Niche Food Group

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. 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. Niche Food Group is comprised of the following concepts: Pastaria by Niche, Pastaria Nashville, Pastaria Deli & Wine, Brasserie by Niche, Brass Bar, Bowood By Niche, Fordo's Killer Pizza, Kitchen Bar, NOTA, Porano, and Expat BBQ.