Flynn McGarry on growing up as a food prodigy and the waning power of restaurant reviews

0:10Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to all the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me, as always, is Semaphore's editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, I'm a little sluggish this morning, a little bit more so than normal because last night I had a two and a half hour long dinner at Cove in preparation for our episode today. I had the hard work of eating at Cove.

0:41Max:Really stretching the definition of a media show here, Max, and the limits of the semaphore expense account. Yeah, that is definitely true on one account, which is our financial expenses. Sorry to our CFO, Garrett. But this is a really exciting episode for me because every once or twice a year, we like to do an episode about food and about food media because it is such a big part of not only the stuff that I'm consuming on a day-to-day basis, but it really is a major part of the world that we live in. And it's also this space where two worlds are increasingly colliding, the worlds of food and of restaurants and of media, particularly here in New York City.

1:21And And that's why I was so interested in having on Flynn McGarry. He is the chef and owner of Cove, which is an excellent new restaurant in the somewhat weird area neighborhood of Hudson Square here in New York. Flynn is a really interesting chef because he is somebody who has experienced food media, both as someone who's creating it in promotion and marketing of his restaurants, but also he's been the subject of it. He was a widely profiled, written about, talked about chef from when he was a teenager and when he was hosting food pop-ups at his parents' house in Los Angeles. He had a New York Times profile written about him when he was 15.

2:03He was described as a prodigy and a wunderkind by places like The New Yorker and NBC. And pretty much every major media outlet that was interested in food was writing about him from a really young age. He's now 27 years old. He's opened multiple restaurants. And I think he has a lot of really interesting thoughts about being the subject of intense national media attention and scrutiny at a young age. And also what it's like to be a restaurateur and a chef and kind of a business owner at a time when food media is something that will make or break your restaurant and is changing dramatically.

2:41Max:Yeah, I think both restauranteurs and chefs are kind of coping with all the same radical changes to the media ecosystem that we who live in media are. Well, we want to get into that. We want to ask him about this show that he almost did with White Lotus creator Mike White. And we want to ask him about how the national media changed how he thought about himself and where food media is going from here. Does the New York Times review still make or break your restaurant? We have a lot that we want to get into with Flynn. We have to take a short break, but we'll be right back with more after this.

3:20Max:Our friend Josh Spanier, Google's VP of Marketing, has a new podcast out called Frontier CMO. It's from Think with Google, and it gets into all the ways marketing is shifting, especially in the AI era, where the old marketing playbooks have become obsolete, and the whole role of the CMO is being redefined in real time. Josh talks to the people who are actually figuring it out, top CMOs, industry leaders, and creators, and gets into the real-world challenges and specific strategies they're using to navigate this new era. These are notes from the marketing frontier. You can find Frontier CMO on any podcast platform or watch it on YouTube.

3:59Flynn, thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to have you here on the show. So the first thing I kind of wanted to ask you is for people who may not know who you are, how do you kind of explain your trajectory as a chef and also kind of a figure in food media more broadly? How do you explain yourself to them? I started cooking as a very young person, and it was very, you know, intended as not really what it all kind of came out to be. And even at that time, I was very aware that like being 15 years old, that sort of world that I was living in, and even media-wise, there was a documentary about my like upbringing and kind of how I started cooking.

4:42And I was very sort of cognizant of how being a child prodigy, as it has been mentioned. And I'm kind of glad that's stopped being the number one thing that's been said. But it's funny because being a child that does a lot in food is very different than being a child that does a lot in music or art, because there are literal age restrictions on your potential to succeed. So no matter how talented I could have been, I was still 12 years old and I wouldn't be able to run a kitchen or do any of these other things. So I think that always sort of helped me separate these two things of like, there was a time where me being young and cooking was the interest and the intrigue.

5:23And there was a lot of obvious coverage around that, especially the documentary. But I even myself at the time knew that I hadn't done anything yet. The first time you got national media attention was when you were a teenager, or maybe even like 12. The New Yorker covered a pop-up that you had done in your home. Did you invite them there? How did the national media attention happen? My mom's friend's friend was a freelance writer for The New Yorker. His whole thing that I remember him saying was like, you know, I had this group of friends who were in their, you know, 40s being like, we're going to dinner at this kid's house.

6:00And he was sort of like, what? And so, yeah, it did really just come up in the sense of word of mouth. You know, I was, I think, in this way, lucky to be doing this in Los Angeles, where friend a friend can end up being someone that writes The New Yorker. He was like, I'm going to write for it. I don't know if he knew if it was going to get accepted or anything. And yeah, he came to the dinner, spent a little bit of time in the day writing it. But it was a very small piece in the end, but did sort of spark this kind of larger thing, which I don't think would happen today at all. Interesting. Why not?

6:35No shade on media as a whole. But if there wasn't... Shade Media as a whole, plenty of our guests do. That's the whole point of the show. We're in this landscape where just writing about someone doing something specific without a follow up, because you can't be like, oh, it's going to pull people here. And then it's going to, we can keep doing this thing. It's going to keep going and going and going. These sort of one-off stories I think are so rare now. And the one-off stories, they do still exist. I'm not saying that that doesn't happen whatsoever, but the traction to them, it allows them, they are just one-off stories.

7:09This was a one-off story that then other writers read, and then other people read that, and then we were reached out to by other media forms, and the media fed the media. Now, someone would say, oh, you were in The New Yorker. I'm not going to write about you. You were already in The New Yorker. I'm not going to write about you for The New York Times. We're not going to double cover the same person. This is something that we're definitely guilty of, right, Ben? I mean, we're a smaller media company. We operate based on those principles, the same principles, which is like, we need to be the first people doing something.

7:39Max:Yeah. And I think it is sort of a social media era assumption that everybody's read everything. Everything is centralizing into the same funnel. If there was a New Yorker story on food and you care about food, you're going to have read it. Why would the New York Times write it? There's this sort of slurry of media that everything feeds into. Or that something that I've always believed is that the writer's point of view from one story to another and what you get out of a subject from talking to them would not be completely different. And I think that that's something that I've always found interesting as like a subject, we get an exclusive or whatever.

8:08And they're like, you can only work with this one thing. And then I talked to the writer and I'm like, oh, your angle, because every story always has an angle. Your angle for this is actually not what maybe I wanted to get across or what I find interesting about the story. And now because we're in this very competitive, if someone already wrote about you, huge elements of stories and people's lives just kind of get lost because no one cares to like dig a little deeper.

8:32Max:Yeah, it's time for a Flynn McGarry takedown. The media's built him up too much. Yeah, right. Exactly. This is a media show, and a lot of our listeners and viewers are people who sometimes write or make films or make advertising about kids. Is there anything from your experience at that time that you would say to the adults who are doing that? Any advice? I think it's honestly less about the sort of profile itself. I think I was lucky enough to, you know, pretty much every profile or writer or, you know, filmmaker that I worked with, I think was really genuine. And, you know, I don't think you find yourself interviewing a 15-year-old chef unless you actually think they're doing something interesting or you're trying to kind of make fun of them.

9:22And I think you're trying to make fun of them. That's pretty mean. Did that happen to you? No, I think it was pretty obvious to see if that was going to happen, you know, from the way that someone was approaching it. And obviously, when I was being interviewed those years ago, and now the media landscape has changed a lot. But I do think interviewing a young person who the entire interview, kind of like we spoke about, is going to be about dreams, hopes, potential. You know, that's what you're looking at. You're not looking at, I'm going to talk about this person who has all these accolades under their belt.

9:52you're interviewing someone who's very naive and very excited. And that is like what you're trying to get across in this thing that hopefully inspires people to also dream and hope and all these kinds of things. And how important the context of both the platform, the editing, the way that people receive it is in that, you know, I think in a lot of ways, a big thing that happened with me in media that got incredibly misconstrued, not even by anyone's fault, is that, you know, we had a lot of these writers kind of talk about this idea that I built a kitchen in my bedroom. And as I would always say to them, it was a few Ikea tables and$100 induction burner.

10:30But it was more of just like, I would still have to go to the normal kitchen to wash dishes and whatever. Like, it was more of a space that I could take all my stuff, close the door, and be able to kind of create. But in talking about it in this way that was supposed to be like, look at how passionate this person is. They obviously want to make everything feel the highest version of it. What that led to is all these people being like, this rich kid had his mommy and daddy build him a kitchen in his bedroom, which was very much so not the case. And that's what I mean about starting to understand not just your own context of what you're trying to get across, but the way that people will receive it.

11:11And I think there was maybe one or two pieces that described that. And then once that narrative kind of happened on the internet and kind of completely outside of these pieces, the rest of every single interview, and even today, has had to have some sort of like, either the question of, do you want to like, comment on how that wasn't the case? Or, you know, how do you phrase it in that way? And I think that not just, you know, your own context of trying to make, obviously you want to convince people that this child that you're writing about is worth writing about, but kind of asking the question of the way that people receive young people, because it is always a very polarizing subject.

11:56You know, how can you be a little bit more delicate because they're not someone that has accolades or whatever to sort of rest on. This is a very sensitive period in someone's career.

12:06Max:Yeah. Did the media and social media shape how you thought about yourself? I think it shaped me in a lot of good ways. I've always been very like, my social media is supposed to be food. And it's focused on the food that I make. And I think that I always had some sort of blockades around it. And so I do actually think in that way, that was helpful being a teenager and being like, the only things that I'm going to post on social media are food. And I'm going to use it for a specific avenue of my life. And obviously, it's blended into other ways as I've gotten older, but I think that I've only allowed it to do so as I've started to sort of not value it less, but it's a thing that I have.

12:51But I think very young, you can become incredibly impressionable on it and being able to say, you know, that wasn't like a parent, that was my own, like, I'm only going to post about food on here. As I was listening to Flynn answer the question, I was kind of curious, like, Ben, you've been written about a lot by various people over the years, you know, in your time running BuzzFeed, in your time as a columnist at the New York Times, New York Magazine wrote a big profile on you. I'm curious to ask you that question, actually. Like, do you ever let the media coverage of the stuff that you do impact how you think about yourself?

13:24Obviously, this wasn't stuff that was happening to you when you were a kid, but.

13:27Max:Yeah, people, you know, people often refer to me as the Flynn McGarry of blogging. Yeah. No, I don't know. I don't know. I think from the early internet and mean blog commenters, I also got a very thick skin and also have very careful boundaries around my personal life that I don't post about. When I was 37, the New York Times ran a headline calling me a boy wonder, for which I was like widely and deservedly mocked. And I do think there's something nice about the expiry of the like, wow, you're so young thing. I mean, mostly that's bad, but there is an upside to it. You do kind of miss it, though.

14:01Max:Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure one day I'll be yearning for it. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. People talk about the kind of the dangers and the kind of drawbacks of being a child star in the entertainment business. This is something that's well-worn territory. Now that there are more chefs who are younger, do you think that there are risks to young food stardom? I think it's the same risk that the rest of the entertainment industry hold, because if you are a young chef, you are in the entertainment industry. You are not in the restaurant industry. You know, I worked in a restaurant incredibly illegally as, you know, there are child labor laws for these reasons.

14:43Hollywood is allowed to skirt all of them. You know, the only legal eight hour day I was able to work before I was 18 was shooting a Cadillac commercial. So I think that, you know, these are these kinds of things that In your exact point, if you are a young chef and you're gaining following, you're on a TV show, any of these kinds of things, you face the same exact problems, you could say, as the entertainment industry. But if you look at chefs for history, you know, it's like they've never gone to this level of stardom that you see really does affect children. I do think in a lot of ways, obviously, you're speeding up your life to a certain extent.

15:22that is a danger to kind of anyone. And I do believe still to this day that every decision and thing that I did as a teenager, the awful ideas that I said no to were on my own accord. And I think that when it starts to not be on your own accord, I think is where you start to see, I mean, that's the classic child star dilemma in a lot of ways is that they're forced into a lot of places in life, a lot of decisions that were not their own decisions. Then when they become an adult, They don't know how to make their own decisions. And I would say, you know, if someone is watching this and has a kid that is, wants to be a chef, I think it's obviously being as supportive as possible, but also making sure that if your child wants to do something out of the ordinary, it has to be their decision.

16:08Otherwise, they're not going to know how to make decisions one day, because that's what you learn in high school in, you know, as you become an adult. And, you know, it's funny, like growing up in LA, I had a lot of friends that were also in the entertainment industry from a very young age. And I was lucky that the ones that I was friends with then and still are friends with now all have this same sort of upbringing to it that was like, my parent didn't force me to do this. This is something that I wanted to do. So I think it holds the same risk as anything, but I think it also holds the same benefits that if your child finds something that they're very passionate about and talented at at a young age, they're probably going to get mocked on the internet at some point, but the pros outweigh the cons for

16:55Max:sure. Speaking of getting mocked on the internet, you've said that you, the one of the places you really learned to cook was the internet. And I wonder if 10 years on the internet is still as good a place to learn to cook as it was then. It's definitely a little bit more confusing. There's a lot more out there, but yeah, I mean, I think the same YouTube videos that I learned and And what I meant by learning from the internet was obviously these sort of basic ideas. But what I really also learned on the internet was I was obsessed with these early 2000s videos of professional kitchens. I forget the name of this channel, but it was this German YouTube channel that would just literally film inside of a three-mission star kitchen for two hours.

17:36and when I was obsessed with the sort of fine dining cooking and didn't have the means to get there being able to watch countless hours of these videos I do believe like set me up for success because when you you know oh I know how they move I see how they're they're speaking to each other so that when I actually got in there I already had context to it you know I think that is what I've always used the internet for is like it can give you context it can give you that first jump, you know, I still use it today. It's like, if I'm like, oh, I want to make this recipe or whatever, I might Google something to make sure that someone else has sort of started it.

18:14And then I'll use that context to then, you know, as I put something together, you know, find how I would, I would do it. But I still think it's a really good way to find your own individual way that you can learn how to cook. I think that's, that's kind of like the best thing about it is that whether it's a YouTube video or an Instagram thing, an article, a weird old cookbook that's available online, like, I think there's so many avenues to learn how to cook and learn about restaurants. The one thing that I will say has started to become a little bit dangerous that I've been very aware of is obviously the AI in cooking.

18:49And like, honestly, someone just convinced me to do this. And it was very helpful, I will say, where you can use it to translate your recipes from grams to like a percentage based thing pretty much instantly. And that is very helpful. But I remember, you know, we had some young kind of cook come in and ask ChatGBT like how to know why this sauce broke. And I think like having a dependency on it for how to actually cook that I think has always been unhealthy. But I think having to give you the first put in the door and then, you know, once you're in the kitchen, you have to figure it out is sort of always been my view.

19:26Was it right about the sauce? No, it was absolutely wrong about it. And that's what was frustrating to me is I was standing right next to them, you know, and I was like, I could actually tell you what went wrong here. Not to totally blow up your spot here, Ben, but we had a lovely conversation last year with Alison Roman in which she was slightly horrified by Ben's use of AI for a morning breakfast recipe. Sorry, Ben. Limited ingredients, you know? Yeah, exactly. But I think that's one of the only times we've really offended a guest on our show. Mildly, of course. Honestly, that doesn't offend me.

19:59If you were trying to be a chef, that might be offensive to me, but... That would definitely be offensive. Well, I thought this was the most interesting thing that she said when she came on the show. Basically, she had gone to ChatGPT and basically said, make me an Alison Roman-style recipe for XYZ thing. and some of the adjectives that it spit back out, she has taken out of her cookbooks and her kind of repertoire, the whole like, you know, yeah, yeah. Like beanie, like greenie, like the way that it was described. She was like, I don't want to be boxed in that way and I need to stay ahead of it.

20:36Have you ever done that? Have you asked it about yourself? We've done it at the restaurant as sort of a, as a joke and I'm proud to say it does not, it cannot compete with me yet. It has no idea what I would do. I think that, yeah, we asked it what kind of burger I would make because everyone has always, you know, I'm not putting a burger on the menu anytime soon, but I was curious and it was so far off. It was remarkable.

21:02Max:What did it say and what kind of burger would you make? It said what a normal person would want to hear. You know, like that's, it said it was like a high quality burger with a nice cheese and, you know, a nice bun. It's like, okay. I think that that's what's unique to us is that if we were to ever do something, it would be about the farm that we're, you know, who raised the cows and, you know, where are we sourcing the cheese from? And sure, they're not wrong that it would be a very nice burger with a nice cheese and a good bun. But I don't think it has developed enough to understand the intention behind making what is a nice burger.

21:47And I think that that is where I am very glad to still have a job that it cannot replace.

21:53Max:Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny. That's like when you talk about creative professions. That is like the one thing that AI can't really do. It can't intend. No. It takes a long time to intend.

22:05Well, we have a lot more that we want to get into with Flynn, but we have to take a short break, so we'll be right back with more after this.

22:17Max:In this week's Branded segment from Think with Google, I talked with Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about what YouTube is doing for advertisers this year. It's upfront season in New York. How's YouTube going to show up for advertisers this year? YouTube has been on fire. It is the largest video platform in the world. It is the largest CTV platform in your home. It is the largest podcast platform. Last I checked, there were 200 billion daily views of YouTube Shorts. It's just a remarkable platform with lots and lots of momentum and energy. One of the things I've been thinking about, though, is YouTube is no longer a tween or a teenager.