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.’ ”
Dishes from McGarry’s former restaurant, Gem Wine.Courtesy of Flynn McGarry
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.”