In this episode, we speak with chef Flynn McGarry about balancing personal vision and public demand, the many meanings of sustainability, and the common ground between fine dining and fine art.

Podcast produced by Ryan Leahey
Original theme music by Kasper Bjørke
Photographs by Clement Pascal

Landon Metz:
What's up, Flynn? How are you?

Flynn McGarry:
Good! Sorry I'm a little late – there’s a leaky faucet I had to very quickly deal with.

LM:
At home?

FM:
Oh no, at Gem. So I’m kind of running back and forth.

LM:
Do you live near the restaurant?

FM:
Yeah, I live two blocks away.

LM:
Oh sick. That's extremely convenient.

FM:
Yeah. I don't really know how I could do it without that.

LM:
Totally. Where were you upstate this weekend?

FM:
I had to find a bunch of rocks for this new dish, so I went to Harriman State Park and brought back eight tote bags of river rocks. I don't know if it's illegal, but it definitely feels illegal when you're doing it.

LM:
Well, you'll find out now. [laughs]

FM:
I mean, yeah. There's a lot of rocks. I didn't take all of them, but there's definitely a feeling when you're lugging a bunch of tote bags full of rocks and a hiker looks at you like, “What the hell are you doing?”

LM:
Were you solo?

FM:
I went with my girlfriend, and she was like, “This is maybe one of the stranger things that I've been a part of.” But it was so nice out yesterday that I was like, “I have to get these rocks and you can just enjoy being outside in the sun.” Harriman is a great place to go for a hike, too. I use every time I want to hike, and I always come back with some piece of wood or a rock or something.

LM:
What's the dish you’re using the stones for?

FM:
We started working with this very intense forager woman who just kind of brings this stuff every week, and the idea is that we’re cooking all these wild things that come from the basin of a river. There's all these small, wild plants, and essentially you cook them yourself on the warm rocks.

LM:
Whoa, beautiful! Who is this woman who's foraging for you?

FM:
Her name is Tama. She sends me a lot of text messages from the field and is like, “Do you want this?” It’s such a cool profession to me, for that to be her job. Literally, she just goes into the woods, and you don't really tell her what you need, because she just goes out and it's like, “Oh, there's a bunch of this and there's a bunch of this.” So right now is kind of the beginning of all that stuff. It’s definitely exciting to start getting some green things in.

LM:
How do you navigate what to agree on bringing back? How do you know it's something that will taste or feel right? Have you just let them do their thing and then figured it out afterwards?

FM:
You know, it's one of those things where it's like, 90% is good. The other 10%, you figure out to do something else with, but you wouldn't get the 90% if you didn't get all of it. I deal with that a lot, where there are people who are just like, “This is what I have.” You have to work with it, and it ends up being a good challenge sometimes.

LM:
Cool. Is she the sole forager you're working with? Is there a crew?

FM:
She has a pretty big crew and then she brings it all together. I do my own small amounts, but as I even saw yesterday, going upstate for the morning is always just the biggest pain in the ass, because it's 45 minutes to get there and then it took two hours somehow to get back. So every time I think, “I should be doing this more often,” I end up realizing, “This actually takes a full day.”

LM:
Yeah. Definitely. I mean, it's a beautiful day. It’s a really nice way to spend your time.

FM:
I would love to have one day a week to go into the woods and come out with some stuff. But right now, it's not really what’s in the cards for me, unfortunately.

LM:
What’s occupying most of your time, then? What are you doing on the day-to-day?

FM:
So especially now with the wine bar, which we just started doing seven days a week…

LM:
So you have no days off right now.

FM:
I have no days off. It's obviously simpler than the restaurant, so I have a little bit of flexibility. yesterday, I did upstate and then I popped in for a little bit and then popped out. But right now, we’re training the new staff. We also go through so much more wine than we were before, so a lot of my job now is actually going to wine tastings and buying wine - which doesn't really sound work, but it's actually the most exhausting part, because you have to taste 45 wines at 11AM and then somehow do the rest of your day. You spit the wine out, but you're still like, “I could go to sleep.” So that takes up a lot of time. Then, at the restaurant, we're about to change our entire menu next week, so most of my day is trying out new dishes. We also change the whole space every time we do a new menu. So it's trying out new dishes, figuring out the wine pairing for it, and then we change out all of our artwork every season, we change out our ceramics, our fabrics. Everything changes each season. And then, you know, a faucet breaks and I have to go fix a faucet. So it's a very wide-ranging group of things that get done every single day.

Christopher Schreck:
Are you still cooking each day at the restaurant?

FM:
I cook at night at the restaurant. We have a team that preps and they're all the cooks. During the day, I'm usually doing everything else, and then come five o'clock, I'm in the actual kitchen with them, making all the food for the guests. Gem’s only open four days a week, which is why I think I can do all the rest of this stuff. I look at my week as a split, where I have four days where I have to be there for certain hours, and then the rest of the week can be used for getting all these other things done. But it is a seven-day week, not a five-day week.

LM:
Dude, you need a day to rest.

FM:
It’s one of those things where it's like, “When it rains, it pours.” But I knew this was coming, that all of these things were somehow going to hit the exact same time. Every year, I try to get better at not having everything at the same time, but it's tricky because we work within so many factors as well: we have to change the menu at a certain point, depending on the season and what's available and where we're at in it. For example, we have 16 employees, and the reason we changed the wine bar at this exact time was because one of them was out of town for a month and it was right when they came back. So as much as I can try to arrange things perfectly, I'm only one element in the giant scope of elements. When we do these new menus and change out the space, I would love to change the space the week before rather than on the same day that we're making a whole new menu, but it always happens where our painter can't come until Saturday, and all of these little details that play together. But it’s fine. After having this restaurant for five years, I know that as much as I can try to have everything done sequentially, I’ll always have one of those days where it's from 7:00 in the morning until 11:00 at night, and there’s something to be done every 30 minutes.

LM:
I think that's just part of pushing yourself to the parameters of what's possible for your project. Every time I have an exhibition, I feel exactly the same way: You plan for a year or whatever, and then the week before is going to be insane no matter what, because you're trying to find the parameters of what's possible for what you're doing. Eventually, something's going to break down, and you have to ride the wave.

FM:
Yeah. It’s not you're not doing anything before, either. You're doing the bulk of the work before, and then you’re executing. That's how restaurants work: You spend all this time preparing, and then you have this very intense period of execution. And it works that on a night-to-night basis, but also on a yearly schedule. We spend January, February, March preparing, and April through November is when you have everything to cook, everything to do. So you spend this time preparing and getting your room ready, but then when it's happening, it's happening, and like you said, you have to ride that wave and be like, “I can have a day off when this is done,” which gets it done quicker. I'm not the kind of person who can have a crazy list of things that need to get done and be like, “You know what? Today I'm going do nothing.” That’s very hard for me to do.

LM:
Yeah. I feel the nights cooking at Gem must have a kind of live performative element to it for you, where you’re really embodying your art – but then that seems to be juxtaposed by all the necessary delegation of running the business. How do you find that balance between your language and your art form, your craft? Just given the pragmatic realities of running two restaurants simultaneously, seven days a week, how do you delegate something that you hold so dear to yourself?

FM:
I mean, it's the hardest part of food as an art form. It’s one of the most complicated forms, because you make something, and then you have to make it again, 40 times a night, four days a week. If you make a piece of art, furniture, a film, whatever, you make it once and that's it. It exists as this singular piece, whereas food is really complicated, because you create this piece – a dish, a menu, a space – and then you have to execute it the same way. You can kind of tweak it as you do, but I said, it’s 40 times a night, four nights a week - and you're not the one executing it. That’s always been very hard for me, and I think that's why I end up working so much, is that there really isn't a way not to micromanage in this kind of environment. We have a great team of cooks, and I'd love to be like, “I have this great team of cooks. I show them the dish and then I let them do it,” but there are so many little nuances that change every single day that unless I am there, that one thing that gets missed unravels the whole art form. That’s what’s really difficult to grapple with. It’s like, if someone puts a little too much lemon juice in this thing, or not enough, or a little bit too much salt, then this dish that you spent weeks perfecting is now ruined, and now the guest eating it doesn't appreciate it, and thinks it’s bad. I can't think of another art form that is that insanely delicate, where you could make it perfect a hundred times and if it’s not perfect one of those times, it’s entirely lost. The entire vision of it is gone.

LM:
Do you think that's just because New York City is an incredibly unforgiving audience? Or is that just the nature of the form?

FM:
Obviously, the unforgiving audience is part of it, but I also mean it in a literal sense. If you create this thing that's supposed to be this exact way, even if they don't realize that a little element is off, the whole idea of the dish is off. In the past, that caused me a lot of - not full-form depression, because it's really just food, but some of the hardest nights I've had at the restaurant is when I'll be like, “Can you make me one of these dishes?” and something is off in it and it just falls completely flat. That is how delicate food is, and that’s why I have to pay so much attention to everything. I mean, I eat the menu once a week at Gem, I eat the wine bar menu probably once a week also, and every single time there’s something that needed a little bit more salt, or needed a little less. As a cook, that is what's frustrating: while you're making it, you're trying all the individual components, but you can never really understand until you eat the whole thing. So that's where it gets really hard to perform at a certain level, because there are so many elements. So I think me being there during the service is me really making sure that every single thing reflects what it’s supposed to. It’s also very frustrating because you have a team of people who can understand a certain amount of what you're going for, but they'll never understand the full spectrum of what you want every little detail to be in the space, in the food, in the service, in everything. I think the only way to really deal with it is like, I’ve just gotten to a place where there's a lot of sacrifice. You just kind of have to give up a certain level of control to focus on what matters.

CS:
Landon's question about an unforgiving audience seems like a valid consideration, too, because I'm sure many people are happy to recognize food preparation as an art form in theory, but when they become paying customers, suddenly there's this line drawn, where it's a service now as well. They feel a right to assert their preferences and expect to be accommodated in a way that maybe an audience at a play or a concert might not. I mean, that's an interesting question to me, is how you navigate people's expectations. For instance, given the fact that you're presenting a fixed-price tasting menu, how do you accommodate dietary restrictions?

FM:
Yeah. I mean, I think about this all the time. It's like, if you go see a movie or an art show or a play, and you don't the art, your first idea is like, “It's not for me.” There are those who are just like, “That is bad,” but usually there's a lot more nuance, where it’s like, “Other people this. It may not just be for me.” That does not exist in restaurants. I feel that with certain restaurants or places I go, but the normal diner does not go to a restaurant and accept that maybe it’s just not for them. It just is “bad.” And I think that’s where the “discerning customer” thing is really annoying, because the majority of the people who have come to Gem and don't like it, it's just not for them. They walk away being like, “I wish I had this, and I wish I had that,” or “I could have used a big steak at the end of the meal” – and it's like, “Why did you go to this restaurant, then? If you know that you're not going get that, and then you’re going be disappointed, then why did you do that?”

Even in in the way of dietary restrictions, we spend I would say 75% of our day making menus for people with restrictions, because if we didn't, I really think we'd be half-empty every night, judging by the amount of people that have restrictions. It just gets to a place where it's like, once again, “Why are you coming here?” Like, the other night, there was someone who was allergic to gluten, allergic to dairy, allergic to eggs, and doesn't eat processed oil, doesn't eat tomatoes or potatoes or fermented ingredients or onions - and that's our whole menu right now. If you're gluten-free or you're dairy-free, we can make a menu for you. That’s fine. It’s an allergy, we will accommodate you - or if you're vegetarian, we can accommodate that. But with so many different restrictions, we actually can't even accommodate that. We'd have to go buy different ingredients to make an entirely different menu.” They ended up coming anyway and being like, “We’ll just do some of those things.” But that’s also hard, because we're trying to give you this idea of a version of our menu, but for the past few months, we've been serving a menu where every dish is fish and shellfish. So we're giving you a vegetarian menu that has no gluten, no dairy, no onions. We’re pulling things together to try to make it, and that's where it gets tricky. I even feel bad saying it, but I almost wanted to charge extra if you have an allergy, because it is so much extra work for us. We make our menu, and then we have four to eight full separate menus for people with allergies. So every night we make an onion sauce, we have to make that sauce the normal way, with gluten and dairy, and then we have to make a gluten-free one, a dairy-free one, one with no nuts, one with no this, one with no that, a vegetarian one. So why, as someone who can't eat anything, do you go to the one kind of restaurant where this is an issue? Like, you go to a normal restaurant, you accept what they can give you. You go to a tasting menu, and we have to accommodate what you want. It just it really perplexes me, because even when we try to say no to allergies, people really don't like that — and the second you allow one, you have to allow all of them. 

LM:
What was it about the tasting menu medium that attracted you? Why was that an alluring proposition for you?

FM:
It's honestly a lot of details. To me, it was like, “We can actually paint a real picture.” Behind every menu, there's an idea, and it's supposed to come out through the whole menu. It changes all the time, with different seasons, but the idea is that it's supposed to paint a realistic picture of what the full season looks like. The way the menu moves is you start with the ingredients that are just coming and you finish with the ingredients that are just at the end, so you're seeing this full spectrum of the tri-state area where there are different weathers. Right now, everything that’s new is coming from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, because you're south and it's warmer there; then you move towards the end of the menu, and it's all these preserved root vegetables from all the way upstate New York, where there are still 10 inches of snow. So these ideas are what’s exciting and inspiring to me, and it feels I'm actually creating something.

LM:
You’re storytelling.

FM:
Yeah.

LM:
And it’s not even just the menu – it’s in the restaurant itself, the decor.

FM:
Yeah. My sister, who works with me, has gotten really into creating these menus at the end that actually tell the story, so when you leave, you can take them and they have a picture of what you ate, where it kind of explains it to you if you didn't really get it from the beginning of the meal.

To me, a tasting menu is the only way that you can create a whole space. You have the timing down, you have all these things down, and what proved that to me was right in the beginning of when we could reopen from COVID. We decided not to reopen with a tasting menu, because the borders were all closed and 60% of our clientele at the time were European tourists. So we were like, “Okay, we have to make a change. The people who want to go to the tasting menu are not in New York right now. We have to do something that's for the neighborhood.” So we reopened as an a la carte restaurant. We did that for six months, and it was really fascinating to me (and why Gem Wine happened), because there was 10 to 20 times the interest in what we were doing when we were a la carte, because people love a low-barrier entry.

At certain points in the summer, we were literally doing 5,000 people on the waiting list for a Wednesday night, whereas with the tasting menu - arguably making much better food and a much better experience for not much more money - we can have a very slow Wednesday night. It was funny, because it’s like, “Okay, this is what everyone wants us to do. Everyone wants us to do this a la carte thing.” But then we started getting all the wrong people, because we were an a la carte menu serving the food that I make, which can be a little bit more complicated and can be expensive, since we want to work with the best produce and the best fish. So we're getting all these people who are mad because they’d now put the restaurant in the category of a normal restaurant, where you go in and expect you can get a myriad of things that we don't offer - and we kind of pride ourselves on the fact that you can't get everything here, because we have everything that's good. We’ve figured it out. Even for the a la carte menu, we had 10 dishes, and it was like, “This everything that we want to serve right now. This is what's in season. This is what's best.” But then you get all these people who are like, “Oh, I don't really these things.” We had one main course, and it'd be duck, and someone's like, “Oh, I don't eat duck, “and I'm like, “Well, you can order other things, but I'm sorry.” So it ended up being this very frustrating time - and we were also making less money, because we were exerting so much energy having to make all of these dishes every night, and then people would show up and order the same three things, things they saw on Instagram. It wasn’t soul-crushing, but it was just kind of like, “This is not what this is meant to be.” I could feel it in the room. Gem was always supposed to be this space to appreciate things at their highest quality, and now we had a bunch of people who are not actually appreciating what they're meant to. They're appreciating value, or hype - all of these things that we don’t care about. All we sold was the cheapest wine. It was just such an interesting change to see, where people were now putting us in the box of a normal restaurant. So then we were like, “Okay, no. We're going back.” The borders to Europe opened, and I was like, “I want to go back to the tasting menu and have it be more focused.” It's funny: We were an a la carte restaurant for six months in the process of the city reopening, and still to this day, people book a reservation, we confirm 15 times that it's a tasting menu, and they show up and they're like, “Oh, I thought it was a la carte.” I'm like, “It was - two and a half years ago.” It’s just this weird thing, the perception of a space once you let it go into the world. That's why I was like, “Okay, I want to stop this, “because we were just leaning into this world of restaurants that I don't really want to be associated with.

LM:
Do you feel Gem Wine provided a positive solution to that problem?

FM:
Yeah. To me, the idea with Gem Wine was like, “Okay, people want us to make an a la carte menu, so we need to make a space that lends itself to experiencing the food and focusing on the wine in a way that works a lot easier.” We don't take reservations there, and it's under the guise of being a wine bar. We make food, and you eat a full dinner, but the idea is that it's a wine bar. It's chill.

LM:
Yeah, it's more a social experience, to just go have a glass of wine and some food. I think a tasting menu is going to a show, you know? You have a different kind of presence and energy, and it occupies people's psychic space in a really different way before they even show up.

FM:
Yeah.

LM:
who do you think is your ideal audience then for Gem?

FM:
I think our ideal audience, which we've almost landed a little bit, is people who are really interested to see a new way of experiencing something and want a little bit of refuge from the New York dining scene. I think there’s this idea that Gem is not also a traditional fine dining restaurant. There are so many in New York that are incredibly stuffy and have this really crazy style of service, and we've never wanted to be that. I’ve wanted it to be this place that's a refuge from both. We offer a lot of luxury in space and the way that you experience the restaurant, where there's not someone three inches away from you and we're not trying to turn your table in 30 minutes, but we're also not trying to be a restaurant where it's dead silent and there's white tablecloths and there's a really intense server that's going to make you feel uncomfortable.

Obviously, Gem is not a place that you're going to go once a week, but the idea is it exists there to be that meal when you’re like, “You know, I really just want to have a night tonight where I can enjoy myself and experience something and I don't really have to work for it.” I feel that way and with certain restaurants in New York, there's a restaurant Torishin, an old Yakitori restaurant in Midtown West, and for me, that's my version of what I want Gem to be for people. It’s like, “I'm going to go sit at this counter. I'm going to be served a hundred pieces of chicken. I'm not going to choose it and I can just live in the moment in this beautiful space with a back garden and really appreciate something like a craft. I can watch this man make something really perfect and drink the most perfectly cold beer and be like, “Everything is working here.” My favorite dining experiences have been that, where it's this way to just kind of be able to relax, but not in a boring way. You're still intrigued, and there's a level of discovery within the meal.

LM:
There’s a casualness to the mechanics of Gem that reminds me of fine dining experiences I've had in Scandinavia. You lived in Copenhagen for a bit, right?

FM:
I lived in Copenhagen and in Oslo.

LM:
Did you take anything away from that time there that you brought to Gem?

FM:
I would argue that I took everything away from my ime there to bring to Gem. [laughs] It really kind of blew my mind when I went there, and even before I went there. Growing up, I went to these Michelin three-star French restaurants in the United States, and I was like, “Oh my God, these are the kinds of places that I want to work at!” Then I went and worked at them, and I really felt like, “This is not for me. This is not the kind of space that I want to be in.” The stuffiness made me uncomfortable, and the style of people I was working with were really aggro and didn't really resonate with me. Then I went to Scandinavia and I was like, “Oh, they understand a different idea of luxury than I think this old-school fine dining understands.”

LM:
There's a lot less classism in Scandinavia. It translates to design, too. I think there’s a certain caliber of human experience that everyone just kind of genuinely seems to expect or believe is available to the general public. “Luxury” is actually a weird word for it; it's just that there's a sense of quality that’s kind of embedded and baked into most experiences.

FM:
But that's what I mean. There, the idea of “luxury” is just quality. It's not the pomp and circumstance that we think of as luxury, which ends up all being irrelevant and awkward. I remember this one thing that’s been drilled in my brain ever since I saw it happen. It was the first time I went to Noma; I was 16 and I went by myself. This was right when I’d gotten to Scandinavia and hadn't really fully assimilated. I was sitting there in the restaurant, the sun was beaming in, and I saw one of the servers stand on a chair and close the blinds. And I remember thinking that every other fancy restaurant would literally shoot you in your face if you stood on a chair or did anything that that feels like it's just your house. I feel like there’s just such an understanding in that culture, where it’s like, “What is important?” And in that moment, it was like, “Okay, what's important is the guests have sun in their eyes. I can either just stand on this chair and get it done quickly, or I could go get a nice step stool and do the whole thing, but then they’d have sun in their eyes for another five minutes.” It's the same thing as how all Danish design is functional. It's functional service and functional restaurants. I think that’s been the biggest thing that I took away from my time there, is how to get rid of these certain elements that you were taught were necessary, but are actually not functional. They're the opposite; they take you more time for a not-better result – which, in America, is what all of our fine dining restaurants are built around. Here, it’s this idea that you take the extra time, you do the extra thing, and because you're doing it, it's worth more, instead of just being like, “Why would we do that? We can give you a better experience if I don't do all these extra things. You'll enjoy yourself more, and the experience will move itself along better.” You’re not being like, “Oh my God, these people are doing everything with this crazy attention.” And I think that casual aspect of fine dining is really just being like, “Okay, why do we have to do that when we could just do it a little bit easier, but then give you this better product.”

LM:
Rene took that unraveling to the next level and just decided to close Noma Copenhagen.

CS:
Well, I was going to say: I would be curious to hear your thoughts on their closing, because with all of these positive aspects that you're talking about, when he decided to shut things down, he grounded that decision in terms of a “lack of sustainability” - not only in terms of ingredients, but more in terms of the treatment of workers, the culture that kind of dining engenders, the hours and skills required. Did you take any anything away from his decision to shut things down along those terms?

FM:
Yeah. I mean, the new Noma is very different than even the first time I went there. There's ten times the staff. They went all out for the three stars. But I think that I would argue that every form of a restaurant currently is pretty unsustainable for someone. I was talking to my friend who works in restaurants last night about how there's this Catch-22 with restaurants, where the restaurant could either have enough staff to get everything done easily - and then, in that case, end up losing money, and then one day have to get rid of all of their staff - or can have to make it work with a smaller staff, but can stick around to continue to pay that staff. You have periods where you're in better shape, periods where you're in worse shape, but that is inherently not sustainable. Every month is different. Every week is different. We try to be as sustainable as possible in our world, and give everyone a four-day work week and pay them really well and give them vacation and all of these things, but someone is always going to make a sacrifice, and I think that the problem is the guest is never the one making the sacrifice. It's either the owner or the employees, because the guests have the option to just say “No.” And I'm not saying that every restaurant needs to charge $100 more, but we’ve got to charge something. It's this really delicate balance. At Gem especially, it's like, if we charged another $50 a person - which would not bankrupt them; they're already spending $150 – but that $50 will deter so many people from coming now, because it's a little bit more expensive. That $50 would give our entire staff healthcare, but the guest is just not willing to make that jump. All I hear all day at the wine bar and at the restaurant is, “It's expensive. It's this, it's this, it's this,” and what I've been so confused about in the restaurant world right now is that everyone's fine paying $23 for a martini, but no one's fine paying $28 for nicely caught fish if it's small. There's this really fucked up cos-to-value perception that guests have right now that I think is going to be the crux of this industry actually being able to move to a sustainable place. I'm not saying that everything needs to get more expensive, necessarily, but the expectation needs to match what you can receive in a realistic way, and until we can all make an agreement on this, nothing's going to change, because it's going to be either bosses taking advantage of employees or the restaurant themselves paying their employees well but the customer not understanding that and being like, “I don't want to spend that extra money” and then the restaurant inevitably not working, which I think is part of the case with Noma. They have made their mission now to be sustainable to their employees, to the whole cycle of that restaurant, and I get it. I would do the same thing as Rene, where you sit down and you go “Okay, if we change our idea of this restaurant to being pop-up-based or whatever, and we can get rid of half of our employees, we can pay that half that's left a really nice salary, make them have a really amazing life, and it's sustainable, but it has to be smaller.” And I think everyone's going to start getting to these places where they have to start making really dramatic changes, which I've seen in New York in normal restaurants. Every restaurant's closing two hours earlier now, and I think that's why I think it's funny that the magnifying glass is so intensely on Noma, as it always is, but really the whole industry is going through this right now. We're all trying to find a way to pay people what they now need to live and also now require. We want to have everyone to have this nice life and have it be a real career - but it hasn't worked like that forever, and now, all of a sudden, we have to be like, “Cool. We need to make this a real business.” But then the customers don't care that we're trying to change. They're like, “What I'm receiving is the same as it was a year ago. Why is the price different?” There's too many moving parts in it. I think it's going to it's going to be a long time until we can actually think of the restaurant industry in the way that the majority of industries work.

LM:
Or they'll just make an Ozempic pill and restaurants won't need to exist anymore.

FM:
Exactly. I mean, honestly, that would save us a lot of time. As long as we get some cut back! [laughs]

LM:
You could have an Ozempic tasting menu. [laughs] So which restaurants are you super into in New York right now? Who's really getting it right, in your opinion?

FM:
For the past few years, there haven't been many restaurants in New York that have really inspired me. There's really little elements in a lot of places. Like I love Four Horsemen in Williamsburg, but they've been around forever and they're just consistent. And then, like I said, this place Torishin is my definition of an ideal New York restaurant. It's quietly existed in Midtown West for 30 years, and it's one of the best experiences. I eat pretty simply when I'm not working, and I want to go somewhere that feels like a kind of refuge, so I avoid the majority of new, very trendy and exciting restaurants. I want to go somewhere that I really just can enjoy the full experience without the chaos of new restaurant hype. So for example, I go to Omen a bunch in SoHo. That restaurant’s been there forever, they know what they're doing, it's really well-designed, and the space feels great. To me, the places in New York that exist and will continue to thrive in longevity are the ones that just don't care about filling a need for something. They just kind of do their little niche. Because the other thing is that we live in a city with so many restaurants that the way I think of it is really based on, “Okay, tonight I want to eat this kind of food,” or “I want this experience and I know the place for that exact thing.” I have my little repertoire of the 20 restaurants that can hit different spots for me - whereas I think we've moved into more this ubiquitous moment where every restaurant tries to fill the same need instead of people opening genuine, specific spaces. That, to me, doesn't feel very New York. New York is about individuality in what you do, and if we have this homogeneous restaurant culture where every restaurant you go, you’re like, “The menus kind of the same here, and I'm kind of receiving the same vibe and wine list,” you're going to get to a place where it’s like, how can you go to five restaurants a week when they're all the same? And not even just the same as in, “Oh, they're all Italian,” but it's like they all kind of serve the same purpose and plan for the night, whereas the three restaurants I just said give me such different things out of them that it's like, when I want to go to one, I know what I want out of my night, I know what I'm going to receive, and then I will just keep with that rotation, which I think is how people have lived in New York forever. I think that now we're getting to a place where five nights a week, people are going to the new trendy restaurant, which I don't think will last because you go to the five in one week, and you like one of them, so then you just go to that one, and the other four you don't.

LM:
New York, baby. There's always something new! [laughs]

FM:
Exactly. There’s  always going to be a new thing, so unless you find your little avenue, you're just going to be forgotten about.

LM:
Yeah, which is also okay. Things can exist for a time and then a new chapter can unfold and that's also just part of life, you know?

FM:
I mean. Exactly. That, to me, is New York. It's like, I live right near Dimes Square or whatever, and in the seven years I've lived in this little neighborhood, it’s flipped over six times, and now is in a really specific place. And that's where New York is right now – it’s in this specific place, and it will adapt and adjust, and the ones that do well and provide a certain thing to a certain crowd of people will continue, and the ones that don't, don't. That’s what makes the city really crazy in its existence, but also consistently interesting.

LM:
Yeah, it doesn't belong to anyone. It's amorphous.

FM:
Yeah.

LM:
What's your what's your hope for Gem? What's the future? What's your dream?

FM:
You know, it's funny. We’re in a in a place where we don't know what the future is, because we have a little over a year and a half left on our Gem lease and (this is the fun New York part) we are in negotiations with our landlord to do a new lease, but once again, we exist to the world and if one person on the co-op board doesn't want us there, this whole idea can change. So it’s a weird time. I can't confidently say what I want it to morph into because there's this blockade in the middle and a chance that we'll have to move it or do something else with it and I'm honestly very open to any of that. If we have to do something else, it’ll be like, “What does that look like?” It’s about allowing it to change, because it's just not in my control. If we have to do it, we have to do it. I think we've found ourselves in this really nice place now, where we've found our real voice, we’ve learned how it works as a business, we’ve found our clientele that continued to support us, the wine bars settling into its own. There’s that thing where it feels nice to be a little bit “figured out,” quote-unquote, but that's always a mirage. It may be figured out right now, but everything’s going to consistently change. So it’s an interesting time to be thinking about what the future of Gem holds, because you start thinking the way that they think about Noma, where it’s like, “Okay, we have this opportunity to make changes.” Regardless of whether they renew our lease or whatever, we have to start thinking of this as either “We're spending another 10 years in this space,” or “We’re moving and going somewhere else.” I think those periods of time where you have to figure out what you're going to do based on someone else's decisions kind of end up being the times where you really can make some real change and really explore new ideas, because you have to do it. You have to perform. You have to make the decision. You can't just be like, “Well, we should do this, but we don't have to.” You get to a place where you need to make the decision, and it may be good, it may be bad, but you have to you have to do something.

LM:
It'll present itself to you. It’s like foraging: Life will just reveal itself to you as it does.

FM:
Exactly. We’ve been here for five years, and in those five years, I've seen that the way things happen and the way they fall into place, it all ends up working out. It all ends up being a learning lesson, and you figure out new things. So I'm excited to see what changes will come. Also, it's crazy to think I opened Gem when I was 19, and at the end of our lease, I will be 27. That is a very different life, that many years apart. It's been really exciting to essentially grow up in and with this restaurant, and grow up in the same way. The ideas that we had when we first opened versus now and the realities are night and day. So I may start looking at this period of Gem as maybe the tail end of the beginning and the beginning of a new chapter. I’m spending a little bit more time reflecting on what these five years have equated to, and how to create something based off of the knowledge of those changes, and what's worked, and what hasn't, because now I have such a much deeper knowledge of that. It's the same feeling I had when we opened the bar: It was so easy to open the bar, because I had this level of confidence that I didn't have when we open Gem. I knew what I wanted it to look like. I knew what I wanted it to feel like. I knew how to file for all the permits and where to get plumbing supplies. I had all of this new knowledge that I hadn't had before, and it was so much easier. You do something and then it's over, and now you have that knowledge, and hopefully the next thing gets a little easier.

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