A Top Chef Winner Steps Up at Time and Tide

Welcome to Grub Street’s 2024 fall restaurant preview. All week, we’re diving into the upcoming openings we’re most excited about.

The new restaurant Time and Tide was always going to carry the weight of certain expectations: It is a 120-seat power-dining destination and a “steakhouse that only serves seafood” from the same restaurant group that runs Crown Shy and SAGA in Fidi. That was before Danny Garcia, who was already set to run the kitchen, won the most recent season of Top Chef and before Jamal James Kent, the chef who, with Garcia, conceived of the project as part of his still-growing company, died of a heart attack at the age of 45. “It’s like being on a roller coaster with no seat belt,” Garcia says.

Garcia and Kent met in 2014 at the NoMad restaurant; Kent was executive chef, and Garcia rose to sous-chef. Kent also mentored Garcia through qualifying competitions for the Bocuse d’Or — where he himself had competed in 2010 — with Garcia going on to be part of a U.S. team in 2017 that won the fine-dining competition. When Kent left NoMad to found SAGA Hospitality Group in 2018, he hired Garcia, who worked there until 2021, when he moved to Hong Kong to work on the Belon reopening. Garcia had been back in the U.S. for only a few months when Kent called to ask if he wanted to look at the space that would eventually become Time and Tide.

After Kent’s death, the entire enterprise — now named Kent Hospitality Group — remade itself, bringing on chef Charlie Mitchell to run SAGA downtown while Garcia focuses on Time and Tide, pivots that were possible because of the ­founder’s vision: Kent had wanted to “create an empire of chefs,” Garcia says. “It’s a Jamal James Kent restaurant because everyone’s voice makes it up. It’s not just Danny Garcia cooking the food; it’s the entire team.”

But it does fall to Garcia to make most of the decisions ahead of opening, and he’s been testing recipes — charred-sardine toast with piquillo relish, cacio e pepe spear squid that “eats like a noodle” — in Crown Shy’s kitchen. One early standout is a pan roast modeled after the version at Grand Central Oyster Bar, the restaurant where Kent’s grandmother had her first date with her eventual husband (Kent’s step-grandfather), Charles Mingus. (The song “Time and Tide,” on which Mingus is featured, was one inspiration for the name; Garcia was doubly moved by the adage “Time and tide wait for no man”: “Time keeps moving,” he says. “It’s this timeless space that we want to create.”) Another musical reference will be a Biggie Smalls portrait on the wall, Garcia says, and the speakers will be turned up loud — ­that’s what Kent had wanted when he was building Crown Shy, too.