This story. Boy. I had just been hired as the EIC of Southforker, a magazine that didn’t exist prior and for which I was tasked with building, story by story, something people here would — fingers crossed — enjoy reading (like, really reading!).
I’d heard the rumors about Mavericks. It was the most anticipated restaurant on the East End, hands down. This was in part because of the star talent attached to it — Vanessa Price and chef Jeremy Blutstein — but also because, in fits and starts, it had been in the making for years. The summer prior, one local magazine even wrote a big juicy piece about how it was about to open and… it didn’t.
When I told my publisher I was leading with this story in the first print edition of the magazine, he dead-panned: “Are you sure you want to do that?”
No pressure…
I spent five months doggedly chasing down Price and Blutstein. I honestly don’t blame them for ignoring me initially. They had bigger fish to fry, and it’s not like I was calling and emailing and saying, “Oh hey, this is Amy Zavatto from [fill in the name of whichever prominent national publication is meaningful to you].” Eventually, I wore them down.
From the outside, Mavericks is one sexy, shiny restaurant, and this could have been a story about that alone. But the thing was, this story was epic; years and years in the making. I honestly don’t know how they didn’t give up on this place. As Price likes to say, every time they turned around they got Mav’d — that is, some crazy, unforeseen malady (a pandemic, building supply shortages, a truck carrying all their new windows overturning on the highway among them) would set them back.
They persevered and opened in April 2023. There is so much toil and thought and love woven into the details here, from what you see to what you eat. It is not a perfect place, but if you’ve eaten Blutstein’s delicate fluke crudo, velvety New York-sourced beef or that mine-all-mine kimchi fried rice, you know it’s a damn good place (with a killer view). I sincerely hope they make it for the long haul and that, a decade from now, both Mavericks and Southforker are still finding the joy and passion in what we do. Long live Mavs.
Read it here.
