When chef Flynn McGarry needed to source 15-foot-long tables for his Copenhagen-meets-California café and grocery Gem Home in NoLita, he put down his spatula and picked up a saw.
The result?...
When chef Flynn McGarry needed to source 15-foot-long tables for his Copenhagen-meets-California café and grocery Gem Home in NoLita, he put down his spatula and picked up a saw.
The result? Four perfectly imperfect red oak tables, custom-built to fit the space just right, even with the slight slant to the former olive oil factory’s original floors.
It wasn’t McGarry’s first time picking up a hammer, nor does he think it will be his last. “There’s actually a photo of me as a one-year-old on a ladder, nailing in a two-by-four,” he says, noting that he made six cherry wood communal tables for his first restaurant, Gem Wine, which he opened when he was 19. “My father always makes the joke that I’ve actually been doing construction longer than I've been cooking.”
“It's such a satisfying process,” says McGarry, adding that he’s currently sitting at a table he built.
A chef who has an affinity for woodworking might seem like a rarity, but it turns out that McGarry is in good company. As the world of food and design knit closer together, a new generation of chefs from Los Angeles to London are giving a new meaning to “farm-to-table”—and are taking the design of their restaurants into their own hands by making their own furniture.
What’s behind the trend? One could look at diners’ increased awareness of food systems, furthered by initiatives like Slow Food and the Michelin Green Star, that are driving people to choose restaurants that prioritize sustainable practices. There’s also a growing appreciation for craft objects and fine furniture, arguably spurred on by all that time spent at home during the pandemic. The Chippendale International School of Furniture, a renowned furniture-making and design school in Scotland, has seen a 5% increase in students each year for the last five years, while the online furniture and antiques marketplace,1stDibs, reported that furniture orders were up 20% in the fourth quarter of 2024 compared to the same time period in 2019. Even more recently, Pinterest has seen searches for “home decor inspo” increase by 489% over the last year. With these two movements happening in tandem, it’s no surprise that restaurants are finding that the best seat at the chef’s table is at the table that the chef made themselves.
Multiple Michelin-starred chef Jordan Kahn, who founded Los Angeles-based Meteora and Vespertine, sees design as crucial when creating a restaurant. “My wife actually likes to call me the art director of our group, and then also the chef,” says Kahn. Over the course of several days, using ferrocement and chicken wire, Kahn hand-sculpted the entire bar at Meteora, as well as a custom shell-shaped seating area for his chef’s table made of a 200-million-year-old Selenite crystal. These organic-feeling elements, coupled with 700 varieties of plants, help transport diners to a time millions of years ago.
Kahn sees the restaurant’s decor as essential in driving his greater mission to connect people back to nutrition. “The way a restaurant feels is really important—not just to inspire people to think differently about what eating actually is and what it means to them, but also to try to influence other restaurants and chefs to adopt the same ideology,” he says. For this generation of chefs, the restaurant only begins in the kitchen. “The food, the design, the furniture, the music, the sound, the fabric that we wear—everything is part of this world that we built,” said Kahn. “Environment must be a huge part of the experience, because it shifts our context, which then changes the way we approach eating.”
In Edinburgh, Henry Dobson, owner of newly-opened fine-dining restaurant Moss, also takes sourcing his ingredients incredibly seriously—so much so that he used the wood from a windfallen lime tree on his family farm for his tables. “The goal of Moss really is to shorten the supply chains of our farm and to eventually source everything from one place,” he says. Dobson found that having a constraint made him more creative. “I didn’t want anything that wasn’t a natural material in the space,” he says, and using the wood he had on-hand reduced decision fatigue around design choices. “I didn't have a choice between oak or maple or beech.”
Ed McIlroy, the talent behind Tollington’s (the North London Fish Bar where Alexa Chung recently hosted the launch of her Barbour edit) practices a similar philosophy when it comes to food and furniture. “I like working within parameters—working with a little to create a lot,” he said. In Tollington’s, he repurposed 18th-century church pews as the ledges in the main bar and found a new use for a former school bench (still marked with doodles and obscenities) as a kitchen hatch and a sink stand in the bathroom.
It’s worth noting that making furniture is not only a creative exercise, but can also be a cost-friendly one. “For our price point, my philosophy has been that I’d rather spend money on nicer wood that lasts longer,” says McGarry. “You can either buy nicely made, cheap material tables or you can buy expensive wood and figure out how to make it yourself.” In this way, Flynn follows the same philosophy in his cooking as he does with design. “I would say most of my job in cooking is sourcing—we’ve never skimped on the quality of the raw product,” he says.
In the fall, McGarry is set to open the fine-dining restaurant Cove in Manhattan, his biggest project yet—and while he can’t give away too much right now, he said he’s spending 90% of his time at the moment on the restaurant’s design. “My white whale of wood is a very high grade Douglas fir,” he says. “I spent eight hours on the phone yesterday trying to find it and I think I finally did!”
Some interiors-minded chefs are going beyond the restaurant and bringing these pieces to their diners’ homes. Late last year, Clare de Boer, co-founder of the beloved West Village restaurant, King, and founder of the acclaimed Hudson Valley institution, Stissing House, launched Roseland, a furniture brand inspired by early American design. Earler this month at Milan Design Week, chef and artist Laila Gohar unveiled a capsule collection with Marimekko that included bedding—and is already no stranger to the interiors sphere, having built a cult following around Gohar World, the tableware universe that she launched in 2022 with her sister, Nadia. In the United Kingdom, food writer Skye McAlpine has grown her artisan-made tableware brand Tavola to new heights, while food stylist and writer Jess Elliott Dennison continues to gather loyal fans of her curated homewares emporium, Elliott’s, in Edinburgh.
Whether more chefs will soon follow with furniture offerings, only time will tell. But if the long waiting lists and sold-out chef’s tables of the restaurants above indicate anything, one thing is for certain: There’s an appetite for it.