Flynn McGarry’s biography is, for lack of a better word, absurd. At 11, the budding chef launched a pop-up supper club from his family’s home, in Los Angeles. By 16, he was apprenticing at Michelin-starred restaurants in Oslo and New York, and three years later, in 2018, he opened his first permanent restaurant, Gem, on New York’s Lower East Side. That same year, a documentary about this remarkable journey, Chef Flynn, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
Now the 26-year-old is getting ready to debut his biggest project yet: Cove, a mainly vegetarian, California-inspired fine-dining restaurant opening in New York’s Hudson Square on October 7. “I have a very high stress tolerance,” he tells me about managing his busy life. “And I take a bath every day.”
Declared a prodigy at 13 in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” McGarry has a youthful genius that has captivated the press ever since. But he says his introduction to cooking “wasn’t this light-bulb moment.” Born in Laurel Canyon and raised in Malibu, McGarry moved to Studio City with his mother and older sister, Paris, at the age of 10, following his parents’ divorce. He began cooking as a way to help his mom. “It became a very difficult thing for her to do on top of raising kids,” he explained. It also provided a distraction from the anxiety of the separation and the move. “Everyone needs an outlet.”
As he began attempting increasingly complicated recipes, McGarry’s mother understood that her Martha Stewart cookbooks weren’t going to cut it. For his birthday, she brought him to a bookstore and let him pick any title he wished. “Being a 10-year-old, I wanted the one that was the most expensive and wrapped in plastic,” he recalls, picking up Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook. He began working his way through the book, and then through Alinea, his other favorite, from the chef behind the Chicago restaurant of the same name. But the ingredients and equipment he needed were increasingly expensive.
In 2011, his mom agreed to turn their house into a supper club, called Eureka, serving 8-to-10-course dinners to family friends—chefs such as John Sedlar, and actors like Dan Byrd—in the living room for $50 a person. A year later, he’d convinced his family to let him be home-schooled, landed an unpaid job at Ray’s and Stark Bar, the now shuttered restaurant inside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and started charging $160 a head at Eureka, where he served dishes like the “McGarry Beet Wellington.”
Still too young to be paid legally, McGarry spent the next few years staging at Alma in Los Angeles, Eleven Madison Park in New York, Maaemo in Oslo, and Geranium in Copenhagen, where he discovered the blending of high-quality food and casual-dining culture. And he fell in love with the discipline necessary to run a fine-dining restaurant, finding peace in a rigor that might, to others, feel punishing. “There’s so much control in the chaos,” he says. “The stressful kitchens are the disorganized ones.”
His real independence came in 2015, when he passed the California High School Equivalency Exam, allowing him to finish high school early and move to New York, where he reopened Eureka as a pop-up in the West Village.
Three years later, at 19, he opened Gem, a Scandinavian restaurant complete with wooden interiors and a tasting menu featuring a grilled lobster tail with apricot barbecue sauce and ramp tortellini in Parmesan-and-caramelized-onion broth. In 2022, McGarry opened Gem Wine next door, a more laid-back wine bar serving small, homey plates.
But New Yorkers didn’t get it. “We had a wine bar with a line down the block, and then we had this tasting restaurant with half the seats empty,” he says. Many balked at Gem’s $155 price tag, while others struggled to grasp the difference between the two businesses.
Still, McGarry held his ground, believing that New Yorkers could warm to the polished yet relaxed environment he’d curated, inspired by Copenhagen hot spots like Pompette and the now closed Manfreds. Last fall, he expanded with Gem Home, a hybrid of a home-goods store, café, and grocery in Nolita that reflected his tastes in food, design, and Danish culture. But it came with new frustrations. “The thing that makes a Copenhagen café is the energy. And when you come here and ruin the energy, it’s no longer that,” he says of the endless crowds of Gen Z–ers eager to camp out there with their computers.
When it comes to food, McGarry realized, New York is unlike any other city. “We want people to come get the experience that we’re trying to give them,” he says. “But people come here with an idea of the experience they want, and it’s so massively different from ours. It’s a delicate balance, and we’re still working on it. ” Last spring, he shuttered Gem and Gem Wine, ready for a new chapter. (Gem Home continues to operate out of its Nolita location, which McGarry lives above with his girlfriend of three years, the fashion writer and publicist Amanda Lee Burkett.)
With Cove, McGarry is bringing together everything he’s learned over the past decade. “I’ve now been working professionally in kitchens for 14 years,” he says. The name is a nod to Paradise Cove, the Malibu beach near where he grew up, and the restaurant will showcase the ingredients he grows on his plot on his friend Isabella Rossellini’s Long Island farm. Guests can choose between an eight-course prix fixe, à la carte dishes, and a family-style dinner.
McGarry says time—and 10 years of therapy—has prepared him for this leap. “I’m really good at creating small moments that reset everything,” he says. But he also knows his limits. “If I add one more thing, it might all break. I’d start to not enjoy it because I’d be running around all day instead of doing what I love—being in the restaurant.”
Jeanne Malle is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
