Chef Charlie Mitchell making ready a dish at Saga.
Picture: Thomas Prior
The tasting menu has lengthy represented the top of chefly ambition. And for years now, restaurant critics have complained about it. In 2012, Pete Wells described the “trapped, helpless sensation” he felt going through “a marathon of dishes chosen by the restaurant.” Three months later, Corby Kummer, in Vainness Truthful, decried the “subjugation to the desire of the artistic genius” that’s required to get pleasure from a degustation. Adam Platt, my predecessor, memorably wrote about his personal “tasting mennui” in 2022. Cooks hold at it anyway.
There are logistical causes tasting menus work nicely, however there are interpretive ones, too: The tasting menu is an indication of seriousness, an implicit declaration of brilliance. Flynn McGarry of Cove, within the growing Hudson Sq., and Charlie Mitchell of Saga, rebooted final 12 months on the prime of an Artwork Deco skyscraper, are two younger cooks who subscribe to this specific paradigm. At their earlier eating places, Gem (McGarry) and Clover Hill (Mitchell), these tastings made a hanging declare: that small rooms run by non-name-brand cooks may play within the huge leagues. Now, they’ve ascended — in Mitchell’s case, actually, 63 tales — to greater rooms, greater kitchens, and bigger staffs. A part of the explanation these multicourse menus endure over grouchy crucial objections is that worldwide star-granting mandarins are inclined to reward them. However what’s good for Michelin isn’t all the time nice for New York. Of their new properties, the calls for of this format largely serve to undermine the cooks’ skills.
Over ten programs at Cove, whose pale-wood-paneled rooms manifest the salubrious calm of a Scandinavian spa, McGarry places on a present of approach in a guise of serenity. He’s a talented technician, steeping, fermenting, freezing-then-shaving, dehydrating. (McGarry has been honing his contact for the shape since he first started serving dinners out of his dad and mom’ home in Eureka, California, at 12.) He performs all his labors onstage — the kitchen, within the central room, is large open — and delivers most of the dishes himself, sweatless. Beholden to the seasons (McGarry maintains a kitchen backyard on the Lengthy Island farm of Isabella Rossellini, considered one of his admirers) even within the doldrums of January, his dishes are intelligent and infrequently lovely. “Northeastern sashimi” is Rhode Island mackerel in a piney ponzu made with Douglas-fir needles, sprinkled with a snowy mixture of horseradish and frozen quince. Winter squash is brushed with ume and soy and tempura-battered, served with Maine uni and grilled chard; other than the truth that the squash and the uni are each orange, I struggled to discover a purpose they need to be served collectively.
“Was that an ‘mmm’?” I requested my dinner date hopefully when the dish arrived about midway by means of our $210 tasting. “That was a ‘hmmm,’ ” he replied. For each dish I lapped up (chief amongst them a Dungeness-crab chawanmushi with child artichokes and fried capers), there was one other I discovered merely fascinating. McGarry might have picked up his hay-smoking approach for his pièce-de-resistance squab working in a restaurant in Belgium, however his fowl — already a tough promote for any pigeon-wary New Yorkers — put me in thoughts extra of the animal’s important animalness than I’d have appreciated. It got here with bitter lettuces dressed with squab French dressing and a mushroom fricassee scattered with chips of dehydrated squab jus. By the point the curious desserts began arriving — parsley-and-gooseberry granita with rose-scented cream, an apple mille-feuille whose pastry had been swapped for cinnamon-toast tofu pores and skin — we have been exhausted.
Saga is a special form of restaurant, the hautest expression of the Kent Hospitality Group, based by Jamal James Kent, who introduced it to two-star Michelin acclaim earlier than his premature demise in 2024. It comes with years of expectation and historical past, however to Mitchell’s credit score, quite than imitating the Saga of yore, he’s introduced his personal historical past to bear. Basquiat and Biggie enhance the partitions; Jazmine Sullivan and classic 112 are on the soundtrack. The cooking, as intricate as ever, is now rooted within the foodways of Black America and the meals of his grandmother’s home in Detroit.
That’s a tantalizing prospect. So why did Saga go away me wanting extra? If I want McGarry have been slightly extra intent on the whims of his clients, I want Mitchell have been rather less. His cooking is a lot extra fascinating than the drained playbook of tasting-menu voluptuousness dictates. It’s a handy guide a rough and fabulous sally to open a menu with cornbread, within the type of a scallop-edged tartlet, a advantageous confit of hen in its golden coronary heart. It’s dutiful, and slightly boring, to then spackle it with caviar.
It’s exhausting guilty Mitchell for this, precisely. The gastrotourists who make it to the 63rd ground, who order the first-growth bottles and the grands crus, count on to be egged. They count on a tiny tartare of shima aji flown over from the fish markets of Tokyo and slightly sliver of white salmon — the rarest sort of king — with a well mannered section of citrus. The difficulty is, this paradigm finally ends up bending what’s great about Mitchell’s meals all out of form. His fried fish has been so upscaled — Japanese madai, tempura-fried, dusted with dehydrated hot-sauce powder — that it looks as if a ghostly shadow of itself, neither salty nor spicy sufficient. And (to paraphrase the previous joke) such small parts.
To incorporate these reworkings of Black American cooking in any respect is a welcome endeavor, and Mitchell refuses to tokenize them. Potato salad turns into a heat, foamy sort of casserole with Marcona almonds. Spinach drapes regally over brioche-crusted fluke. When considered one of his dishes hits each mark — like Japanese Spanish mackerel on soiled rice with ham-hock broth — you would levitate. However a chew or two is all he can give you. The tasting-menu kind needs ten good tips of its magician, who has to go away you wanting extra.
I did need extra, and fewer. Extra meals, with extra chew, and fewer ceremony. If I may have ordered seconds of the Spanish mackerel or the fluke, I’d have. If I may have had them as entrees, I’d have been happier nonetheless. I’d have traded half the service — attentive to absurdity — and all of the caviar. What would that seem like? It’d seem like a restaurant that’s busier, louder, rather less cold. There can be fewer high-touch alternatives (I obtained each a welcome observe on my desk once I arrived and a thank-you observe from my server in my electronic mail after I left) and, fairly probably, fewer Michelin stars. However a much less formidable restaurant may also seem like a extra fascinating one.
What if Saga supplied an à la carte possibility, to permit extra individuals in? (At current, the ten-course tasting is $315 an individual; a shorter, six-course tasting is $215.) Cove does, from expertise — “We switched the Gem menu from tasting solely to à la carte, and we have been 15 instances busier than we had ever been with the tasting menu,” McGarry informed this journal a number of years in the past — and left to my very own units, I used to be capable of expertise Flynnism with slightly extra company and located I most well-liked it as such. Untethered from the restaurant’s ambitions, particular person dishes may shine: earthy slices of duck coated in rye XO sauce, or Nobu-style black cod sweetened smokily beneath its paste of barley miso. That meal felt extra like a dialog, much less like a efficiency. The artist was current. However so was the diner.
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When you favor to learn in print, you may also discover this text within the February 9, 2026, difficulty of
New York Journal.
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When you favor to learn in print, you may also discover this text within the February 9, 2026, difficulty of
New York Journal.