As a chef, Flynn McGarry is asked fairly often what the most memorable dish of his childhood was. And, as a chef, his answer surprises people. It’s not an elaborate roast his family did every Sunday, a pasta that he mastered at an improbably early age, or some apple pie made from a secret generational recipe. “It’s, like, the chicken salad from Joan’s on Third,” he says, laughing.
Joan’s on Third is a famed grocery store-slash-café in Los Angeles, where McGarry grew up. He went to those kinds of places a lot: for instance, Sqirl in Silver Lake, where you could get jams, cheeses, and bowls along with a French omelette; and Gjusta in Venice Beach, which has a deli, bakery, café, and market. Then he moved to New York City. Suddenly, he couldn’t find a passable equivalent: a casual place where you could order a salad at a counter to eat there, or grab some prepared foods to take home, or just do some shopping—for artisanal jams, gourmet olive oils, antique flatware or ceramics made by local artists. “It’s not quite a full restaurant, but it’s also not quite a full retail store,” McGarry explains. (He points out Roman and Williams’s RW Guild, where a homewares store operates alongside buzzy restaurant La Mercerie, as the closet example.)
The idea long sat at the back of his mind as he ran the fine-dining restaurant Gem and casual Gem Wine, both of which garnered critical acclaim and a cult following among the downtown Manhattan set. Then, at Gem, he found himself switching out his serviceware and plates to correspond with the seasons, traveling quarterly to source antique items from Connecticut and Hudson Valley and hosting lowkey tag sales when it was time for a refresh. “It really felt like another way to connect with our audience who came to the restaurant and maybe loved a fork—and now they can buy it for their house,” he says. Eventually, his most loyal clientele started asking the same thing: When was he going to turn this into something?
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