19-Year-Old Chef Opened A NYC Restaurant With A $155 Tasting Menu

i didn't want to open a restaurant i don't like restaurants i think restaurants are cold and robotic and they don't feel comfortable and i wanted a place that feels like you're just in my house so i designed it to feel like my house i'm flynn mcgarry and i'm the chef of gem new york the restaurant is called gem which is my mom's name backwards it was also her idea i started by doing these dinners in my mom's house so sort of an homage to what those dinners felt like and were but also were sort of hidden behind these trees on the little street that like you would walk down you could walk right by and not even know we were here i started uh cooking again when i was 10 i think probably the first memory cooking i actually have was it was like mother's day i was like oh i'm gonna make like brunch for everyone and i made like chicken salad or something but i was like i'm gonna like poach the chicken or do something different with it and it felt very fancy at the time but then i just sort of became obsessed with sort of the more kind of intricate and creative side of cooking when i started cooking my my mom was like okay we'll go get you like a cookbook she took me like burns you know whatever and i was 10 so i wanted the most expensive thing that was on the top shelf so i got the french laundry cookbook and that just sort of like initially blew my mind as far as like what cooking was so i found about elinia because he used to work at french laundry then i got that cookbook and love madison park it was the same thing they love madison park service internship i met them on their book signing tour i was talking about how i had been sort of cooking some things from the book and they're like oh do you have any photos of it and i showed them a bunch of photos of the stuff that i had cooked and it looked surprisingly like like the book they were like if you ever want to come sort of hang out in the kitchen in new york let us know and then like a month later i made my way here i was free labor so everyone was down to have it i mean the general thing with restaurants at that level is just the absurd attention to detail with everything that you learn and that is something that kind of has stayed with me of like everything i do in every regard this kind of thought all the way through you're aware yeah nothing's gonna be perfect but still having the strive for that helps you wake up way too early every day and go to bed way too late every day the beet dish has been on the menu for like three years now it's the only thing that won't leave it was sort of inspired by this one a feeling that i hate beets and two this sort of want for giving someone the most savory intense course on their menu is a vegetable trips a lot of people out uh intentionally the best dishes are the ones that people are just like i don't understand what that was but it was delicious i stopped going to school actually when i was like 15. i've had a full-time job since i was 12. i've never really focused too much on like being like i need to have like a normal teenage experience because i'm just literally never had no desire to do that my investors and everyone would not be super happy if i was just like yeah i'm gonna take some time off the restaurant to like go play video games like the issues and stuff that and qualms and stuff that i deal with are those of someone who is definitely not 19. i knew everyone was always going to talk about my age and like do i love that not really but it's something that i always knew i was gonna have to deal with if i wanted to do this being young getting sort of helps you get a lot of opportunities but then once you get those people seem to have much higher expectations for what you can do than that of a normal person regardless of their age a big thing for me is sort of dealing with having to pull back from the actual cooking myself and focus more on the bigger picture i'm a control freak in every regard there's not a single thing in this restaurant that i will let go by without me looking at it it's a blessing and a curse [Music] we didn't want to compromise the experience and the overall vision that we have for your dinner by being cheap or not being not giving you the best quality of every ingredient and not being able to hire the right amount of staff so you feel comfortable we also have a sense of humor about ourselves and understand what we do is very absurdist and over the top so we like to also have fun we spend literally 18 hours a day together six days a week so i have to like them so i could not hire people that i don't like because i would just hate it for so long this has been the goal and now that i've kind of reached this point it's sort of the restaurant dictates what's next and i'm just sort of along for the ride i did go to coachella a couple years ago to cook but it was not a fan

Channel: Insider

Views: 2,424,739

Keywords: INSIDER, flynn mcgarry, gem restaurant, young chef, teenage chef, french laundry, eleven madison park, chef, professional kitchen, NYC restaurant

Id: lOlrbe2OQCU

Length: 4min 43sec (283 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018