Danny Garcia keeps a clear memory of what he wanted as a kid working his way through restaurant kitchens. Not a Michelin star. Not a television trophy. A sandwich shop. Something small, neighborhood-rooted, his.
That dream got buried under years of fine dining, then resurfaced in the wreckage of a restaurant that closed too soon.
Garcia won Top Chef’s 21st season and rode that momentum straight into a partnership with restaurateur James Kent, opening Time and Tide in the Flatiron. Then Kent died suddenly. The company reshuffled. The restaurant’s concept struggled to connect with diners, and by 2025, Time and Tide had closed. A rough stretch, even by New York standards.
“Time and Tide closing was hard,” Garcia said. “I put everything into that restaurant, so taking that to the chin. It’s not a failure; it was an accomplishment. Did it not last as long as I would have wanted? Sure, but there are learned lessons, and now I get to take those lessons and do the next best thing.”
So he did.
Garcia stepped away from Kent Hospitality Group entirely. He started talking things through with his wife, pastry chef Sumaiya Bangee, and kept returning to the same conclusion. “I need to do something that is just wholeheartedly Danny Garcia,” he said.
The result is Only Goods, a brand and eventual restaurant built around Latin American culture and Garcia’s own Puerto Rican and Dominican background. Right now it lives as jarred salsa macha and a line of T-shirts. The restaurant is coming. And it won’t look like much else in the city.
Garcia describes his vision as somewhere between the Puerto Rican bodega and the sprawl of a Cracker Barrel. Closer to the bodega, obviously. “Small spaces with dusty cans of beans and there’s one of everything across the wooden shelf,” he said, with real warmth in the description. The plan calls for a luncheonette counter and bodega-style front of house, plus a casual, cozy dining room in the back. Neighborhood first. His word, repeated often, is “community.”
“We are going to be a restaurant that embodies the neighborhood and what the people need it to be, like a bodega,” he said.
Growing up with that culture, Garcia knows the reputation Puerto Rican food carries in New York. Fast-casual. Steam tables. Paper plates. “Aunties and titís and abuelas” cooking food that gets eaten standing up. He doesn’t want to erase that. He wants to honor it while pushing the cuisine into rooms it hasn’t fully occupied yet.
“Let’s shine the light on that, take up our own space, and let’s be the catalyst to open this cuisine a little more and say, ‘Yeah, we can do more than rice and beans and pernil,’” Garcia said. He’s watching what chefs are doing right now for Indian and Afro-Caribbean food in New York and he wants Puerto Rican and Latin American cuisines at that same table.
There’s one element of Only Goods that’ll catch some people off guard. Garcia is Muslim, and the restaurant will be halal. No pork on the menu. At a Puerto Rican concept. He knows people will have questions.
But think about what that actually means for New York. The city’s Muslim population is over a million people. Halal carts and restaurants have been part of the food infrastructure here for decades. Garcia isn’t removing something from his culture; he’s adding a lane into it for people who’ve been eating around pork their whole lives.
“Only Goods was born of this idea of putting a spotlight on Latin American culture, but also a nod to younger Danny Garcia and the dream I had to open a restaurant,” he said.
That line cuts to the heart of what makes this project different from a chef cashing in on a TV win. It’s personal in the way that good neighborhood spots always are. The kind of place where the owner knows what the corner needs.
Eater New York first reported on Garcia’s plans for Only Goods, including details about his product line and the halal direction of the restaurant.
No location has been announced yet. The salsa macha is already out there, though. For anyone who’s been paying attention to what Garcia can do with flavor, that’s probably enough of a preview.
New York has never been short on places to eat. But a halal Puerto Rican luncheonette-bodega hybrid, run by a Top Chef winner who just wants to feed his neighborhood? That’s a specific kind of gap. Garcia’s betting he’s the right person to fill it.