Niche Food Group is based in St. Louis, Missouri and owned by executive chef Gerard Craft. As a Food & Wine Best New Chef, Food & Wine Innovator of the Year, 2015 James Beard Foundation Award-winning Best Chef: Midwest, and Inc. Magazine Star Entrepreneur, Chef Craft has been a pioneer for the Midwest dining scene. A native of Washington, D.C., Chef Craft became addicted to the restaurant life while living in Salt Lake City as a snowboard photographer. Chef Craft went on to cook at Bistro Toujours in Park City, Utah and Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California as well as stage at Ryland Inn in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey before making the leap to open a restaurant of his own. Always a believer in following intuition, Chef Craft settled on a boarded-up building in the Benton Park neighborhood of St. Louis, a city that he had never visited, to open his first restaurant, Niche, at the age of 25 in 2005. Niche Food Group now includes restaurants in St. Louis and in Nashville, Tennessee: creative cocktails at Taste by Niche, French bistro fare at Brasserie by Niche, approachable Italian at Pastaria, laid back burgers and brats at brassWELL inside Rockwell Beer Co., and wood-fired, South American-inspired cuisine at Cinder House inside the Four Seasons Hotel. Our newest concept, Pastaria Deli & Wine, a daytime lunch spot and shop offering selections of housemade, imported, and local provisions along with a vast wine selection, took the former home of Sardella, which closed mid-2020. We're also thrilled to introduce our next ventures in the fall of 2021: Bowood by Niche, taking the former home of beloved Café Osage at Bowood Farms, and The Kitchen Bar located inside the newly opened City Foundry food hall. With hundreds of employees across six restaurants in the Gateway City, and one restaurant in Nashville, TN, the group was named one of St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Top Work Places in 2017 and 2018.
