Saga
70 Pine St., nr. Pearl St.
Brioche with sorrel and caviar.
Photograph: Courtesy of Saga
When Charlie Mitchell labored at Clover Hill, the 20-seat Brooklyn Heights tasting room the place he earned his first Michelin star and was named the perfect chef in New York by the James Beard Basis, his days started and ended within the kitchen. When he arrived at Saga, the skyscraper-topping gastronomy penthouse in Fidi, his calendar started to refill: “Branding conferences, emblem conferences, design conferences, plate conferences, new imaginative and prescient conferences,” he says. “It’s a big firm.”
After taking on in 2024, Mitchell needed to keep up and honor the earlier order put in by Jamal James Kent, the chef who opened Saga and ran it till his sudden loss of life. Mitchell made small changes at first and waited eight months earlier than including his first dish to the $300, nine-course tasting menu: grilled madai with farro, collard greens, and ham-hock consommé.
It was supposed in some methods to pay tribute to the meals Mitchell ate rising up in Detroit. “That grandma’s-house feeling could be very particular,” he says. “You possibly can go there anytime, any day, and get a plate.” His new fall menu will take Thanksgiving as its jumping-off level with programs like a beet tart with cranberry sauce, yellow grits with butter and sizzling sauce, and sliced brioche topped with sorrel leaves and caviar. Mitchell can be eradicating the bigger shows supposed to be shared by diners that Kent had been recognized for. “That’s probably not my type,” he says. “I’m nonetheless at that section of my profession the place I’m making an attempt to regulate each chunk you could have.”
The message is evident: That is Charlie Mitchell’s Saga now, and the eating room is being transformed to coincide with the brand new path. Pale-salmon carpeting is gone, changed by a subtler shade of brown, and new serviceware from Hering Berlin and Christofle will sit on freshly put in black-marble tabletops. When it reopens on September 1, Saga will dwell on the high of town’s fine-dining hierarchy alongside stalwarts resembling Per Se and Eleven Madison Park; Mitchell was nonetheless working as a chef de partie on the latter simply 5 years in the past. No one has been extra shocked by his fast ascent than Mitchell himself. “Clearly, I got down to get three Michelin stars — I need to be the primary Black chef to get three stars,” he says. “However at the moment, it didn’t actually appear obtainable.”
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In case you want to learn in print, you may as well discover this text within the August 25, 2025, problem of
New York Journal.
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In case you want to learn in print, you may as well discover this text within the August 25, 2025, problem of
New York Journal.
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