19 Year-Old Chef Opened A NYC Restaurant With A $155 Tasting Menu

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Today we are at the Gem, the restaurant at the 116 of Forsyth St, here in New York and we are going to interview Flynn McGarry, a very special to do not say unic, professionist in the gastronomy field. Flynn runs on his own, a successfull, unic restaurant in New York and The Metropolitan wants to inform its readers about this place in town.

Lars: Good afternoon Flynn, thank you for receiving us for this interview.

Flynn: Thanks to you, Lars. It’s my pleasure.

Lars: Flynn, can you tell to our readers, how your amazing restaurant, the Gem, is born?

Flynn: Well, i cannot give a linear answer to this, let’s say i didn’t want to open a restaurant. I don’t like restaurants. I think restaurants are cold and robotic and they don’t feel comfortable. I always wanted a place that feels like you’re just in my house. So I designed it to feel like my house.

The restaurant is called Gem, which is my mom’s name, Backwards. It was also her idea. I started by doing these dinners in my mom’s house. So sort of an image of what those dinners felt like and were. But also, we’re sort of hidden behind these trees on the little street that, like, you would walk down and you could walk right by it and not even know we were here. I started cooking, and when I was ten, I think probably the first memory cooking actually ever was like Mother’s Day. And I was like, Oh, I’m going to make like brunch for everyone. And I made like chicken salad or something. But I was like, I’m going to, like, poach the chicken or do something different with it. And it felt very fancy at the time. But then I just sort of became obsessed with sort of the more kind of intricate and creative side of cooking. When I started cooking, my my mom was like, okay, we’ll go get you like a cookbook. She took me like burns and over or whatever, and I was ten.

So I wanted the most expensive thing that was on the top shelf. So I got the French Laundry cookbook and that just sort of like initially blew my mind as far as like, what cooking was. So I found him at Alinea because he used to work at French Laundry. Then I got that cookbook and loved Madison Park. It was the same thing. They love Madison Park, sort of internship. I met them on their book signing tour. I was talking about how I had been sort of cooking some things from the book. And then I go, Do you have any photos of it? And I showed them photos of the stuff that I had cooked, and it looked surprisingly like like the book. They were like, If you ever want to come sort of hang out in the kitchen in New York, let us know. And then like a month later, I made my way here. I was free labor, so everyone was down to have it. I mean, the general thing with restaurants at that level was just the absurd attention to detail with everything that you learn. And that is something that I’ve kind of stayed with me of.

Like everything I do in every regard is kind of thought all the way through. You’re aware? Yeah, nothing’s been perfect, but still having the strive for that helps you wake up way too early every day and go to bed way too late every day. The beet dish has been on the menu for like three years now. That’s the only thing that won’t leave. It was sort of inspired by this one, a feeling that I hate beats and to this sort of want for giving someone the most savory, intense course on their menu is a vegetable trips a lot of people out intentionally. The best dishes are the ones that people are just like, I don’t understand what that was, but it was delicious. I stopped going to school actually when I was like 15. I had a full time job since I was 12. I’ve never really focused too much on like being I need to have like a normal teenage experience because I just literally never had no desire to do that. My investors and everyone would not be super happy if I was just like, Yeah, I’m going to take some time off the restaurant to like go play video games. Like the issues and stuff that qualms and stuff that I deal with are those of someone who is definitely not 19. I knew everyone was always going to talk about my age and like, Do I love that? Not really, but it’s something that I always knew I was going to have to deal with if I wanted to do this. Being young definitely sort of helps you get a lot of opportunities, but then once you get those, people seem to have much higher expectations for what you can do than that of a normal person, regardless of their age.

A big thing for me is sort of dealing with having to pull back from the actual cooking myself and focus more on the bigger picture. I’m a control freak in every regard. There’s not a single thing in this restaurant that I will let go by without me looking at it. It’s a blessing and a curse. We didn’t want to compromise the experience and the overall vision that we have for your dinner by being cheap or not being not giving you the best quality of every ingredient and not being able to hire the right amount of staff so you feel comfortable. We also have a sense of humor about ourselves and understand what we do is very absurdist and over the top. So we like to also have fun. We spend literally 18 hours a day together, six days a week, so I have to like them so I could not hire people that I don’t like because I would just hate it for so long. This has been the goal. And now that I’ve kind of reached this point, it’s sort of the restaurant dictates what’s next and I’m just sort of along for the ride. I did go to Coachella a couple of years ago to cook, but I was not a fan.

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