Cove, chef Flynn McGarry’s new restaurant, emerged from a relatable New York reality: real estate.
“Two and a half years ago, we were nearing the end of our lease at Gem and kind of had to start thinking, what am I gonna do next?” says McGarry, seated in the airy dining room at Cove a few weeks before its public opening. Gem, the fine-dining tasting menu restaurant that he opened at the age of 19, and sister bar Gem Wine, have since closed — making way for the young chef’s next chapter.
“I took some time to reflect on what I really wanted to change from Gem, what I thought could be better,” adds McGarry, now 26, who still runs his design and cafe concept Gem Home in NoLIta. “And really landed on this idea that we needed more space, we needed more flexibility, we needed these things to be able to be around for a while.”
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He found more space in the SoHo-adjacent Hudson Square neighborhood. Cove has three distinct yet connected dining spaces, dedicated to different styles of dining while offering the flexibility to pivot based on shifts in demand. The open kitchen serves as the room’s focal point as chefs work in clear view of diners, facilitating a dialogue throughout the meal as they deliver dishes to the tables.
It’s the morning after the first friends and family service, and the kitchen team is currently unpacking fresh produce from the local greenmarket and discussing a dish planned for that evening’s menu incorporating tomato, raspberry and bush basil.
“I went to the market today and changed [it],” McGarry says. “We’ve got these amazing tomatoes at the end of the season, and there’s raspberries that I didn’t think were gonna show up,” he adds. “I wanted to create the menus to allow for that sort of spontaneity.”
The “kitchen room” will offer Cove’s eight-course tasting menu, while the main dining room will serve an a la carte menu more geared toward sharing and larger format dishes. There’s some crossover between the two menus — like a fluke crudo — but the culinary approach remains the same: market-driven, sourced in close collaboration with farmers and from McGarry’s own garden on Long Island.
Cove is an evolution, not a departure, from Gem, so it makes sense that McGarry is bringing over some favorite dishes from that project, like the vegetable schnitzel. The fall version at Cove is composed with cheese pumpkin served with mushrooms, pickled ramps and chives with traditional schnitzel sauce. Other dishes for fall include grilled eggplant with truffle, wild rice and dashi, and lobster with chanterelles, new potatoes and chamomile.
On a wall in the main dining room, McGarry points out a large painting of a flowering chamomile plant. It’s one of many same-size paintings of wildflowers lining every wall, all created by McGarry’s friend Frederik Nystrup-Larsen. “ We had him come out to our farm in Long Island, so they’re all the flowers that were growing from the farm,” McGarry says of the cohesive artwork.
The chef designed the entire interior of the restaurant himself, and worked alongside an architect to realize his vision. The room features large windows facing the quiet side street and wood-slat ceilings that reveal the building’s raw space. “You’re still aware that we’re in a glass and concrete building. So it kind of feels like a restaurant within a space,” McGarry says.
It’s the only hint of the raw concrete space that McGarry has since transformed into a Scandi-inspired room anchored in warm wood furniture, built by Grainwood Studio, cozy pendant lighting and botanical design accents. Each table is decorated with a small ceramic vase of wildflowers and a flickering pillar candle, and additional wildflower arrangements around the room add texture. Ceramic tableware is all custom, and available to purchase at Gem Home.
While McGarry has established his career in New York, the restaurant nods to his childhood in Paradise Cove, Calif., where he began cooking in earnest as a young teen.
“A big stepping back idea of this restaurant is how do you look at East Coast produce and ingredients with a California mindset,” he says. “And a lot of it is sourcing, a lot of it is working with specific farmers,” he continues. “And then same with the space: I wanted it to feel very airy, and like you could be in the Bay Area. You could be upstate. You could be kind of anywhere.”
But with a vision distinctly McGarry’s own, diners will be very aware that they are somewhere more specific: Cove at 285 West Houston Street.
