The first time I visited Gabriel Kreuther’s new restaurant, Saverne at Hudson Yards, back in March, the allure of open fire cooking and a return to the chef’s roots had me on the edge of my seat. Before opening the doors of the new Hudson Yards restaurant, you could smell the aroma of wood fire from a block away. For Chef Kreuther, the connection to open fire goes back to the farm he grew up on in Alsace, France, where it wasn’t a trendy concept—it was everyday life. “It’s beautiful to invite people into your kitchen,” Kreuther says. Throughout our conversation, Chef Kreuther repeatedly returned to one idea: that restaurants remain among the few places where genuine human connection still unfolds naturally.