Flynn McGarry, the 14-year-old culinary prodigy behind Los Angeles pop-up supper club Eureka, is known for his emphasis on both ingredients as well as playful creativity. Jace Lacob dined at Eureka’s May 1 spring dinner. He offers his photographs of the eleven courses served at the event, and talks to McGarry about several specific dishes.
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Two tastes, side by side. On the right, a sort of quivering blancmange of chamomile, rhubarb, and basil, redolent of the garden, and then a piece of crispy kale with seaweed, briny and oceany. It’s vegetative but fresh, creamy yet bracing.
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A gorgeous dish that juxtaposes fresh English peas with dehydrated peas, which conceal a hidden parmesan pudding underneath the verdant abundance. It’s punchy, crunchy, and bright, the tendrils threatening to overtake the bowl.
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A cucumber foam sits atop a live scallop, which in turn conceals a piece of grilled cucumber, a study in textures. The dish is playfully plated in a scallop shell that is anchored to the plate by sand.
“I grilled the cucumber so it had a different flavor,” said McGarry. “The foam was made with cucumber juice, but I took vinegar and I blended in the cucumber and made a cucumber vinegar so it was mostly cucumber vinegar with a little bit of cucumber juice. The idea was a vinaigrette but in a foam.”
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A playful and exuberant dish that reimagines beet as a piece of beautiful beef, the sauce meant to mimic the juices running out of a piece of rare red meat. Meaty and intensely smoky, it’s a star dish.
“Originally, the beet wasn’t dehydrated, it was just like a smoked beet,” McGarry said. “The last reiteration of it was a smoked beet filled with cranberry preserves, so it looked like solid beet, then it had crème fresh and grilled cabbage sauce. I thought the dish could be better. I looked at the beet again, and I was like, 'What am I trying to achieve with the beet?' Beets aren’t the most enjoyed vegetable. So I thought, 'What if I took out some of the moisture and cooked it until it was super-soft, and then smoked it, and then really took out the moisture until it was super-shriveled up, but then tossed it with a little bit of beet juice to take in the moisture on the surface so it has a shiny skin?’ The inside is very dense and meaty, and then I smoke it overnight, so it actually dehydrates a little bit more. Instead of cold smoking, you just burn it and then blow it out. I take big chunks of the wood and burn it, so it's just the embers, so it slowly cooks a little bit more.”
“Just the beets alone is a very long preparation, and it's a pain in the ass… The berries, I want the acidity with it. The goat’s milk was [because] I want a freshness to it, but I want it also sour. The note behind the dish was super-rich and meaty, but I want a bunch of sour around it. And obviously, the berries, they're also red. The sauce, I put it on there to look like the beet was bleeding out.”
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Succulent white asparagus is enshrouded in pork lardo, and paired with tender wheatberries that are infused with lemon. The dish very much captures the season: it’s bright and light, with a nice hit of acid and salt.
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This is a British fry-up essentially turned on its head, an inverted breakfast dish of unctuous egg yolk, bacon, and mushrooms and a delicious sauce of preserved lemons and radish greens. The bowl is from Eleven Madison Park, the perfect vessel for this outrageous dish.
“The sous-vide egg yolk was a mistake, actually,” said McGarry. “I put the wrong temperature on the sous-vide bath, because I wanted the egg yolk just to like break and be super liquid-y. But I realized if I'm trying to separate the yolk from the white—if it's a gooey one—I'm going to break a thousand of them. It’s this chewy, dense egg yolk, and then the sautéed mushrooms. It could have many different crumbles, but the pork skin crumble? I mean, pork skin, egg yolk and mushrooms, that dish was just sort of made to be good. That combination, you can’t really do it wrong. And then the radish vinaigrette was for the acidity once again, and the mint was the weird ingredient that I threw in there that worked.”
“It's always good to have a couple of dishes on your menu that people can eat a lot of, then there are those other dishes where, in my opinion, if I gave you four times the amount of scallops, that'd just be gross. So there are certain dishes where you eat just that amount, and it's really good then, but if you eat more of it, it'd be really bad. But then there are the dishes where if you ate a lot of it, it'd be really good, but I'm not going to give you a lot of it. Because, the next dish is just as good, maybe even better.”
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This dish is both delicate and rich at the same time, smoky and intense, yet oddly comforting. It has a distinct, NOMA-esque, Scandinavian influence, yet the bonito brings in a hint of Japan as well.
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An exquisite and sophisticated dish that’s a tongue-in-cheek play on sturgeon and caviar, with the tapioca filling in for roe. Pickled red onions and vinegar give the dish appropriate acidity, the fire-roasted ramps lend a nice smoky quality. It’s genius and madness on the same place.
“The idea that the tapioca pearls almost resemble caviar did not come to me at first. The rye bread and sturgeon; it was sort of like this smoked fish and rye bread,” said McGarry. “Smoked whitefish, rye bread, onions, and then the tapioca. I wanted something gooey and comforting. That’s cooked in cream and it’s very rich and hearty. The onion sauce is sort of the star of that dish, you can put that on anything and it really tastes good. I was always trying to figure out a way to do an onion sauce that’s just pure onion. So I decided to char the onions incredibly dark and then roast them for an hour until they’re pretty much mush, and then juice them and then whisk in brown butter. It has a really good sauce texture and it tastes like burnt onions, which taste really good surprisingly. So once I had that on the dish, I was like okay, this is how it is.”
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21-day dry aged lamb is paired here with velvety lamb belly (cooked sous-vide), fava beans, and blackberries. A decadent dish that is beautifully balanced and perfectly seasoned.
“I had an idea to age lamb in a sheet of wood, because I saw these sheets of applewood and I was like, 'If I age something in that it’ll take on the wood flavor without smoking it, which is burnt wood,’” McGarry said. “But then I was like, 'lamb and fava beans, and fava beans are in season right now.' At a certain point, you have an index in your brain, say it’s lamb, and you know everything that goes with lamb that’s in that season, and you always try to throw in one weird ingredient that may entirely work, that may not. If the weird ingredient works, great. If it doesn’t work you don’t really need it.”
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The first of two small desserts, this dish is frozen milk crystals with hazelnuts and Earl Grey tea, along with a Meyer lemon syrup that is poured tableside. It’s tart and sweet and citrusy.
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Half palate-cleanser, half richly decadent dessert on one plate. Raw slices of yellow beet sit atop of chocolate ice cream; next to it, a light tangerine sorbet and pieces of fudgy toffee reminiscent of Britain’s luscious Burnt Sugar toffee.
