There’s a version of this story where a hospitality executive with twenty years at the top of the industry opens a cocktail bar and calls it a passion project. This isn’t that story. Craig Joseph didn’t open The C List to have a hobby. He opened it because after two decades of building other people’s rooms, he knew exactly what his own should be, and no one in Crown Heights had built it yet.
Castries, first.
Craig was born in Castries, St. Lucia, where hospitality isn’t an industry you enter. It’s how you’re raised. You learn early that a guest in your house is a guest, that the first thing you do is offer a drink, and that nobody leaves hungry or without a story. The island does this without training programs or service standards. It just does it.
He brought that to New York, into an industry that had turned the same instinct into a science. And he was good at the science.
Twenty years at the top.
At the Four Seasons in Midtown, Craig ran food and beverage, which at a Four Seasons means every drink, every plate, and every guest interaction across one of the most demanding hotels in the city. The standard there isn’t “good service.” It’s anticipating what someone wants before they know they want it, at scale, every day, without a single visible seam.
Then Lincoln Center. As General Manager of Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, he ran the room at what became one of the most celebrated restaurants in the country, a place where the food is Afro-Caribbean and the Bronx and the reservations are measured in weeks. Running that room means holding two things at once: the precision of fine dining and the warmth of a place that feels like somebody’s home.
Twenty years of running other people’s rooms taught me exactly what I wanted mine to be. The place you go after a long day.
Craig Joseph
The thing he kept noticing.
Two decades in rooms like that teach you something the guests never see: the best night of someone’s week rarely costs what those rooms charge. What people actually come back for is being known. A bartender who remembers the drink. A stool that’s somehow always open. A room where the conversation at the next seat over becomes yours by the second round.
Craig kept noticing that the neighborhood he lived in had bars, but not that one. Not the place you’d pick without thinking. Good enough for a date, loose enough for a Tuesday, priced like it wants you to come back. So he left corporate and built it.
What he built.
The C List opened on Franklin Avenue in 2024. A proper bar with a long counter and real bar seats. Caribbean-inspired cocktails from fresh juice and house infusions. A rum shelf that starts in St. Lucia, where he was born, and works its way across the islands. The classics done the Four Seasons way, priced the Crown Heights way.
The Four Seasons is in the details nobody notices: the ice, the glassware, the fact that your second drink arrives right as you’re thinking about it. Tatiana is in the food, the Caribbean spine of the menu, the jerk fries people order twice. Castries is in everything else: the way the door works, the way the room fills, the fact that regulars bring first-timers and first-timers become regulars.
Karaoke every Saturday, where the owner’s favorite singer is Whitney Houston and he’s been known to prove it. Taco Tuesday. The match on the big screen. Rum tastings poured by people who grew up with the bottles. Local art on the walls. His records on the turntable.
Why it matters.
Brooklyn has plenty of bars opened by people who wanted to own a bar. It has very few opened by someone who spent twenty years learning what a room is for, at the highest level the industry has, and then chose a block in Crown Heights over another title.
That’s what you’re walking into at 835 Franklin. Every night, whether you know it or not, you’re getting Four Seasons attention at happy hour prices, from a St. Lucian who thinks the whole point of a bar is that you leave with more people than you came with.
When he’s not behind the bar, he’s traveling or with his pups. Both show up in the playlist. Come thru and see the rest for yourself, at 835 Franklin Ave, no reservations, every day from four. More about the bar, or what’s on this week.