Nolita, NYC | Café, Grocery & Design Shop | Seasonal Provisions Subscription

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Key Results

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• A creative outlet: the club pushes the team to keep their curation fresh
• Delivery to Manhattan and Brooklyn: reach extended to guests who can't easily get downtown
• Table22 owns the admin, supporting the end-to-end member cycle, from onboarding to delivery

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Celebrating the people behind the ingredients

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Chef Flynn McGarry opened his first restaurant, Gem, on the Lower East Side at 19 years old, and followed it with the low-intervention wine bar, Gem Wine. In October 2024, he expanded the brand once more to open Gem Home, a multifunctional, upscale home goods shop. The space blends a vintage and design shop up front with a working cafe and grocery in back, sourcing produce from nearby farms and stocking shelves with goods from small producers.

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For Dylan Farrell, Director of Operations, the shop's reason for being comes down to one thing. "We really wanted to find a way to highlight purveyors, producers, farmers that we love and are excited about," he says.That shows up everywhere, from the pastry case to the retail shelves, and even in a summer slushie program built around fruit from Weiser Family Farms in California.

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A different kind of pantry

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Most of the Gem Home team came up in full-service restaurants, and opening a cafe-grocery-retail hybrid meant thinking about product in a new way. A grocery section creates real opportunity to cut down on food waste, Farrell says, since produce nearing the end of its shelf-life can be processed into something new rather than tossed. 

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It also meant the team suddenly had more product on-hand than a single cafe menu could use: that extra produce, or a surplus from a particularly good week at the farmer’s market, and even ingredients they were excited about but hadn't found a place for yet on the in-house menu.

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They wanted to find a good home for it all, and thought there might be an opportunity to use it as a way to stay connected with their guests once they walked out the door.

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Seasonal, seamless, and creative

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Working with Table22, Gem Home launched its Seasonal Provisions subscription: a rotating monthly box built around what the café is making and sourcing at the moment, from pastry and pantry staples to seasonal produce finds. Members choose between an Essentials Box and an Essentials Plus Box that adds a sourdough loaf with house-made jam and butter, with a $25 pastry add-on available for anyone who wants more.

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"It allows us to kind of continue that relationship with the guests," Farrell says, "and also for them to build out a pantry and a cabinet of wonderful spices and prepared goods." The boxes regularly include items that never make it into the cafe at all, offering their members the best of the season as expertly chosen and curated by the Gem team.

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On the process of launching the club, Farrell says that “it's been a really seamless transition. I think that's something that makes total sense for the type of business that we're running here."

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Almost a year in, the club has become something else too: a creative outlet. "We're in this place where it's constantly pushing us to be more experimental, working on new items," Farrell says. For a kitchen staffed by cooks and chefs, that pressure to keep inventing is a welcome one.

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"I think [the club] is a great outlet for us. It's pushing us to be more creative."

— Dylan Farrell, Director of Operations, Gem Home

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Instagram unboxings and increased loyalty

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Farrell's favorite feedback comes from gifted subscriptions, a way he’s seen members introduce someone to the shop. "We'll see people posting on Instagram, like the surprise for the first gift when they get it delivered, and the spread that's laid out on their kitchen table," he says. It is, in his words, a way of sharing love through hospitality and food, and it introduces new members to Gem Home who might never have found the shop otherwise.

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The club has also deepened relationships with increasingly loyal guests. Longtime regulars who stop by multiple times a week have signed up too, now getting their Gem Home fix both in-person and through their monthly box. Delivery - run entirely through Table22’s own fleet - extends through Manhattan and out to Brooklyn, reaching guests who work from home or otherwise find it hard to make the trip into the city during the week.

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On the logistics side, Farrell credits Table22 with removing the parts of the job his team isn't built for.

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"[Table22] totally handles the delivery aspect, it's super easy. All the couriers, all the team members are really responsive. And anytime we have an issue, the customer support team is always right on it and does the liaising with the guests for us."

— Dylan Farrell, Director of Operations, Gem Home

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Advice from the inside

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Farrell's advice to other operators considering a club is straightforward. "There's so many ways to make this right for your business, whether it's through a wine subscription, meal kits, or prepared goods," he says. "People want to find ways to interact with the businesses that they love outside the brick and mortar themselves. They want to be able to take away experiences from places that they love, bring them home, share them with their friends and family."

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For a New York audience specifically, Farrell thinks the key is offering something a subscriber genuinely cannot buy anywhere else. For Gem Home, that means leaning on what the team makes in-house: the pastries, the bread, and the small-batch items Farrell says give a kitchen its character. As the shop keeps sourcing from new farms and dreaming up new seasonal offerings, the Provisions box remains the place where that abundance lands, one table at a time.

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Our platform, your pantry. Welcome to the club.