The chef Flynn McGarry was only thirteen years old when he débuted a tasting-menu pop-up in his home town of Los Angeles, in 2012. He was nineteen when the doors opened at Gem, his real-deal restaurant on the Lower East Side, and he was only a couple of years past legal drinking age when he expanded with a wine bar, Gem Wine, which eventually pivoted to become a café-cum-shoppy-shop, Gem Home. Those of us who enjoy the retrospective clarity of adulthood understand that it’s a curse to become famous as a child, to have your still malleable identity and interests forced through the fiery kiln of the public gaze. If McGarry had reached his twenties and decided to abandon the kitchen and never touch a knife again, I don’t think anyone would have blamed him. But he’s twenty-seven now, and still a chef, and with the opening of Cove, his fourth restaurant, this past fall, he’s undertaken his most ambitious project yet.

Flynn McGarry, at twenty-seven, is running his fourth restaurant.

Cove, on West Houston Street, does not mark an especially obvious step into maturity or anything narratively pat like that, because McGarry’s cooking and his businesses have never really had so much as a hint of childishness to begin with. What was both unique and fascinating about his time as a wunderkind was that, even in the earliest days, when he was doing tween-age stages at Alinea and Eleven Madison Park, or being written about in breathless profiles and skeptically snarky blog posts (not to mention a vignette in this magazine), he was never a kid speaking to other kids. There was no aw-shucks mugging, no twee riffs on lunchbox junk food: his cooking was precise, focussed, with a near-reverential attention to detail, and a high-end sensibility. At the various Gems, he cultivated a nimble and intimate sort of flavor maximalism that played perfectly in those tiny establishments. Cove is much larger, with a more formal service style, but the exactitude is still there, the sense of stylishness, the obsession and the delight. The walls are sheathed modishly in wood, and hung with dramatic botanical paintings. The tables, also sleek wood, orbit an open kitchen in which a phalanx of cooks move around their stations in quiet deliberation, with McGarry a strawberry-blond, white-jacketed flare at the center.

The dishes are simply beautiful. I nearly didn’t order a salad of golden beets with smoked yogurt, struggling to muster enthusiasm for yet another beet-and-dairy salad, but my dining companion insisted. It turned out to be amazing, a parade of roots in every shade of yellow, with bursts of brightness from what seemed like a whole bouquet of nasturtiums, orange and vermillion and gloaming purple. For all the complexity of McGarry’s creations, they remain tight and streamlined: every element is load-bearing, and the final appearance isn’t always showy. Take, for example, a bowl of artichoke purée poured around a hillock of tender Jonah crab. The smooth liquid is briny and delicate, with a subtle vegetality that harmonizes with the crustacean’s sweetness; an accompanying hunk of freshly baked bread provides a sour-edged counterpoint, enlivening things even more. For all the evident care in this dish, its plating is boldly plain—beige on beige. McGarry could easily have zhuzhed things up with a little color: a sprinkle of sumac, or a chiffonade of fresh mint, but adding any other element would have changed the flavor. He trusts, wisely, in the carefully calibrated balance of each bite.

Elsewhere, he does equally remarkable things. An oyster is poached in chamomile oil and served with wisps of creamy chestnut. A carrot is roasted to marshmallow sweetness, tempura-fried, and wrapped in charred sweet leaves of caraflex cabbage, then draped in uni and drizzled with spiced quince syrup. Like much of what’s on McGarry’s menu, it has a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel busy or chaotic; McGarry layers ingredients and flavors like washes of watercolor. On one of my visits, as the chef himself presented the grilled half lobster that is the climax of the tasting menu, he explained how the chefs “take the brains” and purée them with black trumpet mushrooms and a little bit of fennel. The resulting mixture, funky and unctuous, is piped back into the exoskeletal noggin and tiled over with caramelized slivers of the same mushroom, a glossy crown for the hunks of tender flesh filling the body below. The lobster’s claws and knuckles arrive from the kitchen a few minutes later, flashes of red in a brothy bowl of rice, with bits of mushroom carrying a note from the previous course, and meaty morsels of walnut and a crispy tuile made from dehydrated chicken stock carrying the symphony of umami onward. Desserts, too, are both adventurous and delicious. A fluffy square of cake is made with celery root and passion fruit; a huckleberry semifreddo is capped with snappy, twisting shards of chocolate and an undulating wave of preserved cherry blossoms.

Cove is nominally a West-meets-East proposition, channelling a California ethos through East Coast ingredients, but I don’t really see it that way. To me, it’s more evocative of New Nordic cuisine, the fiddly, forage-y fine-dining philosophy that dominated the late two-thousands and has more recently fallen out of fashion. And yet McGarry, quite miraculously, makes that Scandi aesthetic seem thrilling again. His multifaceted dishes are intentional, and highly composed, but still exploratory: the uncommon vegetables, the edible flowers, the house-made juices and herbal elixirs. I scoffed, a little, at the inedible landscape of pine branches and polished stones that decorates Winter in the Northeast, an assortment of small bites (including that lovely oyster) that kicked off a late-December tasting menu, but then again it made me happy. I came of age as a restaurant-goer in the New Nordic era, under the Noma hegemon; despite our nearly two-decade age difference, so did McGarry, but in his hands the approach feels unencumbered by what became, at a certain point, a somewhat formulaic pursuit of a “sense of place.”

Still, I was surprised not to detect any sense of place at Cove. The servers take care to note that most of the menu’s ingredients are sourced from the Northeast, but that’s not a terribly specific palette, and McGarry’s cooking seems to eschew riffs or recognizable references (even if the combination of Asian pear and fresh horseradish garnishing a mackerel crudo did, for me, vividly evoke the Hillel sandwich at a Passover Seder). This is my biggest criticism of Cove, and maybe it’s a little unfair: McGarry wants to make a grand statement with this new restaurant, but I cannot figure out what on earth it is. After each of my visits, I left feeling elated, animatedly recapping the meals with my fellow-diners as we wandered across Varick Street toward the train, but I wasn’t sure what to do with all my enthusiasm besides wave my hands around. McGarry’s dishes speak with such grace; they have all the subtlety and verve of an artistic thesis being mounted, and yet my meals left me without a sense of anything actually being argued for. Certainly, a restaurant doesn’t need to try to say anything—it is enough, actually, to serve dazzling food in a beautiful room—but McGarry gets oh-so-exhilaratingly close to doing something beyond just feeding people. Maybe it will come to him with time. I can almost taste it. ♦