One might assume that a house’s most important selling point for a chef would be the kitchen. Not so for Gerard Craft, James Beard Award winner and owner of Niche Food Group. He and his wife chose their new home, in Richmond Heights, for the backyard and school district and the tree-lush views. The kitchen, with its red granite counters and cherry cabinetry, needed an update—on a budget. “I wanted it to be kind of modern country French, like something I would see outside Paris in the country,” Craft says. He tapped furniture-maker David Stine to create three pairs of open shelves; removed some of the upper cabinets and painted everything white; and replaced the granite with one section of butcher block and another of marble. And the exposed brick behind the stove? “That we preserved.”
1. When Craft remodeled his old home, he changed the footprint of the kitchen and had to put this Tulip table into storage. Here, it’s given a second life.
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2. One of the chef’s favorite features is the large, one-bowl sink. “I hated always having split sinks,” Craft says. “You can’t put things like a roasting pan in them,” which, to him, is an essential, because braises—oxtail, lamb shanks—are his favorite things to cook. He makes them year-round. “It’s really soulful and easy to share at the table.”
3. “I usually have farofa, which is like this crispy cassava, and garlic, and onions,” Craft says. He also keeps a container of Nishiki rice on hand—it’s possibly the most-consumed food in his household. San Marzano tomatoes round out his pantry must-haves.
5. The June smart oven may get used more often than the chef’s six-burner Kitchen-Aid. It can be preheated from his phone and warms up fast, and his children are comfortable using it.
6. “There are some things that the microwave doesn’t agree with,” says Craft. “I don’t want to cook meat in a microwave. But say you’re reheating braised beef: If you think about it, when you reheat a braise on a stovetop, the sauce starts to boil before the inside is hot, so you have to add a little water to it so it doesn’t burn or over-reduce. But you pop it in the microwave, it heats up perfectly. There’s no other good way to heat up rice. Or I microwave coffee, because sometimes I forget about it.”
7. The limited-edition wheat-pattern Christian Dior bowls were inherited from Craft’s grandmother. The wheat makes him think of pasta. The patterned bowls, from Anthropologie, were a long-ago Mother’s Day gift, to his wife. “For our house, we just went in and painted all the walls white,” he says. “But then you get to have art, bits of color, and plants.”
8. The white plates are the Crafts’ wedding china. “I think we thought that every family needed to have a set of china,” he says. He mixes in plates from Heath Ceramics. The mattarelli—classic Italian pasta rolling pins—were a gift from Stine.
9. “I’m obsessed with thermometers,” says the chef. “I feel like you can’t cook well without one.”
