Danny Garcia didn’t grow up dreaming about Michelin stars. He wanted a sandwich shop. Small, his, rooted in a neighborhood that knew his name.
That’s the version of him that got lost somewhere in the years of fine dining kitchens, and that’s the version that came clawing back after one of the worst professional stretches of his career.
Garcia won Top Chef’s 21st season, which opened doors. One of those doors led to a partnership with James Kent, and together they launched Time and Tide in the Flatiron. Then Kent died. The company around him reshuffled. The restaurant’s concept never quite locked in with diners, and by 2025 Time and Tide was gone. That’s a brutal sequence by any city’s standards, but this is New York, so you absorb it and figure out what’s next.
“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.”
He left Kent Hospitality Group entirely. Started long conversations with his wife, pastry chef Sumaiya Bangee. Kept arriving at the same answer. “I need to do something that is just wholeheartedly Danny Garcia,” he said.
That something is Only Goods, a brand and eventual restaurant built around Latin American food culture and Garcia’s own Puerto Rican and Dominican roots. Right now it’s jarred salsa macha and T-shirts. The restaurant is coming, and it won’t look like much else operating in this city at the moment.
Garcia describes his concept as floating somewhere between the Puerto Rican bodega and a Cracker Barrel footprint. Heavily weighted toward the bodega. “Small spaces with dusty cans of beans and there’s one of everything across the wooden shelf,” he said. He said it like someone describing a room they miss. The plan includes a luncheonette counter and a bodega-style front of house, with a casual dining room tucked behind it. He uses the word “community” constantly, and it doesn’t sound like a pitch line.
“We are going to be a restaurant that embodies the neighborhood and what the people need it to be, like a bodega,” he said.
Garcia knows exactly how Puerto Rican food gets read in New York. Steam tables. Paper plates. Fast-casual counters, aunties and titías and abuelas feeding people food that doesn’t get photographed because nobody’s sitting down long enough. He isn’t trying to erase that tradition. He wants to respect what it is while pushing the cuisine into rooms it hasn’t 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’s happening right now with Indian restaurants and Afro-Caribbean spots in New York, and he wants Puerto Rican and broader Latin American cooking at that same table, that same level of seriousness and ambition.
There’s a layer to Only Goods that’ll catch some people off guard. Garcia is Muslim, and the restaurant will be halal, serving New York’s sizable Muslim population while staying rooted in Latin American flavors. It’s not a compromise, it’s a combination that reflects who he actually is.
Eater New York has tracked the Only Goods rollout, and the response from the city’s food community suggests Garcia isn’t the only one who’s been waiting for something like this.
A location hasn’t been announced. The full restaurant is still on its way. For now, Garcia’s building the brand jar by jar, getting the city familiar with his name on his own terms, not attached to a network competition or someone else’s hospitality group. The sandwich shop kid from the beginning, finally getting his shot.