At that point, Mr. Colicchio was in his 20s and, in his own words, was “a raving lunatic” who had already run some of New York’s most important kitchens. Although he stayed involved in fighting hunger by raising money for charities and food banks, he was much more focused on his career. Things took off in 1994, when he and Danny Meyer opened Gramercy Tavern on East 20th Street. Seven years later, he went off on his own and opened his flagship restaurant, Craft, one block away.

The year he opened Craft, he also married Lori Silverbush, a filmmaker who had worked at Gramercy Tavern as a waitress. (They now have two sons, 3 and 4. Mr. Colicchio also has a 21-year-old son from a previous relationship.) Mr. Colicchio credits his wife for his political awakening. In 2007, Ms. Silverbush started mentoring a teenage girl she had met through a Harlem charity called Groove With Me. She helped to get the girl into a school for students with learning disabilities. Then one day she got a phone call from the principal, who told her that the girl had been spotted outside foraging for food in the trash.

The call resulted in “A Place at the Table,” a film on hunger and its political roots that Ms. Silverbush released in 2012 (with a co-director, Kristi Jacobson). “What we learned was that the great work of charities was in some way enabling us to never look at the policies that underpin hunger,” she said. “We can’t food-bank our way out of this. It just doesn’t matter how much money we raise. We are never going to raise as much as they’re slashing.”

Mr. Colicchio appeared in the film and served as its executive producer, and the experience opened his eyes to the insufficiency of the charitable work he had been doing for decades. He began reading up on food-stamp legislation and on school lunch programs, like the one his mother ran at Elizabeth High School. His transformation came in the form of a simple but radicalizing insight: “If we want better food policies, we need to elect better officials.”

These days, as part of his anti-hunger work, Mr. Colicchio has joined his fellow chefs Rachael Ray and Johnathan Adler in endorsing Lunch 4 Learning, a grass-roots campaign pressing Mayor Bill de Blasio to offer free lunches for all students in public schools. Mr. Colicchio tweets or retweets daily about food-policy subjects, like the new food documentary “Fed Up” or a petition seeking congressional action to stop the importing of chicken from China.

Image At the Community FoodBank of New Jersey in Hillside. Credit... Nancy Borowick for The New York Times

But politics, like cooking, is more art than science, and despite his various efforts, he said, he was often frustrated by the political process. “There are two things you don’t want to see made — sausages and laws,” he said. “And having seen both, I can tell you, I’ll take the sausage.”