when you want, where you want.
Flynn McGarry Has Built the Restaurant of His Dreams
Photo: Sean Davidson
Flynn McGarry was 19 years old when he opened his first restaurant, Gem, fresh off teenage stints at Eleven Madison Park, Maaemo (in Norway), and Geranium (in Denmark), which is the kind of place that serves a tasting menu called “The Summer Universe” that lasts three hours and costs, depending on the exchange rate, about $653 per person. McGarry learned a lot from his high-caliber externships. Possibly too much. “You look at your food, and you can tell there’s a lot of other people’s identities in it,” McGarry’s mentor Daniel Humm once told him, “but there are dishes in here that feel truly unique and like they are your food.” The grand project of Gem — and its follow-ups, Gem Wine and Gem Home — was discovering what that food was.
The problem was that while McGarry was trying to find his voice as a culinary technician, he was doing so in a tiny restaurant in an old Lower East Side storefront. How is any chef supposed to create when the basement keeps leaking? Gem was the restaurant equivalent of a starter home, even if McGarry didn’t see it that way then. He’s building his new business, Cove, to last.
Cove is McGarry’s fantasy restaurant. Every detail has been calibrated to his precise specifications: Before he even had a lease, he’d drafted the place on AutoCAD, which he taught himself. “I’m really trying to create a restaurant that I, as a 10-year-old, would look up to — a restaurant that’s able to shoot for the stars.” The walls are punctuated by giant oil paintings of herbs and flowers by his friend, the Danish artist Frederik Nystrup-Larsen. Unlike at Gem Home and Gem Wine, McGarry did not personally build Cove’s furniture, mostly because he does not have the insurance policy necessary to be his own subcontractor (he looked into it). He did, however, build the frames: “I would feel too distant from it if I didn’t build anything or, at least like, touch a saw.”
McGarry is the anchor tenant of a new development in the still-figuring-out-what-it-is neighborhood of Hudson Square, and he’s aware of the benefits that come with this. “There’s nothing right now that I’m like, Oh, I’m gonna have to fix that later or put in a nicer version of that when we have money,” he says. He’s found the kind of investment that’s allowing him to do it right, working with “people who were like, ‘If you need the extra 100 grand, I’ll give it to you,’ which is a very rare thing.”
Photo: Sean Davidson
The opportunity comes with pressure to make something historically significant, a place that defines dining. For two years now, McGarry has been studying the restaurants that managed the trick and identified a kind of holy quaternity: the River Cafe in London, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the French Laundry in Napa Valley, and Le Bernardin a few miles uptown. “They’re restaurants that I don’t even really think about, as far as that past 20 years,” he says, “but they’ve actually been quietly dominating because they’re the ones that are still booked every day.” What stands out about their food, besides its obvious excellence, is its relative simplicity and a prevailing sense of easy confidence. “I don’t want to use the word swagger,” McGarry says by way of apology, “but I can’t think of a better word. People in these restaurants carry themselves like, We are so certain of what we’re doing.”
Simplicity is not what McGarry is best known for, but he now feels it’s what his cooking needs. He has also come to terms with the fact that he is from California, not Denmark. When, after five years away, he went back home for a friend’s wedding, he was met with what he calls “a weird feeling” and what someone else might describe as comfort. He uses a lot of vegetables and a lot of citrus and rather than “a bunch of spices”; he prefers herbs and oils. He is a chef who craves “space and nature and avocados,” and he is cooking like one. “I wanted to create the new restaurant with the idea, What is New York through the eyes of someone who was raised in California?” The restaurant is called Cove as a nod to Paradise Cove, the Malibu beach near where he grew up, and because coves, conceptually, struck him as “the most California thing” he could reasonably reference. “I wasn’t gonna call it, like, ‘California.’”
He’ll serve an eight-course “kitchen menu” (because “people hate the phrase ‘tasting menu’ so much,” McGarry says, accurately), plus family-style dinners and à la carte options; people just love choices. He characterizes his newly breezy approach to assembling a dish as, “a vegetable, with another vegetable, in a sauce.” He is considering a carrot schnitzel and has plans to revive the cold corn soup he prepared at Gem. Eggplant might get grilled until its innards can be scooped out and mixed with wild rice and mushrooms — “a warm salad, in a way” — while the skin would be repurposed as a vehicle to steam chawanmushi-like custard, at which point the whole thing would be reassembled and served with pickled herbs, perhaps lovage stems, and maybe some pickled green blueberries? He has definitely settled on the lobster: halved, rubbed with salted plum paste, stuffed with yellow beets, and topped with rose butter made from pickled petals. “It may sound complicated,” McGarry says, “but there’s nothing here that’s, like, 85 steps.”
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