My Life In Meals: Flynn McGarry
"I got nine courses of tomatoes, because they just had so many tomatoes that one day."
Flynn McGarry has been cooking professionally since he was 11. He opened Gem on the Lower East Side at 19; today he runs Cove in Hudson Square and Gem Home on Mott Street. He recently sat down with us and talked about hot dogs, Paris, Eleven Madison Park, and the best family meal he’s ever eaten (a bowl of homemade pozole).
I grew up in LA. I remember we went to some random nice-ish French place in the Valley — I literally can’t remember the name — for my grandmother’s birthday or something, and I remember timing the time between courses. I became obsessed with these very little things.
Whenever I talk about California food, I’m like, if you’re actually from California, you understand that the tri-tip sandwich is a thing, but no one else would know that. There was a guy who would make them in the grocery store parking lot near where we grew up. At that point, you do start to wonder: what’s he putting in his rub that’s different? How is the bread being made that’s different? That was very formative for me.
There was a hot dog place (Editor’s note: in L.A.) whose hot dogs felt different from the others. I became obsessed with learning how they made them. They boiled them — most of the hot dogs I was having were steamed — and the boiling was that crunch, that pop. I would go home, buy hot dogs, boil them, and see how it was different.
I had lunch at Arpège in Paris when I was 16. I’d just been working in restaurants in Scandinavia and was staying at a friend’s place in Paris for two weeks, watching their apartment, and I’d saved up all this money to eat lunch there. It was the middle of August. Arpège is a legendary restaurant — three Michelin stars. Alain Passard was known as this very talented three-star chef, and then one day he decided to get rid of fish and meat and just focus on cooking vegetables. He has multiple farms, and every day they get three deliveries from each at 11 a.m., and then they figure out what they’re going to cook with them.
I got there at noon and ordered a bottle of champagne. I left at 7 p.m. There were periods where I wasn’t eating — they stopped service because they were cleaning the kitchen — and he came and sat with me for an hour, eating his family meal. He doesn’t really speak English. I don’t really speak French. I ate nine straight courses of tomatoes. They just had so many tomatoes one day. In the middle of the meal, another truck arrived late, so they added a few courses because they’d gotten these new eggplants in. Never have I felt a meal in a restaurant was so personal — someone cooked me lunch, and then sat and ate their own lunch with me, and then cooked me a bit of dinner.
That lunch was the one meal I had money for. Everything else I ate in Paris was a baguette. I was staying in the 7th, a very residential neighborhood, and I’d get a baguette at the bakery — a euro — and a small chunk of cheese at the cheese store — two euros — and that was a meal. And it was great. That’s exactly the point, even of that meal: it’s a food, a texture, a flavor you can eat every day. I still eat bread and cheese pretty much every day. Having only two weeks in Paris, I decided to double down. Instead of spending $75 a day all week, I spent $350 on this one thing, and the rest of the time I ate mundane. I’m probably in a very small category of people who would do that. And if the meal had been bad, I think I would have had very different thoughts about my strategy in this industry. That was 10, 11 years ago, and I still think about that lunch more than I think about 90% of the other high-level meals I’ve had.
The first time I went to stage at Eleven Madison Park, I was 13. I was in the kitchen for two weeks. You spend two weeks working these very long, hard 12-hour days, putting in all the little details, and on the last day they were like, do you want to sit and have dinner? I sat at the bar with my mom, and they made a whole non-alcoholic thing for me. They took so much care.
A couple of years ago, I was in Japan on a sake trip with a bunch of wine people, learning about sake. I hadn’t spent much time in Japan, so going in I was obsessive — I need to find the best of everything. I’m not the person who needs a reservation for everything, but I go to a city with a plan — the places I want to go. And what do you do when you can’t go to the places you want to go to? I didn’t want to go to the secondary places. I was like, I’m just going to give up on this and let fate take its course. I walked into a place because it looked good to me from the outside. I didn’t know what any of the letters said. I didn’t know anything about it. I saw a guy in there, it was empty, and I was like, I’m hungry, I’m going in. And I had a genuinely amazing meal. He just started handing me pieces of fish. Is it the best sushi in Japan? I don’t know, but I had an amazing time. It was lunch, I was there for 45 minutes, I had 14 pieces of sushi, it was $45, and he was very nice — he walked me outside and called me a cab. I remember trying to find it on Google and I couldn’t. I still don’t really know where it is, or if I’ll ever find it again.
The opposite happened in Kyoto. We went to this yakitori place that had all this insane, random wine, and we drank these amazing bottles and had some yakitori, and we were like, bring the whole group back the next day. Closed. For three weeks — they were just going on vacation, which is maybe why they opened all that crazy wine. It was this perfect example of: we tried to plan it, and it ruined it, because then everyone was mad. “You pitched us on this amazing thing and now we can’t have it.” And when you try to find another version, you end up comparing it to this unicorn in your head.
Omen is a Japanese restaurant in Soho that’s been around for a really long time. Every fourth week, on a Monday, I wake up, and I’m like, I want that for dinner. They have a really great agedashi tofu, amazing shiso rice, and really good black cod. It’s just this nice little meal. I wait for the craving, then go to the restaurant — and the craving might hit 20 minutes earlier. That’s why I love being in New York.
There’s a restaurant, Altro Paradiso, that I go to a lot — sometimes even once a week. One of my best friends lives in LA now, and she’s always been obsessed with their big Florentine steak. Usually my girlfriend and I just get pasta and a couple of salads — we’re not going to spend $200 on a big steak. But my friend comes to New York once a year, and every time she comes, we go there and we get the thing. It’s been three or four years running now.
It was a very funny back-to-back recently: we ate there two weeks ago on a Monday, and then again the following week, but this time as a date. Usually we go on a Monday because it’s close to where we live, quick, delicious, and easy. But we went back and got a bottle of wine, started with cocktails, got the steak, got desserts. It’s always fun to go to a place you go all the time and have that completely different experience. That’s being a regular — but it’s also how a restaurant can flex with you. Are you going big tonight? Are you celebrating? Or are you just here on a Tuesday? That’s very New York. Only here can restaurants really do both.
I’ve had so many bad family meals. But there was a chef, Diego, who worked with us for six years. Roughly once a month, he would make his family’s pozole recipe — he was from Mexico — and it was so good. He ended up teaching another of our cooks, a city kid who grew up in New York and had never been to Mexico, how to make it. When Diego left, Oscar would make the pozole. It was the only dish that passed through the restaurant without ever going on the menu. It was passed through the restaurant entirely because we all wanted to eat it all the time. It’s still the best pozole I’ve ever had.