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Flynn McGarry Opens Gem Home With Some Strong Sandwiches
Photo: Flynn McGarry
Flynn McGarry is in his nesting era. Gem, his first restaurant, opened in 2018, when he was still a teen, followed by Gem Wine in 2022 (which, proving successful, took over the original Gem location last year), after he was of legal drinking age. Now, McGarry has turned his attention to domestic concerns with Gem Home, which opened in Nolita last week. It’s one part café — a place to stop for some apple-fennel salad and a chewy chocolate cookie with toasted coconut flakes — one part shoppy shop with groceries like a $25 bag of K&K Ranch raisins, and one part home-goods store with an emphasis on vintage wares selected by McGarry.
Although Gem Home has food, ovens, and cooks behind a wall in the middle of the room, McGarry makes it clear that it “is not a restaurant.” He has given a lot of thought to the room itself, a former boutique that had been vacant for years, which he designed and outfitted with his own woodwork, from the shelving to the long candlelit communal tables in the back that would feel at home in a boarding-school dining hall.
The multiuse space will also function as a private dining room and an option for pop-ups in the future; for now, the best time to visit is at midday, when the bakery’s display case — still loaded with black-cardamom buns, chanterelle-caraway rolls, and a gently sweet parsnip cake from breakfast — gets filled with trays of sandwiches built on that morning’s focaccia, baked until it’s covered with dark spots and filled and sliced into big squares that require both hands to eat. The fully dressed sandwiches appear around 11:30 and are available until they sell out for the day. That means no mods or custom orders either.
I tried two of the available sandwiches, each costing $16, the other day. My favorite consisted of a vibrant smoked-trout dip with watercress and soft marinated Sun Golds that melted into everything. The focaccia was chewy with an irregular, spongy crumb thick enough to absorb all the juices without seeping through the crust. (A girl next to me struggled to keep hers from falling apart.) And while I loved the salty speck and very spicy pickled peppers in my other sandwich, it was undone by a very orange squash butter that McGarry says is “just squash and butter.” The good news is McGarry says the sandwiches will change frequently.
Even though he has been running around in an apron since the opening, McGarry intends to give the kitchen the leeway to produce the menu while he focuses on the other details: sourcing antique Alessi fish trivets and plate sets. McGarry also sells the ingredients from the sandwiches in a refrigerator in the front of the store — like containers of marinated broccoli rabe and anchovies — as well as jars of sunflower-seed barley miso and hot sauce made from ají dulce with nasturtium leaves. Below the condiments are bins of flowers and eucalyptus alongside orchard fruit and root vegetables.
It takes about 15 minutes to walk from Gem Home to the junction of Ludlow, Division, and Canal Streets, where Elbow Bread — the new bakery from Zoë Kanan and the Court Street Grocers crew — has, after months of delays, finally opened. Although it tends to be cleared out of breakfast items (get there before 10 a.m. for the best variety), plenty of bread is available later in the day, like the conical, croissantlike “elbows” sprinkled with sesame seeds and the buttered spelt rolls. While the rotating display of soft sweet-potato pretzel “hugs” looked freshly loaded with both salted and sugared options, I went with a sweet one, which was comprehensively coated with spiced sugar in every crevice that even more impressively adhered to the smooth browned exterior every time I took a bite.
With its fresh white paint job and massive windows swung open on all three sides, Elbow Bread is the kind of space that onlookers will always stop to check out and eventually wander inside. Lines form often in the standing-room-only space, all of a sudden trailing out the door as people try to view what’s still available from outside. Kanan herself is present but mostly out of sight in the bakery downstairs.
Latecomers who miss out on breakfast breads can console themselves with a selection of cookies in time for afternoon tea. Flaky rugalach filled with spiced-pecan meringue immediately conjured the holidays, while thin, caramelized palmiers were dotted with whole caraway seeds that cut through the butter and caramel. Throw in one of the nostalgically cakey brownies that happen to be gluten free and you won’t feel like you missed out at all.
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