Journalists get curious and they start asking questions. One day James Estrin decided that he wanted to know what goes on behind the kitchen door of a fancy restaurant , the sort of place where people dress up for the meal and the pork chop costs $55. Mr. Estrin has been a staff photographer for The New York Times since 1992, and told me he wanted to document the work that goes into delivering that sort of experience. “Not so much the food,” he said. “I wanted to see the people and the culture they share, backstage.”

I sent him to Craft, which the chef Tom Colicchio opened in 2001, on East 19th Street in Manhattan. Craft is by no means a theatrical restaurant. There is no open kitchen to draw a guest’s attention, and Mr. Colicchio does not generally stride the dining room accepting accolades and air-kissing models, bankers and those who gather around them. In fact, he is often not in the restaurant at all. The food his cooks make is simple and simply served, with a minimum of narrative fuss. The staff limits its attentions to the needs and wants of its customers. Among them, there is no preening.

That takes a lot of work. Simplicity in a restaurant, Mr. Colicchio has written, does not mean simplistic. Quite the opposite. Indeed, every aspect of a meal at Craft reflects a near-fetishistic desire for perfection, from the quality of a stock or a sliced tomato to the spotless gleam of a wineglass that has been polished three times. The restaurant’s 84 employees share this desire individually and as a team. They work as an orchestra or a military platoon does, with each member dependent on the other for success: 22 hours a day, seven days a week.

Mr. Estrin spent six days at Craft, at various hours of the day and night, photographing its employees at work. What surprised him about the experience, he said, “was the sheer physicality of the labor, and the precision of it.” Also, the camaraderie. “It was amazing to me,” he said, the degree to which “each role in the restaurant depends on someone else doing a job perfectly, and how if someone doesn’t, everything falls apart.”