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About a decade ago, Tom Colicchio started writing checks. Not large ones at first, and not on his own thesis\u2014he is the first to say he doesn\u2019t have the wherewithal to evaluate a company. His method was to find people who did, watch what they were putting in, and ride alongside if the conviction looked real.<\/p>\n
That is how a friend told him about Bending Spoons.<\/p>\n
The Milan-based technology conglomerate closed a $710 million equity round in October 2025 at an $11 billion pre-money valuation, making it one of a handful of European tech decacorns. Colicchio got in early, exited around that round, and walked away with what he says was roughly a 15x return.<\/p>\n
\u201cEssentially, Bending Spoons covered everything else that I\u2019ve done, and then some,\u201d he told me, sitting in his office above his flagship restaurant in Manhattan\u2019s Gramercy neighborhood. The company is now reportedly preparing a U.S. listing that could value it at nearly $20 billion.<\/p>\n
Bending Spoons is best understood as a software rollup: it acquires underperforming consumer apps\u2014Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Meetup, Eventbrite, AOL\u2014and aggressively re-monetizes them, typically with deep staff cuts and price increases. It is exactly the kind of efficiency-first operator that, in another setting, Colicchio will tell you has helped hollow out creative industries. He does not pretend the tension isn\u2019t there. He just took the trade.<\/p>\n
It is the kind of return that, in a normal year for American fine dining, would be a fun footnote in a chef\u2019s biography. In 2026, for Colicchio, it is the part of the portfolio that is working.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt used to always be fun. It\u2019s not really fun these days\u201d<\/p>\n
Colicchio is direct about the state of his own industry in a way most operators aren\u2019t. \u201cCraft\u2019s been open for 25 years, and last year was probably our worst year ever,\u201d he said of his Flatiron flagship. \u201cIt is what it is. The restaurant business has never been easy, but it used to always be fun. It\u2019s not really fun these days.\u201d<\/p>\n
The math, as he described it, is unforgiving. Food costs that ran comfortably at 34% of revenue when he started out now have to be held at 26%. \u201cThe only place to get that is to lower your food cost,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s one variable cost you can lower.\u201d Fixed costs, he explained, you really can\u2019t. Beef is up roughly 30% over the past 18 months. Olive oil from Italy has repriced sharply. Spirits and wine have been disrupted by tariff retaliation. \u201cA lot of liquor went up because of tariffs,\u201d he said. \u201cWine prices have gone up. Certain American liquors are not affected by tariffs. But they\u2019re all affected because a lot of other countries pulled stuff off shelves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bryan Hunt, Craft\u2019s director of culinary operations, said the cost of some luxury ingredients \u201chas just gotten so exorbitant\u201d that the restaurant uses them only for special-occasion menus. \u201cWe might have one or two dishes that feature some of those things,\u201d he said. \u201cThe stations have gotten a little smaller. I would say some of the dishes are not quite as involved, and there\u2019s not as many touches on the dishes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lunch near the 19th Street flagship has become nearly impossible to fill\u2014a permanent consequence of hybrid work schedules that have thinned Manhattan\u2019s midday office population to a fraction of what it was. Tuesdays are now the best night of the week, Hunt said, because that is when employees are back in the office. Thursday and Friday nights, once reliable, have softened.<\/p>\n
The formula has narrowed in ways that go beyond the numbers. \u201cSo many restaurants are doing \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s like the formula,\u201d Colicchio said. \u201cA cup of pasta, a pizza, some salads, and that\u2019s it. Because no one wants to take risks. Taking a risk is expensive.\u201d Diners, he argued, have become as risk-averse as operators. Back in the day, he claimed, he could put anything on the menu, and it would sell: squab, offal, whatever. \u201cI put squab on the menu now, I can\u2019t sell it.\u201d He described a vicious cycle where diners and restaurants alike are less adventurous, and chefs follow suit. \u201cYou try to please everyone, and you end up being like the Gap.\u201d<\/p>\n
He connected this to a broader cultural compression he sees happening across every creative field at once, against an economy reshaped by AI anxiety and tariff disruption. \u201cWhat\u2019s interesting to me is that there\u2019s more money sloshing around than ever before,\u201d he said, \u201cand usually you had people who were really wealthy who were the ones financing independent films and financing restaurants. And I just don\u2019t know if that\u2019s still happening.\u201d <\/p>\n
Which is, in a roundabout way, how Colicchio ended up an investor in 30 companies. He is too disciplined to call it a hedge against his own industry. But he is also a man who, at every fork in his life, has refused to bet on a single track.<\/p>\n
The portfolio, built over roughly the past five to seven years, runs to about 30 companies: a Brown University\u2013affiliated angel group focused largely on medical technology; a corporate food services platform called Hungry; a hot sauce company that sold to McCormick at a modest return; and Bending Spoons, which by his own account paid for everything else.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s interesting,\u201d he said of the founder class he works with now. \u201cSome people, you put some money in, you hear from them, and they\u2019re really good about keeping in touch. And some founders, it\u2019s like you never hear from them again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The son of a corrections officer who became a union president, Colicchio came to his skepticism of unearned advantage honestly. Bending Spoons, he said, was a great story to watch as the company went from strength to strength, which isn\u2019t always the case with venture investments.<\/p>\n
The kid who couldn\u2019t sit still<\/p>\n
Everything about how Colicchio operates today\u2014the restlessness, the parallel bets, the refusal to be defined by the institution in front of him\u2014traces back to a kid in Elizabeth, N.J., who could not get through a school day.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t go to college because I had undiagnosed ADHD,\u201d he said, with the bluntness familiar to fans of his long-running Bravo show, Top Chef. \u201cSo I hated school for that reason.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some things came easy. Competitive swimming, for one. \u201cI didn\u2019t lose a race from the age of 9 to 13,\u201d he said\u2014until he started partying, stopped practicing, and the kids he had been beating regularly began finishing ahead of him. \u201cIt pissed me off,\u201d he said, flashing the competitive side that has become a Top Chef trademark. He made himself a private promise: if he ever found something else he was good at, he wasn\u2019t going to let that happen again.<\/p>\n
Before the swim club snack bar, there was his grandfather. Colicchio grew up in a four-family redbrick apartment building in Elizabeth; his grandfather lived in the apartment behind theirs. On Saturdays, they would fish together\u2014out to Toms River and Barnegat Bay, an hour-and-a-half each way\u2014and the boy\u2019s job on the ride home was to keep his grandfather awake at the wheel. His other job, starting at age seven, was to fillet the catch. Someone, he recalled with a laugh, \u201cthought it was okay to put a knife in a 7-year-old\u2019s hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
The catch\u2014crabs, clams, sometimes fish \u2014 would come home to a table of 20 or 30 people, extended family gathered for a summer meal. He didn\u2019t understand how much those meals shaped him, he said, until the pandemic, when he was doing Zoom cooking classes and being asked over and over why he cooks. \u201cFood, I think more than anything, has the power to bring people around a table,\u201d he said. \u201cI think that\u2019s why I was attracted to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then the Gran Centurions swim club in nearby Clark, N.J. \u2014 where his parents were members\u2014needed a short-order cook. Colicchio was fast with a knife. The kitchen showed him what the classroom couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe frenetic pace of the kitchen worked for me,\u201d he said. \u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he thinks he started cooking at exactly the right moment. From the vantage point of 2026, with an economy reshaped by AI anxiety and tariff disruption, it can be hard to remember how peripheral chefs once were. That changed in the 1980s. Nouvelle cuisine in France had begun to liberate chefs from the tightly wound traditions of French cooking. New American cuisine was arriving in New York. The last days of disco were fading, and Andy Warhol and his ilk needed another place to hang out.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy theory is that once people got a little older and stopped going to clubs, they realized they can\u2019t just live on cocaine,\u201d Colicchio said. \u201cBut they still wanted to go out. And so restaurants became a thing.\u201d He was well-positioned, he added, because from age 13 onward, he had been practicing that rarest of things: a true skill.<\/p>\n
He picked up knife work at an Italian restaurant that did a lot of butchering. He learned how to make a sauce that would hold together, even going head-to-head with chefs of a certain pedigree. \u201cI worked in another restaurant with two recent culinary grads,\u201d he recalled, almost shaking his head, \u201cand, like, I would have to make the sauce because they would break hollandaise every time.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was still thinking of going to culinary school himself when he landed at a New American restaurant called 40 Main Street that wouldn\u2019t seem out of place in today\u2019s listings\u2014redoing its menu every night, doing elevated things. He was promoted to sous chef within four months. \u201cI was like, \u2018I\u2019m not going to culinary school now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
By 26, he was the chef at the Mondrian in New York and had received a Best New Chef citation from Food & Wine. The people he had admired \u2014 Jonathan Waxman, Jean-Jacques Rachou, Danny Meyer \u2014 started coming to his restaurant on their nights off. When he told Meyer he was closing Mondrian, the conversation naturally turned to what they might build together.<\/p>\n
That became Gramercy Tavern in 1994, one of the most famous restaurants of its era. \u201cGramercy was a lot of fun. It was a lot of hard work,\u201d he said. \u201cI was usually in that restaurant at 10 in the morning and didn\u2019t leave until 1 most nights.\u201d Craft followed in 2001, earning three stars and building the template for ingredient-driven American cooking that a generation of chefs would imitate.<\/p>\n
Today, his Crafted Hospitality group counts three restaurants in New York City, one on Long Island, and one in Las Vegas\u2019 MGM Grand. Top Chef came next, and kept coming, now into its 23rd season. He has won eight James Beard Awards.<\/p>\n
From the outside, the arc looks like the inevitable rise of a natural. From the inside, it has been a sustained argument with a world that once declared him unequipped\u2014an argument he has been winning, methodically and without much fanfare, for forty years.<\/p>\n
Learn a trade anyway<\/p>\n
There is a version of nostalgia that is merely self-serving\u2014the successful person who made it in an earlier era romanticizing the conditions that made their success possible. Colicchio is honest enough to walk up to that line and examine it.<\/p>\n
New York, he said, really was as good as advertised, or as depicted in series like FX\u2019s Love Story. When he opened Gramercy Tavern in 1994, he was paying $9,000 a month in rent. SoHo was filled with artists living in loft squats who could afford to be in the city, be strange, and take risks.<\/p>\n
What he misses most is not the economics but the energy\u2014the sense that every night was an event, that the room had a life of its own, that something might happen. \u201cEvery night was like a party,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery night was fun to be there. Always cool people around. It seems to have changed.\u201d The people who used to stay until midnight now leave at 7:30. \u201cNo 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\u2019s doing that anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
He does not have a clean theory for why. \u201cSome people think the algorithm makes us the same as everyone else,\u201d he said. The cost of real estate. The displacement of the creative class that once gave cities their productive friction. \u201cFood was the last one to go,\u201d he said. \u201cAfter indie movie star died, and the music scene died, food was still going strong until like 10 years ago.\u201d And then it stopped.<\/p>\n
Hunt, from his vantage point in the kitchen, agreed. \u201cEverybody was in New York to work at the restaurant, and that\u2019s what your whole life revolved around,\u201d he says. Now people put more energy into life outside work. \u201cI definitely also think sobriety culture has something to do with it. The younger generation, it\u2019s very obvious that they do not drink quite like my peers in the industry when I was their age.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hunt said he sees a counter-trend, too. \u201cThere\u2019s 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,\u201d he says. In the past two years, he has seen cooks come through with more passion, cooking on their days off, talking about food a lot more. \u201cTo see that coming back these past couple of years is reinvigorating.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Colicchio thinks of his younger children, in school at 15 and 16, \u201cthe idea of AI is stressful. Are there going to be jobs for our kids in 10 years?\u201d He said he watches their schooling with the specific anxiety of someone who knows from the inside what those institutions can miss \u2014 and what they can cost a kid who doesn\u2019t fit.<\/p>\n
He hopes they find something like he did \u2014 something they can actually do, something the market will recognize independently of what any institution says about them. \u201cWhen I found cooking, I just found this came very easy to me,\u201d he said. \u201cI liked it. And I was good at it.\u201d If he was 20 years older, he added, he\u2019s not sure if cooking would have been the same opportunity. \u201cI got lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n
He is not telling his children to skip college. He is telling them, or at least hoping, in the way parents of complicated, bright, restless kids hope, that somewhere along the way they find something like he found the knife: a skill so obviously theirs that no classroom could have found it for them.<\/p>\n
Is he worried about AI coming for his job, and theirs? One of his investments, he allows, started as something else and has morphed into robotics.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it can\u2019t cook,\u201d he said. \u201cIt can\u2019t cook. It\u2019s not going to cook.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Tom #Colicchio #built #American #restaurant #hes #watching<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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