![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/6e3f014d044211f91217459149d63e0db0-PRIOR-SAGA-FINAL.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Chef Charlie Mitchell preparing a dish at Saga.
\n Photo: Thomas Prior\n <\/p>\n
The tasting menu has long represented the pinnacle of chefly ambition. And for years now, restaurant critics have complained about it. In 2012, Pete Wells described<\/a> the \u201ctrapped, helpless sensation\u201d he felt facing \u201ca marathon of dishes chosen by the restaurant.\u201d Three months later, Corby Kummer, in Vanity Fair, decried<\/a> the \u201csubjugation to the will of the creative genius\u201d that is required to enjoy a degustation. Adam Platt, my predecessor, memorably wrote about his own \u201ctasting mennui\u201d<\/a> in 2022. Chefs keep at it anyway.<\/p>\n There are logistical reasons tasting menus work well, but there are interpretive ones, too: The tasting menu is a sign of seriousness, an implicit declaration of brilliance. Flynn McGarry of Cove<\/a>, in the developing Hudson Square, and Charlie Mitchell of Saga<\/a>, rebooted last year at the top of an Art Deco skyscraper, are two young chefs who subscribe to this particular paradigm. At their previous restaurants, Gem (McGarry) and Clover Hill (Mitchell), these tastings made a striking claim: that small rooms run by non-name-brand chefs could play in the big leagues. Now, they\u2019ve ascended \u2014 in Mitchell\u2019s case, literally, 63\u202fstories \u2014 to bigger rooms, bigger kitchens, and larger staffs. Part of the reason these multicourse menus endure over grouchy critical objections is that international star-granting mandarins tend to reward them. But what\u2019s good for Michelin isn\u2019t always great for New York. In their new homes, the demands of this format mostly serve to undermine the chefs\u2019 talents.<\/p>\n Over ten courses at Cove, whose pale-wood-paneled rooms<\/a> manifest the salubrious calm of a Scandinavian spa, McGarry puts on a show of technique in a guise of serenity. He\u2019s a skilled technician, steeping, fermenting, freezing-then-shaving, dehydrating. (McGarry has been honing his touch for the form since he first began serving dinners out of his parents\u2019 house in Eureka, California, at 12.) He performs all his labors onstage \u2014 the kitchen, in the central room, is wide open \u2014 and delivers many of the dishes himself, sweatless. Beholden to the seasons (McGarry maintains a kitchen garden at the Long Island farm of Isabella Rossellini, one of his admirers) even in the doldrums of January, his dishes are clever and often beautiful. \u201cNortheastern sashimi\u201d is Rhode Island mackerel in a piney ponzu made with Douglas-fir needles, sprinkled with a snowy mix of horseradish and frozen quince. Winter squash is brushed with ume and soy and tempura-battered, served with Maine uni and grilled chard; aside from the fact that the squash and the uni are both orange, I struggled to find a reason they should be served together.<\/p>\n \u201cWas that an \u2018mmm\u2019?\u201d I\u202fasked my dinner date hopefully when the dish arrived about halfway through our $210 tasting. \u201cThat was a \u2018hmmm,\u2019\u2009\u201d he replied. For every dish I\u202flapped up (chief among them a Dungeness-crab chawanmushi with baby artichokes and fried capers), there was another I found merely interesting. McGarry may have picked up his hay-smoking technique for his pi\u00e8ce-de-resistance squab working in a restaurant in Belgium, but his bird \u2014 already a hard sell for any pigeon-wary New Yorkers \u2014 put me in mind more of the animal\u2019s essential animalness than I\u2019d have liked. It came with bitter lettuces dressed with squab vinaigrette and a mushroom fricassee scattered with chips of dehydrated squab jus. By the time the curious desserts started arriving \u2014 parsley-and-gooseberry granita with rose-scented cream, an apple mille-feuille whose pastry had been swapped for cinnamon-toast tofu skin \u2014 we were exhausted.<\/p>\n Saga is a different sort of restaurant, the hautest expression of the Kent Hospitality Group<\/a>, founded by Jamal James Kent, who brought it to two-star Michelin acclaim before his untimely death<\/a> in 2024. It comes with years of expectation and history, but to Mitchell\u2019s credit, rather than imitating the Saga of yore, he\u2019s brought his own history to bear. Basquiat and Biggie decorate the walls; Jazmine Sullivan and vintage 112 are on the soundtrack. The cooking, as intricate as ever, is now rooted in the foodways of Black America and the food of his grandmother\u2019s house in Detroit<\/a>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a tantalizing prospect. So why did Saga leave me wanting more? If I wish McGarry were a little more intent on the whims of his customers, I wish Mitchell were a little less. His cooking is so much more interesting than the tired playbook of tasting-menu voluptuousness dictates. It\u2019s a snappy and fabulous sally to open a menu with cornbread, in the form of a scallop-edged tartlet, a fine confit of chicken in its golden heart. It\u2019s dutiful, and a little boring, to then spackle it with caviar.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to blame Mitchell for this, exactly. The gastrotourists who make it to the 63rd floor, who order the first-growth bottles and the grands crus, expect to be egged. They expect a tiny tartare of shima aji flown over from the fish markets of Tokyo and a little sliver of white salmon \u2014 the rarest type of king \u2014 with a polite segment of citrus. The trouble is, this paradigm ends up bending what\u2019s wonderful about Mitchell\u2019s food all out of shape. His fried fish has been so upscaled \u2014 Japanese madai, tempura-fried, dusted with dehydrated hot-sauce powder \u2014 that it seems like a ghostly shadow of itself, neither salty nor spicy enough. And (to paraphrase the old joke) such small portions.<\/p>\n To include these reworkings of Black American cooking at all is a welcome endeavor, and Mitchell refuses to tokenize them. Potato salad becomes a warm, foamy kind of casserole with Marcona almonds. Spinach drapes regally over brioche-crusted fluke. When one of his dishes hits every mark \u2014 like Japanese Spanish mackerel on dirty rice with ham-hock broth \u2014 you could levitate. But a bite or two is all he can offer you. The tasting-menu form wants ten perfect tricks of its magician, who has to leave you wanting more.<\/p>\n I did want more, and less. More food, with more bite, and less ceremony. If I could have ordered seconds of the Spanish mackerel or the fluke, I would have. If I could have had them as entrees, I\u2019d have been happier still. I\u2019d have traded half the service \u2014 attentive to absurdity \u2014 and all the caviar. What would that look like? It might look like a restaurant that is busier, louder, a little less bloodless. There would be fewer high-touch opportunities (I received both a welcome note on my table when I arrived and a thank-you note from my server in my email after I left)\u00a0and, quite possibly, fewer Michelin stars. But a less ambitious restaurant might also look like a more desirable one.<\/p>\n What if Saga offered an \u00e0 la carte option, to allow more people in? (At present, the ten-course tasting is $315 a person; a shorter, six-course tasting is $215.) Cove does, from experience \u2014\u00a0\u201cWe switched the Gem menu from tasting only to \u00e0 la carte, and we were 15 times busier than we had ever been with the tasting menu,\u201d McGarry told this magazine a few years ago \u2014 and<\/a> left to my own devices, I was able to experience Flynnism with a little more agency and found I preferred it as such. Untethered from the restaurant\u2019s ambitions, individual dishes could shine: earthy slices of duck coated in rye XO sauce, or Nobu-style black cod sweetened smokily under its paste of barley miso. That meal felt more like a conversation, less like a performance. The artist was present. But so was the diner.<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the February 9, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n