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It’s the second night of friends and family at Flynn McGarry’s new restaurant, Cove, and the 26-year-old New York chef is breathless at the pass of his vast open kitchen. “Fire two corn fritters! Fluke! Tomato!” he booms, expediting orders.
The restaurant’s team are going through the paces of a full dinner service for trusted friends of the house – testing out an eight- course tasting menu in a back corner of the soaring wood-panelled dining room, with à la carte dishes delivered to the larger space out front. “A lot of these people have come to all of our friends-and-family events; they know how to do it,” says McGarry. “We may totally mess up everything – we don’t need to hear your opinion; you’re literally bodies in the room.”
In the back of the kitchen a chef sears cabbage and peppers on a wood-fired grill. “Fire a sweet potato cake,” says McGarry.
McGarry was once the most famous “kid chef” in the US – the “Justin Bieber of food”, as Vogue dubbed him in 2015. Now, he’s on his fifth New York opening in a decade. When McGarry was 10, he cooked his way through Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook. By 11, he was serving tasting menus to guests at his own supper club, Eureka, run out of his family home in California’s San Fernando Valley. A “Talk of the Town” story in The New Yorker when he was 13 got the media circus going. By 15, he was on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. By 16 he’d moved Eureka to New York as a three-day-a-week pop-up. After stints at Maaemo in Oslo and Geranium in Copenhagen, he opened Gem, his first New York restaurant, on the Lower East Side in 2018. Cove, in Hudson Square, is his largest project yet.
In a private dining room, design publicist Amanda Lee Burkett, McGarry’s girlfriend of four years, is gathered with a dozen of their close friends around long wooden tables for a family-style feast – more dinner party than restaurant banquet. It’s an eclectic group of furniture designers, stylists, photographers and art dealers; a circle of confidantes whose aesthetic sensibility McGarry has come to cherish and trust. The chef is also a design fanatic and amateur carpenter who has built a lot of his own furniture (he enlisted a professional, Robert Williams of Grain Wood Studio in the Hudson Valley, for the bespoke pieces at Cove).
Camron Booth, a founding partner in the soon-to-open Lore Bathing Club – a sauna club in NoHo – digs into a salad of Greenmarket tomatoes and muscat grapes on a thick puddle of ajo blanco. He met his former flatmate, furniture designer Ian Felton – who is seated beside him nibbling on corn and shishito pepper fritters – at a similar pre-opening dinner for Gem. “Camron has probably eaten my food more than most people in New York in this very sort of guinea-pig way,” says McGarry, who rushes in and out of the kitchen with a pair of tweezers tucked into the strap of his blue apron, torn between keeping service humming and checking in on his friends.
Despite the easy buzz permeating Cove, McGarry admits towards the end of the night that things have been quietly going off the rails. The speakers – which have been playing a mix of jazz tracks, from The Soul Surfers to the soundtrack to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless – have overheated, while the kitchen, toggling between tasting menu and à la carte dishes, has been falling behind. “I was doing à la carte dishes and I looked over at the tasting room, and I was like, ‘Oh shit, they’re going down,’” he says. “This is why we have friends and family, so we’re ready for a stranger to come in.”
McGarry’s earlier efforts had a Nordic bent. Now he’s leaning back into his West Coast roots. The restaurant’s name is a nod to Paradise Cove, a popular beach near the home in Malibu where he lived between the ages of four and 11. “I think I spent a lot of time trying to ignore the California in me,” he says of his first decade as a chef in New York, when he mostly tapped into his experiences abroad. The new menu is a way to reflect the raw materials and melting-pot spirit of his home state, from slivered raw fluke topped with fresh-grated California wasabi to the warm sweet potato and fig cake served at the end of the meal. “Every California chef has these immigrant influences – Mexico, Japan,” he says. “I’ve started to take a larger view of the idea of California, because nobody really knows what Californian food is.”
Cove is available to book on Open Table
FT Appetites, which brings together stories from FT Magazine, HTSI and FT Globetrotter, is supported by OpenTable. The FT does not earn a commission from any booking page links included in this article and all content is editorially independent
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