Chef Flynn McGarry Is Leveling Up—With A Little Help From Isabella Rosselini

New York Chef Flynn McGarry spent his summer preparing to launch a highly anticipated fine-dining restaurant called Cove, which opens this month on Houston Street in West SoHo. But for a big chunk of June and July, he did that prep from luscious rural fields on Long Island, shuttling between town and country and occasionally making construction decisions while multitasking. “On Friday, I was out here literally cutting lobsters open on FaceTime,” he said, “being like, ‘Put the tile there.’ ”

It was a Saturday in July, and McGarry was walking through Isabella Rossellini’s 28-acre Mama Farm in Brookhaven, through the pens of chickens and cows and chirping birds. Since putting down roots there to grow herbs and vegetables for Cove, he’s gotten so tight with the dozens of goats that he was on a first-name basis with at least one of them. “That’s Gertrude Stein,” he said, pointing.

But he wasn’t out there to hang with livestock. Rossellini, who founded the farm in 2013, invited McGarry to set up shop on her property in March after befriending him at Gem, his former restaurant in the city. Through the summer he tested menus for Cove, staging ambitious multicourse extravaganzas served en plein air at dusk, with no light but the setting sun, dessert arriving as darkness settled in. The dinners were small, a dozen people each night—including his girlfriend, Amanda Lee Burkett, and on one occasion Alec Baldwin. (The guest list for Cove’s splashy opening was under wraps at press time, but other devotees of McGarry’s cooking include Dries Van Noten, Daniel Boulud, and Maria Sharapova, and one of his backers is Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack investor, George Loening.) McGarry wants his team to spend a lot of time on the farm and bottle the energy so it can be felt even when you’re sitting for a tasting menu in the middle of Manhattan. “There’s trees, there’s water, it’s everywhere,” he said. “We’ll bring our cooks out here. You become so thirsty for it.”

Cove is McGarry’s first big-budget, super-snazzy, going-for-four-sparklers restaurant, which on paper is wildly impressive—he’s just 26, well short of the age when most chefs graduate from grunt work to starter concept to the big leagues. But McGarry’s actually a decade and a half into his career, having gotten his start as a pint-size 12-year-old who went viral for his YouTube cooking displays and got a profile in The New Yorker with the headline “Prodigy.” He opened the small but ambitious Forsyth Street spot Gem in 2018 and then followed it with a wine bar nearby—all before he could legally drink. They’ve since closed, but he maintains Gem Home, a cookware store and pantry that traffics in items like vintage teapots, tableware, and McGarry’s homemade spice mixes and savory granola, and sells pleasingly creative sandwiches and salads during the day. And now, with Cove, he has a space where he can punch up to the iconic restaurants that he wants to emulate: The French Laundry, Chez Panisse, The River Café.

But on that night in July, there was no external budding restaurateur stress, just the green farm and the enormous red sky and the cavalcade of herb-forward knockout dishes that could one day end up at Cove: chilled cucumber soup with nasturtium, Montauk tuna with tomatoes and verbena, lobster glazed with sour plum served with new potatoes cooked in lobster brains. And it sure is nice to have a place like Mama Farm. While running the tasting menu iteration of Gem, McGarry told me, he needed some pine branches and had to spend $60 a bundle for them in the Flower District. Here, he can pick them up off the ground.

Once the restaurant opens, he’ll truck in hauls of fresh veggies that he can plate that night. “Everyone wants that feeling of like, ‘I’m escaping,’ ” he said. “For Cove, I can say, ‘This was picked this morning, and it’s right on a leaf that we also picked this morning.’”