Our Story

Hearth opened in Manhattan's East Village in 2003, and it's a testament to the passionate loyalty of our customers that we're still around.

(Are we grateful? That would be an understatement.) Hearth is a restaurant that's easy to enjoy — although occasionally hard to describe. We started out a lot fancier, but we gradually evolved into the place we are now — a warm, casual, quirky downtown sanctuary devoted to serving the food that we happen to crave.

You probably wouldn't categorize us as a wine bar, but wine has always been at the heart of what we do, and our list goes deep.

And a whole lot of loyal customers come for the cocktails, which (like the dishes from our kitchen) reflect our reverence for everything seasonal, local, and handcrafted. Our chef and founder Marco Canora, winner of 2017's James Beard Foundation Award for the Best Chef in New York City, has family roots in Tuscany, and you can see that Italian influence in our pasta dishes, our polenta, our meatballs.

But we're not an Italian restaurant in the strict sense. You might say we're Italian in spirit, with the same reverence for ingredients and commitment to seasonality that have defined Italian cuisine for centuries. Maybe the best way to describe Hearth is to say that it's the place you want to keep coming back to, and apparently that's why we're still here.

Our Founder

"I have very little interest in innovation or what's cutting edge," Marco Canora once told Food & Wine magazine.

What gets our founder fired up is everything that's nourishing, earthy, and crave-worthy. Before opening Hearth in 2003, Marco gained experience and drew accolades while cooking in both Tuscany and the United States. In New York City he was part of Tom Colicchio's legendary team at Gramercy Tavern, and it was Colicchio who chose Marco to help lead the kitchen at Craft. Both spots earned three stars from The New York Times, and Craft went on to win the 2001 James Beard Foundation award for Best New Restaurant in America.

Since then Marco, has won a Beard Foundation award of his own — in 2017, for Best Chef: New York City — and he has written three acclaimed cookbooks: Salt to Tast, A Good Food Day, and Brodo. (That third book grew out of Marco's passion for a variety of bone broths, which he and our team still sell out of a window at Hearth.) He has also appeared on TV shows such as Top Chef, Chopped, and Iron Chef America, but he's most at home cooking for family and friends. When he's not at Hearth, Marco can be found spending time with his wife, Amanda Filley, and their two daughters — and occasionally letting off steam with a meditative pause in a sauna followed by a bracing dunk in a pool of icy water.

Photography by Kelly Marshall, Daniel Krieger and Francesco Sapienza / Design and Words by McCalman.Co