Illustration: Adam Mazur
Henry Rich spent his earliest years in Cobble Hill, nearby where he now lives with his own family and a block away from his restaurant June. “I was named after Henry Streeet while my mom was on a walk,” he says. Today, as managing partner of the Oberon Group, he also operates the Brooklyn hotspots Rucola, Rhodora, and Anaïs and is a partner in the Nowadays nightclub. “We just want to make good, everyday restaurants that serve as less transactional third spaces for New Yorkers,” he says. Later this summer he will open Oberon restaurant in the New Museum, which aims to be a high-design “neighborhood restaurant for the downtown art world.” “I’ve worked on projects in Manhattan before, but we’re very much coming out of the Brooklyn Zeitgeist,” he says.
Sunday, May 31
I split my time between Brooklyn and a small Arts and Crafts–style house in the Catskills. My town, Accord, is in a little area called the Rondout Valley, nestled in between the Shawangunk-Mohonk ridge. There are bears, rivers, sweat lodges, amazing farms, and — not incidentally — incredible natural beauty.
I start my day making my two daughters (ages 4 and 1) a smoothie that I also enjoy: kale, blueberries, chia, hemp, avocados, and ginger. My older daughter’s favorite color is purple, so I need to put enough blueberries in to make it convincingly purple. That needs to be consumed within about 15 minutes or it turns green and she’s pissed.
On alternating days, I make her a bowl of Willow Pond sheep yogurt and granola. The yogurt is made in Ulster County and is only available from May until October, maybe November, but by then it’s giving Magic Mountain energy (i.e., themes of decay), so they cut off the supply.
For context, there wasn’t a ton of food in the house I grew up in, and I’m hell-bent on giving my children a different experience. I usually ate a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-chip cookies for dinner and from age 10 started fending for myself at delis. By 14, I took up residency at Chapter One, a coffee shop that has since closed, and had my calls forwarded to their landline. To this day, I associate home comforts with restaurants you can spend all day in and go back to for every meal of your life.
Back then, I was always intrigued by what I called the “quickie of the day” — but they would always tell me the quickie of the day was quiche, which I didn’t care for. When I complained about this, they explained, with infinite kindness, “It’s pronounced quiche of the day, not quickie.”
For lunch I make the kids something I want as well: avocado toast with togarashi and Hudson Valley steelhead trout on levain from Kingston Bread. I know avocado toast is boring, but I’m at my least interesting in the middle of the day.
I love togarashi because I’m a pepper fanatic. From a young age I internalized that salt was bad but pepper was consequence-free, so I just went all-in on enjoying pepper.
Next I swing by Field and Supply in Kingston, a makers’ market that’s now an essential component of feeling like you can have all the cultural richness of the city with all the open space and nature immersion of rural life. That’s followed by family dinner at Inness, a restaurant and hotel in Accord. I have the Snowdance Farm chicken with spring onion, pommes purée, turnips, and preserved lemon. Snowdance is just one of the best farms in the country for chicken — it has crispy skin, it’s juicy, and there’s a richness and a depth of flavor that’s unusual.
Monday, June 1
It’s a sheep-yogurt and granola day. I meet with the Oberon Group team for an Upstate field trip: Our catering company is working with some friends to develop a 19th-century mill into an arts gallery and event space, so we start there before grabbing lunch at Little Goat in Rhinebeck. I go for the turmeric-cauliflower-farro salad, which I could eat once a week for the rest of time. I love turmeric, and it’s a longevity spice, so it helps you live forever.
Then we swing by the Accord Market, a pandemic idea to make area produce more accessible to locals.
Our beverage director, Franz Kosmicki, decides to spend the night while the rest of the team goes home. The two of us go out to Mirador, a Spanish restaurant in Kingston that probably has the best collection of sherry in the United States (validated by Franz, who worked at Altro Paradiso and Estela and actually knows). The owner talks to us for what feels like an hour, taking sherry out of his private collection, telling us all about sherries made in the old style and new style and making sherry on the vine through pruning and sun-exposure without any manipulation.
I have the tosta matrimonio, which balances smoke and acidity with incredibly smooth anchovies on crunchy bread. The endive salad is ten times more peppery than any salad I’ve had in a restaurant, which is to say it’s perfect. And the humble pan con tomate, with its sherry vinegar as a secret house weapon, quietly steals the show. It is a master class in everything that makes restaurants worth going to and without question my best meal of the year.
Tuesday, June 2
Back to the city. Scarf down a bowl of oatmeal with blueberries before jumping in the car and proceed to take five meetings during the drive down. We’re talking about fun pop-ups at wine bars and opening a restaurant on Governor’s Island in an old Admiral’s House. More than anything, though, we’re meeting about our new restaurant, Oberon.
Preopening in a restaurant is usually such hell you never want to do it again. But this project has been different, because working with the Office of Metropolitan Architecture has made solving difficult problems a pleasure. Simple questions — like, “How do we manage the lighting transition from daytime to nighttime?” — are met with a 200-slide deck spanning all of human knowledge about light and dark. Seating arrangements? Let’s start with some slides about the human body, then how it exists in space, then maybe how people squeeze together in New York restaurants. Not following? Well, here’s a tiny diorama of your restaurant full of guests, plants, tables, and miniature bartenders to help catch you up.
For lunch, I have a meal I’ve had literally 500 times: Rucola’s escarole salad with toasted almonds, smoked feta, and preserved-lemon wildflower honey vinaigrette. The escarole tastes strong and holds up to a fairly high level of acidity with the lemon — it’s healthy and delicious and makes me feel amazing. (On my way out to the museum, I notice Ezra Klein having lunch with Yascha Mounk, one of several people who kept me tethered to reality during the pandemic.)
At June, the courtyard is open and life is good. I grab a burger plus a glass of chilled red.
Wednesday June 3
I wake up in Cobble Hill with a full day of New Museum meetings ahead of me. Grab a vegetable frittata at Poppy’s because it’s a block away from my house and because I’m an adult and like baked-egg dishes now.
Work all morning and have the exact same lunch — same time of day, same salad, same espresso — as yesterday.
Prepare with my partners for a meeting that night with Community Board 4 in Chelsea about an immersive-theater project at the event space 530W27. As usual, the controversy is about the hours of the liquor license; despite the building having been licensed until 4 a.m. for most of the last 30 years, there have been a number of ultraluxury residences built during this time. These residents, who show up in force, are unblinking in their assessment that times have changed and this is no longer a block for these kinds of activities. Our pitch is essentially the same: Times are changing and noncommercial culture has been brutally exiled to the outer boroughs, but we think this is actually bad.
The board forges a compromise that forgoes late night dancing but allows the shows we’re currently platforming, like the Heated Rivalry parody musical. If you’re abundance-pilled and want a refreshing take from the opposite end of the spectrum, tune into your local community-board meeting.
Dinner nearby at Café Chelsea with my partners, where I go for the roasted salmon and am reminded why Sean McPherson is one of my favorite restaurateurs. It’s a hotel restaurant, so it’s just the most classic way that you could possibly prepare a salmon: down the middle, no surprises, maybe slightly veering in a French direction. He gets the simplicity of what people want, and he gets the why.
Thursday, June 4
My birthday. I make oatmeal for the family, go for a walk, and pack the car. Drive all day to Truro on Cape Cod; eat Fishwife smoked salmon out of the tin like a wild dog while driving, attempting with some success not to spill fish oil in the car. For some reason, my daughter has started calling me “Fat Walrus” whenever she wants to get my attention. That may be because of all the episodes of Planet Earth we watch, or it may be because I’m eating more tinned fish than a fat walrus.
I’m heading to stay in an old fishing shack my grandparents started renting 70 years ago. The happiest moments of my childhood were sitting with them reading the paper and asking them questions about what it was like to grow up as Irish immigrants in Boston 100 years ago. My entire life has been driven by trying to make my grandparents proud, which is a Fitzcarraldo-ian exercise in futility and masochism.
The only person to ever impress my grandmother was her mother, and then only once for staying on the front lines of WWI in France as a nurse after being mustard-gassed. I think she was also impressed by James Baldwin, but that’s really it.
After my family rented the shack for 60 years, it came on the market in 2011. Post-recession, I had no money, no credit, and lots of debt. I tried to get a mortgage and was reasonably turned down. So I tried the only thing I had left, which was writing to the owner, who had watched me grow up. I explained the only thing I’ve ever really wanted in life was this shack — would she hold the mortgage for five years and give me some time to figure out how to pay for it?
Unbelievably, she said “yes.” It made no financial sense. People do not do this. Her name was June Finch, and she was Merce Cunningham’s rehearsal director, known for being particularly kind and attentive to her students. She was an unusual person who made my biggest childhood dream come true, and my restaurant June is named for her.
When you arrive on Cape Cod you get the cod, so I grab takeout from Mac’s Shack for family dinner. He has a mini-empire in the Outer Cape, and nothing is fresher than any kind of local seafood from Mac at his own restaurant. I put extra pepper and lemon on the broiled fish. I always associate this meal with this place, so it brings me back. I ask my daughter to tell me the best thing she did today, and she says collecting shells in the river, which was my favorite thing at her age. I could not have asked for a better birthday gift.
