30 Years In, Gramercy Tavern Remains a Great American Restaurant

On August 5, 2014, a young woman just days away from boarding a cross-country flight to California walked under the distinctive brown-domed overhang at 42 East 20th Street for the first time and opened the door. Aretah Ettarh was going to be pursuing an accelerated program at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, in Napa Valley. In her waning hours on the East Coast, where she’d spent the first 21 years of her life, she decided to go big before leaving home — with a meal at one of the most acclaimed restaurants in all of New York City: Gramercy Tavern. 

This would be Ettarh’s first tasting menu; it was also her first fine-dining experience, first amuse-bouche, first everything. She was nervous, but the captain at her table (through magic? ESP? eavesdropping?) intuited this. “They sensed that we were young and then just dialed the approach back so that we felt super comfortable,” Ettarh recalls. Would she and her friend like a tour of the kitchen, perhaps? Oh yes, they would. By the time she was escorted through the bustle of the people-jammed, bloom-strewn Tavern to her table in The Vault Room, she was at ease. Ten years later, she still remembers the meal — executive chef and partner Michael Anthony’s seasonal march of arctic char, lobster salad, halibut, squid-ink pasta, and duck breast, and pastry chef Miro Uskokovic’s panna cotta with apricots, tapioca pudding, coconut, and thyme — and how perfect, warm, and welcoming it all was.  

At the moment Ettarh first walked past the host stand, Gramercy Tavern had been open for 20 years and 25 days. Her meal, and the highly personalized hospitality that accompanied it, was just one of thousands that have been made here since opening day: July 11, 1994. And just one week later, to the utter horror of co-founders Danny Meyer and Tom Colicchio, a New York Magazine cover posed the question, "Gramercy Tavern: The Next Great Restaurant?" 

It wasn’t at first. Three months after Gramercy Tavern opened, New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl delivered a two-star review. Essentially, it was as a placeholder: Watch this space; give them time. But Colicchio says he took it as affirmation of what he’d been telling his business partners, that they were pulling off only one-star food. Reduce the number of tables, increase the number of tasting menus, and they would be able to match the fuel to the fire. In February 1996, a short span for a re-review, Reichl added a third star, writing, “It takes a while for a restaurant to hit its stride. There is no timetable for this; each proceeds at its own pace.” 

Now, 30 years into its tenure, Gramercy Tavern burns steadily and brightly, while so many others have faded into memory. Through 9/11, recessions, blackouts, a pandemic, industry reckonings, staff shifts (though, notably, there have been only two executive chefs), diners have always been drawn back toward its warmth. In December 2023, the restaurant reported its most successful month ever. 

Consider this: Without Gramercy Tavern, it’s entirely possible that Top Chef would not exist as we know it, with Colicchio at the judges’ table. There might be no Shake Shack a stone’s throw or app delivery away from you. Carrie Bradshaw would have chatted up a problematic ex elsewhere in the Sex and the City pilot. Former pastry chef Claudia Fleming’s salted-caramel chocolate tart, documented in her cult-favorite cookbook The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern, would likely not be a canonical flavor combination. And the legions of chefs, servers, and sommeliers who have served here and gone on to found other restaurants, or simply to reproduce Gramercy’s groundbreaking farm-to-table food ethos and service DNA at other addresses, might well have gone on working in hospitality, but ... differently. Perhaps less distinctively, or less passionately.

Great is an admirable goal, but there can be something dauntingly monumental to that word, something carved in stone. Gramercy Tavern is a great American restaurant, no question, but a key part of that greatness is how over the years it has both changed and stayed the same. And that goes back to its people.  

Meyer and Colicchio first met at a fundraising event where Colicchio’s Sea Urchin and Crab Fondue snared the senses of the young restaurateur. Their paths crossed again at the 1992 Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, where Colicchio and chef Michael Romano of Union Square Cafe were among those being fêted as F&W Best New Chefs. Meyer had flown in to support Romano; Union Square Cafe was the sole restaurant he owned at the time. He certainly wasn’t looking to expand. 

As they sat at a café near the festival tents, Colicchio confided that he was contemplating leaving Mondrian, where he’d garnered his F&W accolade and where Meyer had become a devotee of the New Jersey native’s pristine, ingredient-reverent cooking. The two continued the conversation back home in NYC, then on a 10-day eating tour of Italy. They figured that if they could still stand each other’s company after that trek, they should consider opening a restaurant together.

They landed on the same word: tavern. Something casual, à la carte, where regulars were encouraged but where even celebs and masters of the universe would have to put their names on the list — this would be the bar room, up front. In the back, on the other side of the rarely drawn curtains, would be The Vault Room, with seasonally driven tasting menus, but in Meyer’s words, “If the refined dining feels like a temple or a church, you’ve got to walk through a party to get there.” Besides, he adds, “We didn’t want people to worship anyway.” 

Colicchio put word out that he was hiring. By his early 30s, he’d established a reputation as an intelligent, sharpshooter chef with perhaps a gruff demeanor but also respect for the people he worked alongside (an anomaly in the hellfire of ’90s kitchen culture). Today, Colicchio laughs, recalling a trip to a software store to buy something called “HR in a Box” so they could develop the restaurant’s first human resources manual; Meyer, he says, hadn’t realized they needed one.

But one thing Meyer did have was an uncanny sense of restaurant goers’ particular and sometimes inchoate wants. In 1985, that had allowed him, a 27-year-old novice from St. Louis, to go all-in on a derelict block of Manhattan real estate, in the middle of the crack epidemic, and through sheer will and instinct turn Union Square Cafe into the warmest address in town. (“I don’t want to be the hot restaurant,” Meyer says, “because hot gets cold.”) Meyer’s intent with his first venture had been to reconcile the paradox he’d seen between the Midwest dining rooms of his youth, where “the welcome was always off the charts,” and New York City, where the cuisine was world-class but the hospitality left him asking, “Would the food taste worse if we applied a little of the kind of welcome that I’d always felt?” 

Gramercy Tavern, he and Colicchio envisioned, would be a hybrid of Union Square Cafe’s hell-bent-on-fresh ethos (the Greenmarket is literally steps away) and the artful, anticipatory service of the Parisian restaurant Le Taillevent, where Meyer says he was for the first time able to enjoy a three-Michelin-star meal without his shoulders up around his ears. Here, that exhale into relaxation would have to start at the front door, as diners drew in the scent of the woodsmoke from the restaurant’s central grill.

In New York City, chilly disdain is practically legal tender, but at Gramercy Tavern, someone offers to relieve you of your coat, bags, burdens, and — how is there, on an overcast midwinter day, a riot of blossoms on the lichen-covered branches flanking the host stand? Jim Meehan, the barman whose career — and marriage, he says — were forged in the crucible of service here, recalls that after service at some restaurant jobs, he’d “smell like a fryer and want to burn [his] clothes to get the smell off.” At Gramercy Tavern, by contrast, “You left smelling like a wood nymph of the primordial forest.”

This was by design. Meyer and Colicchio joined forces with architect Peter Bentel, who was cowed neither by the large space nor by a chef who wanted a massive oak-stoked grill at the core. The floral decor that has become a signature feature of the restaurant is by Roberta Bendavid, who in the mid-1980s had left the fashion world and become a fixture at the Union Square Greenmarket, where she sold bouquets alongside the market’s local produce. When she caught wind of the nascent Gramercy Tavern, Bendavid launched a scrappy monthslong botanical campaign, culminating in the delivery of “a little bouquet of lilacs in a copper container” that caused Meyer to finally say, come do our flowers, be part of it all. She still is to this day.

This is how Gramercy Tavern itself works: as an intoxicating bloom that draws the “special freaks” (Meehan’s words; he happily counts himself among them) like bees toward an improbable garden in the center of a hungry city. They make a home here, sometimes for decades. Steven Solomon is a visual artist who refers to his 22-year tenure as a sommelier and captain here as the “genius grant” that allowed him to simultaneously pursue a creative career. Together, he and former beverage/service director and assistant general manager Paul Grieco (now owner of the gonzo Terroir wine bar) say they refined what they call an “aggressive” form of enlightened hospitality, grounded in the irreverent yet elegant ethos of no generosity measure being too extreme to surprise and delight a guest. Uncork a bottle of something wildly pricey and offer a free glass to go with the entrée. Offer that life-changing kitchen tour. Bring a surprise mini portion of an appetizer or two.  

Kevin Mahan started as a server in 1999, worked his way up to general manager, and slept with the medal for Gramercy Tavern’s James Beard Award for outstanding restaurant around his neck one jubilant June night in 2008. (He left in 2014.) Like so many others on staff, he started as a regular — Steven Solomon likens it to your favorite band’s tour bus pulling up and someone saying, “Get in, you’re the bass player now.”

The litany of famous chefs who’ve worked here is long: Colicchio, Fleming, Anthony, and on and on. If you’re a restaurant scholar, you’ll know the impact of alumni like Marco Canora (Hearth and Brodo, NYC), Gregory Marchand (Frenchie, Paris), Keaka Lee (Kapa Hale, Honolulu), Howard Kalachnikoff (Rolo's), and many others. Front of house and beverages, too, like Juliette Pope, Steve Olson, Scott Reinhardt, and hundreds of others who envisioned and enacted bold new ways of delivering hospitality. They’ve branched out, cross-pollinated, and nurtured restaurants, bars, books, and cultures of their own.  

Guests also end up part of the family. Literary agent Tony Outhwaite popped in from his office across the street on opening night and has done his part to hold up the bar ever since. “I’ve never seen anyone get out of line here,” he says, sitting dapper and besuited under a large arc of forsythia. “They wouldn’t have any reason to, and we wouldn’t let them.”

Even magazine editors are kin. Former Food & Wine Editor in Chief Dana Cowin celebrated her wedding at Gramercy Tavern in 1998. For what was going to be a runway of cakes, she left the details up to pastry chef Claudia Fleming. She says that seeing the Wayne Thiebaud–inspired dessertscape that Fleming created remains “one of the greatest surprise-and-delight moments of my entire life.”

In 2002, Michael Anthony, like Colicchio, connected with Meyer in Aspen; he was there as a F&W Best New Chef, too. Four years later, he came on to lead the kitchen after Colicchio sold his portion to Meyer to concentrate on his burgeoning Craft restaurant group. “Of all the well-established restaurant cultures, [Gramercy Tavern] may have had the strongest,” Anthony says. “It was both incredible to understand how it came to be and to see it and feel it. But in some ways, it was such a tightly knit fabric that it made it hard for outsiders to find their way in.” 

Yet find their way they do. One name you might not know is Carlos Perez. He’s perfectly happy with that. His father, Ramon, was a day-one employee who got his son a job as a dishwasher a few years in. Twenty-six years later, Perez is Gramercy’s lead runner, standing steady at the center of it all, and every single plate passes by him for approval. In Anthony’s estimation, he is the axis around which the restaurant rotates. 

Mike Widdoes, a musician, has been working the floor since the very beginning, and has long found his rhythm in the whirl of a Gramercy Tavern service. "We're all broken toys, and it's a dysfunctional business," he says. "It's transient and it's fantastic. It's the rock and roll of the workforce world. It's marvelous." In 2015, his wife Carolyn Wandell-Widdoes made the move from Union Square Cafe where she'd been since 1988. Everyone at Gramercy Tavern knows her as "Mama."

And, of course, there’s Aretah Ettarh. Ten years ago, she headed off to the Culinary Institute of America. When she finished her degree, she says, “I applied to every three-star place in New York.” She landed a gig at chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s eponymous flagship restaurant, a huge win for a recent culinary school grad. But a few years later, when she was ready to move on and casting around for possibilities, her sister told her, “You really should give Gramercy a chance; you love that restaurant.” So she did. 

Today, Ettarh works alongside Michael Anthony as Gramercy’s chef de cuisine. He'll rely on her even more as he adds duties as culinary consultant for the Waldorf Astoria to his plate this year, but just as anyone at Gramercy Tavern would, she's going to take on the challenge "one step and day at a time."

On that July evening in 1994 when Gramercy Tavern first opened its doors, Meyer worked part of the night on the floor at Union Square Cafe; similarly, Colicchio worked the line at Gramercy Tavern the night his restaurant Craft opened in 2001. Both were nervous about their teams questioning their commitment to the places where they’d laid down their roots. Meyer even carried his infant daughter Hallie as he touched tables throughout Gramercy Tavern in the early days, in part hoping critics like Reichl would see what was at stake. Evidently she did. In March of this year, Reichl was seen having lunch in the Tavern and soon after wrote a rave in her newsletter La Briffe: “Is it any wonder that the restaurant is celebrating its 30th year?” 

On a recent spring afternoon, Anthony was sitting in the dining room, looking over the menu from the night that Ettarh had that first tasting menu of her life, noting that while obviously Greenmarket and farmer availability would be a factor, the fundamentals of it were so classically Gramercy Tavern, it could as easily be from today. Someone interrupted him: Chef, what do you think about this new fabric we’re thinking about for the upholstery? He studied it carefully. Just keep in mind that it has to last for the next 10 years. Or 20. Or even longer.

Key moments in Gramercy Tavern history

April 22, 1991

At a benefit event for Share Our Strength, Mondrian chef Tom Colicchio serves a Sea Urchin and Crab Fondue dish that captures the attention of Union Square Cafe owner Danny Meyer.

June 1992

Tom Colicchio and Danny Meyer reconnect at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen and hash out the idea of a new restaurant.

July 11, 1994 

Gramercy Tavern opens. Danny Meyer still works the lunch shift at the door of Union Square Cafe.

February 2, 1996

Ruth Reichl gives Gramercy Tavern three stars in the New York Times, a rating it maintains to this day.

June 1997

Sex and the City shoots its pilot in Gramercy Tavern, but Tom Colicchio is on crutches after an injury and can't be on camera.

1998

Claudia Fleming creates a chocolate salted caramel tart, which achieves icon status — especially once it appears in The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern in 2001.

September 11-12, 2001

The Gramercy Tavern team brings food to triage units at Ground Zero. September 13, they set up camp in Union Square Park and deliver 3000 hot meals to Red Cross workers, NYPD, NYC Firefighters, clergy, and family members at  the 26th St. Armory. 

June 2002

At the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Michael Anthony meets Danny Meyer, who becomes an advisor to him.

March 8, 2006

Top Chef premieres with Colicchio as a judge. Later that year, he sells his interest in Gramercy Tavern. Michael Anthony is named head chef.

June 8, 2008

Gramercy Tavern wins the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant. Longtime general manager Kevin Mahan sleeps with the medal around his neck. 

November 8, 2008

In Gossip Girl , Gramercy Tavern is cited as Blair Waldorf's favorite restaurant.

October, 29, 2013

The Gramercy Tavern Cookbook by Michael Anthony is published.

February 17, 2014

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon premieres with an opening montage including Gramercy Tavern, where Fallon is a regular.

July 26, 2019

The Amazon Prime show The Boys premieres and a new recruit to the secretly evil legion of superheroes at Vought Industries is enticed with a promise of, "Oh, and wait till you check out the dining room. We, uh, may or may not have stolen [pastry chef] Miro from Gramercy Tavern. Yeah, he's fan-f***ing-tastic."

April 2023

Pete Wells places Gramercy Tavern at Number 11 on his New York Times list of the 100 Best Restaurants in NYC.

June 15, 2024

Gramercy Tavern celebrates 30 years in business with a dinner at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen with courses made by Tom Colicchio, Michael Anthony, Aretah Ettarh, Claudia Fleming, and Karen DeMasco, flowers overseen by Roberta Bendavid, service directed by general manager William Carroll, and guests welcomed by Danny Meyer.

Gramercy Tavern's James Beard Awards

1995: Outstanding Restaurant Graphics: Bow & Arrow Press, Gramercy Tavern; New York, NY
2000: Best Chef: New York City: Tom Colicchio, Gramercy Tavern; New York, NY (nominated 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005)
2000: Outstanding Pastry Chef: Claudia Fleming, Gramercy Tavern; New York, NY (nominated 1998, 1999) 
2001: Outstanding Service: Gramercy Tavern; New York, NY
2002: Outstanding Wine Service
2008: Outstanding Restaurant
2012: New York City Chef: Michael Anthony, Gramercy Tavern, New York, NY (nominated 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011)
2015: Outstanding Chef: Michael Anthony