquired a Best New Chef quotation from Food & Wine. The individuals he had admired — Jonathan Waxman, Jean-Jacques Rachou, Danny Meyer — began coming to his restaurant on their nights off. When he instructed Meyer he was closing Mondrian, the dialog naturally turned to what they could construct collectively.

That turned Gramercy Tavern in 1994, one of the well-known eating places of its period. “Gramercy was a lot of fun. It was a lot of hard work,” he stated. “I was usually in that restaurant at 10 in the morning and didn’t leave until 1 most nights.” Craft adopted in 2001, incomes three stars and constructing the template for ingredient-driven American cooking {that a} era of cooks would imitate.

Today, his Crafted Hospitality group counts three eating places in New York City, one on Long Island, and one in Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. Top Chef got here subsequent, and saved coming, now into its twenty third season. He has received eight James Beard Awards.

From the surface, the arc seems just like the inevitable rise of a pure. From the within, it has been a sustained argument with a world that when declared him unequipped—an argument he has been profitable, methodically and with out a lot fanfare, for forty years.

Learn a commerce anyway

There is a model of nostalgia that’s merely self-serving—the profitable one who made it in an earlier period romanticizing the circumstances that made their success potential. Colicchio is trustworthy sufficient to stroll as much as that line and study it.

New York, he stated, actually was pretty much as good as marketed, or as depicted in sequence like FX’s Love Story. When he opened Gramercy Tavern in 1994, he was paying $9,000 a month in lease. SoHo was full of artists dwelling in loft squats who may afford to be within the metropolis, be unusual, and take dangers.

What he misses most will not be the economics however the power—the sense that each night time was an occasion, that the room had a lifetime of its personal, that one thing would possibly occur. “Every night was like a party,” he stated. “Every night was fun to be there. Always cool people around. It seems to have changed.” The individuals who used to remain till midnight now depart at 7:30. “No one hangs out anymore. You know, come at 8:30, 9:00, you get out of your restaurant, you go home. It used to be, you stay until 10 and then you go meet your friends and go hang out. No one’s doing that anymore.”

He doesn’t have a clear idea for why. “Some people think the algorithm makes us the same as everyone else,” he stated. The value of actual property. The displacement of the inventive class that when gave cities their productive friction. “Food was the last one to go,” he stated. “After indie movie star died, and the music scene died, food was still going strong until like 10 years ago.” And then it stopped.

Hunt, from his vantage level within the kitchen, agreed. “Everybody was in New York to work at the restaurant, and that’s what your whole life revolved around,” he says. Now individuals put extra power into life outdoors work. “I definitely also think sobriety culture has something to do with it. The younger generation, it’s very obvious that they do not drink quite like my peers in the industry when I was their age.”

Hunt stated he sees a counter-trend, too. “There’s been a huge shift of people that have kind of been romanticizing the industry and dipping their toes into the water to see if they like it,” he says. In the previous two years, he has seen cooks come by way of with extra ardour, cooking on their days off, speaking about meals much more. “To see that coming back these past couple of years is reinvigorating.”

When Colicchio thinks of his youthful youngsters, in class at 15 and 16, “the idea of AI is stressful. Are there going to be jobs for our kids in 10 years?” He stated he watches their education with the particular nervousness of somebody who is aware of from the within what these establishments can miss — and what they’ll value a child who doesn’t match.

He hopes they discover one thing like he did — one thing they’ll really do, one thing the market will acknowledge independently of what any establishment says about them. “When I found cooking, I just found this came very easy to me,” he stated. “I liked it. And I was good at it.” If he was 20 years older, he added, he’s unsure if cooking would have been the identical alternative. “I got lucky.”

He will not be telling his youngsters to skip school. He is telling them, or a minimum of hoping, in the way in which mother and father of difficult, brilliant, stressed youngsters hope, that someplace alongside the way in which they discover one thing like he discovered the knife: a talent so clearly theirs that no classroom may have discovered it for them.

Is he nervous about AI coming for his job, and theirs? One of his investments, he permits, began as one thing else and has morphed into robotics.

“But it can’t cook,” he stated. “It can’t cook. It’s not going to cook.”