Flynn McGarry’s Artful, Ambitious Next Act
The chef Flynn McGarry was only thirteen years old when he débuted a tasting-menu pop-up in his home town of Los Angeles, in 2012. He was nineteen when the doors opened at Gem, his real-deal restaurant on the Lower East Side, and he was only a couple of years past legal drinking age when he expanded with a wine bar, Gem Wine, which eventually pivoted to become a café-cum-shoppy-shop, Gem Home. Those of us who enjoy the retrospective clarity of adulthood understand that it’s a curse to become famous as a child, to have your still malleable identity and interests forced through the fiery kiln of the public gaze. If McGarry had reached his twenties and decided to abandon the kitchen and never touch a knife again, I don’t think anyone would have blamed him. But he’s twenty-seven now, and still a chef, and with the opening of Cove, his fourth restaurant, this past fall, he’s undertaken his most ambitious project yet.
Flynn McGarry, at twenty-seven, is running his fourth restaurant.
Cove, on West Houston Street, does not mark an especially obvious step into maturity or anything narratively pat like that, because McGarry’s cooking and his businesses have never really had so much as a hint of childishness to begin with. What was both unique and fascinating about his time as a wunderkind was that, even in the earliest days, when he was doing tween-age stages at Alinea and Eleven Madison Park, or being written about in breathless profiles and skeptically snarky blog posts (not to mention a vignette in this magazine), he was never a kid speaking to other kids. There was no aw-shucks mugging, no twee riffs on lunchbox junk food: his cooking was precise, focussed, with a near-reverential attention to detail, and a high-end sensibility. At the various Gems, he cultivated a nimble and intimate sort of flavor maximalism that played perfectly in those tiny establishments. Cove is much larger, with a more formal service style, but the exactitude is still there, the sense of stylishness, the obsession and the delight. The walls are sheathed modishly in wood, and hung with dramatic botanical paintings. The tables, also sleek wood, orbit an open kitchen in which a phalanx of cooks move around their stations in quiet deliberation, with McGarry a strawberry-blond, white-jacketed flare at the center.
The dishes are simply beautiful. I nearly didn’t order a salad of golden beets with smoked yogurt, struggling to muster enthusiasm for yet another beet-and-dairy salad, but my dining companion insisted. It turned out to be amazing, a parade of roots in every shade of yellow, with bursts of brightness from what seemed like a whole bouquet of nasturtiums, orange and vermillion and gloaming purple. For all the complexity of McGarry’s creations, they remain tight and streamlined: every element is load-bearing, and the final appearance isn’t always showy. Take, for example, a bowl of artichoke purée poured around a hillock of tender Jonah crab. The smooth liquid is briny and delicate, with a subtle vegetality that harmonizes with the crustacean’s sweetness; an accompanying hunk of freshly baked bread provides a sour-edged counterpoint, enlivening things even more. For all the evident care in this dish, its plating is boldly plain—beige on beige. McGarry could easily have zhuzhed things up with a little color: a sprinkle of sumac, or a chiffonade of fresh mint, but adding any other element would have changed the flavor. He trusts, wisely, in the carefully calibrated balance of each bite.
