Sean Davidson/Cove

Nadia Chaudhury is a born-and-raised New Yorker who is an editor for Eater’s Northeast region and Eater New York, was the former Eater Austin editor for 10 years, and often writes about food and pop culture.

Chef Flynn McGarry is known for his focused New American cuisine, courtesy of his restaurants Gem, the now-shuttered Gem Wine, and Gem Home. The latest is his Hudson Square restaurant, Cove, where he and his team showcase East Coast ingredients through a West Coast lens — though you’ll pay top dollar for both the tasting and a la carte menus (the latter of which I got as a solo diner) and a well-curated natural wine and after-dinner drinks list.

What to order

• The Jonah crab custard ($42) is a warming dish, its creamy pudding generously studded with crab meat. It comes with two pieces of toasted bread dripping with egg yolk — it’s a worthy, albeit messy, appetizer.
• The pumpkin schnitzel ($42) surprised me. The giant slab of the gourd is fried in a way that maintains its shape, balanced well with hazelnuts and chanterelle mushrooms.
• Don’t skip the celery root-passionfruit cake ($17), which my server described as similar to a carrot cake, which was correct. The two-layer half-cake wasn’t overly sweet, where the celery root bits in the cake added crunchiness to the dessert, and the exterior was doused in a passionfruit syrup with whole seeds.

The space

The unassuming front door leads to a dim vestibule with a big fat pumpkin on the floor and hanging aromatic dried herbs. Then you enter the wide, bright space that doesn’t feel overly luxe. Per McGarry’s preferences, the room is made with blonde wood, and there are Impressionistic wildflower paintings on the walls.

Insider tip

McGarry has been cultivating a garden out on actor Isabella Rossellini’s Long Island farm for Cove sourcing, where he had previewed the restaurant with pop-ups — so find preserved shiso in the crab custard, onion blossoms in the schnitzel, and preserved ingredients elsewhere.