After two years as the pivot point of the Top Chef judging team, everyone from Sacramento to Savannah recognizes Tom Colicchio as a man who knows something about food. Yet despite a growing mini-empire that comprises nearly a dozen restaurants, relatively few people have actually eaten anything cooked in one of them. Colicchio's reputation as a critic is, for the vast majority of the nation, more salient than his reputation as a chef, and this does not necessarily work in his favor. Take our recent meal at Craftbar as an example: As HungryMan and I waited for an old friend to meet us, we overheard at least three groups of diners in the raucously loud dining room cattily mimicking a few of Tom C.'s recently televised barbs. If the old adage about glass houses holds true for restaurant owners, we cannot help but admire the guts it must take to provide diners with their own bread basket full of stones.
As difficult as it may be to be impartial about Colicchio, it is impossible to ignore that the man has a gift for savory food. Craftbar's informal, enoteca-style menu, with its emphasis on cured meats and cheeses, is the perfect context to show off this skill–executed on a daily basis by Lauren Hirschberg, Craftbar's Chef de Cuisine. Indeed, our favorite dishes of the meal were ones where salty elements breathed life into the food. The best, a cold mixed baby beet salad (pictured left, $12), sounded pedestrian enough, but wound up tasting as sweet as fruit, thanks to a crumbling of pungent blue cheese and a balanced vinaigrette–the choice of a saltier, sharper cheese made all the difference. So too, in the chickpea fries with black olive aioli (pictured on Flickr, $7), a bar snack with a tender, almost custard-like interior. 
Alone, the fries tasted a bit like crunchy planks of tamago sushi, but when dipped in the olive spread, they acquired a fragrant peppery flavor that made them a wonderful partner for a glass of red wine. Only one dish was perhaps a bit too savory–the orecchiette with fennel sausage and ricotta salata (pictured top, $10). But even this dish, with its aromatic spicing, was still quite decent and required just a little judicious culling of a few of the stiff white cubes of aged ricotta.
Another main, the daurade with brussels sprouts (pictured right, $21) was surprisingly filling, thanks to a generous portion of soft and smoky brussels sprouts that looked as if they had bloomed into papery green layers from dollhouse-scale cabbages. Thanks to the bacon, this was another salty dish, but one where all the components worked well together. Our friend's crispy polenta with mushroom ragout (pictured on Flickr, $16), one of the two vegetarian main dishes, seemed a bit out of step with the season and probably better suited to an autumn menu. It was, unfortunately, also too oily and ended up being the only plate of food we did not finish.
And we had plenty of time to try–our server left our table uncleared for nearly 45 minutes. Still, even the lapses in service did not deter us from ordering the brown sugar cake with roasted pineapple and rum vanilla ice cream ($10). All three of us agreed that the pineapple and the potently alcoholic scoop of vanilla bean ice cream were superb. The cake itself also was not bad, by any means–just a bit too sweet and, ironically, missing one thing that would have made it really wonderful, something we bet Tom himself would not hesitate to toss in: A little more salt.
Craftbar, 900 Broadway (near 20th Street), 212-461-4300.
