McGarry has yet to make much money for his cooking, but that could change soon. Once he turns 16, he can take his California High School Equivalency Exam and, with his parents’ consent, work full time at a restaurant like Alma. And while McGarry may be singularly focused on his cooking — “he doesn’t want to be the kid chef,” Meg says — he also seems to recognize the value of his unusual story in achieving his ultimate goal. He is hoping to expedite his professional development by traveling across the globe to work in some of the world’s top kitchens. And he is hoping to make this possible by starring in a reality show in which he is paid to travel across the globe to work in some of the world’s top kitchens. “I get to learn from these chefs and experience all of these different places, but I don’t have to pay a lot of money for it,” McGarry said. David Bernad, who is developing the show, said: “Flynn is very confident kid, but he also knows that he doesn’t know everything and has a lot to learn. So the idea of the show is that it’s his journey to being the youngest Michelin starred chef in the world.” 
 
 McGarry’s real precociousness, in fact, may be his ability to confront his own ambition. Twice during our conversations, he spoke about how he tries to avoid reflecting too much on all the things that are happening, to not pay attention to the media or let it freak him out. At the same time, he’s a willing participant in it; he told me he was convinced that self-promotion — whether it’s a show or a magazine article — was an integral part of being a creative person nowadays. “You can’t really do anything without selling out, to an extent,” he says. “And I don’t consider this selling out, because I want to do it. I was like: ‘I want to do a travel show. I want to meet these chefs. I want to talk to them, and I wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise.’ I could get into these kitchens, maybe, and work there, but I’d have to find a place to live, and all the plane tickets and stuff. And also, I’m 15, so my mom has to come with me, too.” 
 
 McGarry’s eventual plan is to move to New York at 17, work at Eleven Madison Park or somewhere like it for a year, maybe a year and a half, and then start work on his restaurant by 19. The remainder of his teenage years seems to him a respectable stretch of time in which to learn and develop. Then again, “now that I think about it,” he says, “time moves very quickly for me, so it’s not that far away. I don’t think I can wait too long, because the real estate [in New York] keeps going up and up and up. You can’t wait forever to do it, because if you wait forever, your opportunity might just be gone.” 
 
 He paused for a moment. “I know people are always like, ‘You shouldn’t mark what you want by someone else’s [standards]’ — like three Michelin stars or four New York Times stars — but it’s kind of like a goal to look up to. This is what I want. I want to have one of the best restaurants in the world, or whatever, which is kind of a very high goal to have, but I like pressure. So to say I want the best restaurant in the world would put enough pressure on me to try as hard as possible to have the best restaurant in the world.” ||||| While most of his peers head back to school next week, 16-year-old Flynn McGarry will be opening up a pop-up restaurant in the Village — charging $160 a head for his fine-dining experience. 
 
 McGarry, who graduated high school in March and is living in the Big Apple on his own, will be dishing out a 14-course meal three days a week starting Sept. 12 for the foreseeable future. 
 
 “We don’t see it ending anytime soon,” the self-taught teen chef told The Post Tuesday. “It’s a way for me to learn the ins and outs of opening a restaurant — but not have to do the whole thing.” 
 
 The pop-up restaurant will be named Eureka, the name of the street on which he lived in California and what he called his first supper club he started at his parents’ home at age 15. It will be run out of the Creative Edge catering spot on Washington Street. 
 
 The 12-seat chef’s-counter restaurant is already sold out through September despite the reservation site crashing Monday. McGarry plans to release reservations two weeks at a time. He isn’t releasing the complete menu yet, saying he wants to “keep a few secrets.” 
 
 But he did provide details about a beet bourguignon dish he’s been working on perfecting for months. 
 
 The beets have been aged for three weeks and paired with slow-cooked beet juice and wilted beet greens in fermented beet butter. 
 
 He went through 10 pounds of tomatoes last weekend cooking them in every way he could think of to try to get the perfect dish before thinking up a tomato-lobster dumpling in rose-hips tea and roasted lobster oil. “I was on the subway and I just thought of tomato, lobster and rose,” McGarry said. 
 
 He plans to switch up the menu frequently but wouldn’t commit to a weekly cycle. “If I get bored with something, I’ll change it,” he said. “Some things might change every day, some things might change ­every week.” 
 
 Diners can also tack on an $80 wine pairing to their meal, which includes tax and tip, or opt for a by-the-glass list. 
 
 McGarry knows he’s not the average teen, but working full time is what he’s been doing since he was just 12 years old. “Everyone has their different versions of growing up,” he said. “This is just my version of being 16.” 
 
 Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton ||||| By Cynthia Betubiza, Ella Dawson and Kate Torgovnick May 
 
 Session 1 of TEDYouth 2014 brought us to many worlds imagined. From a look at other planets that could be like Earth, to an introduction to a mysterious dinosaur bigger than T. rex, to a beet-tastic vision for the future of food, this morning’s speakers brought wonder, passion and a slew of fascinating facts. 
 
 Here’s what happened in Session 1 … 
 
 How we find planets far, far away. When you look at the night sky, you see about 6,000 stars, says astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger. That’s only a fraction of the billions of stars in our galaxy — and there are billions of galaxies beyond that. Our sun, of course, is a star. And statistically, every second star out there has at least a planet; every fifth planet has the potential to be a world like ours. Kaltenegger explains the techniques used to take the “fingerprint” of a distant planet, by charting the light pattern created by its atmosphere and the way the star wobbles with the planet’s gravitational pull. “We can do weather reports for planets from light years away,” she says. And thus, we can find out if a planet has life. 
 
 A kick-in-the-butt from science fiction. 15-year-old Marrec Selous was nominated by his TED-Ed club to speak. And he wants us to get our heads back into the clouds and take inspiration from the world of science fiction. 2001: A Space Odyssey imagines a world with massive moon bases that make our current International Space Station look tame. Why haven’t we landed people on other planets? What happened to that insatiable sense of exploration that catapulted us into space after World War II? Marrec worries that it comes down to a societal obsession with consumerism that distracts us from the wonders above. 
 
 Meet the Spinosaurus. Paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim wanted to uncover the mystery of the Spinosaurus, a bizarre, gigantic predatory dinosaur whose only remains were lost during World War II. After uncovering a new skeleton at a dig in North Africa, Ibrahim made the landmark discovery that the Spinosaurus may have been the largest carnivorous dinosaur to ever live. Its crocodile-like head, dense bones, short legs, and wide, paddle feet suggest it was a water dweller unlike any other. “The entire skeleton has water-loving river monster written all over it,” he says. 
 
 The city that never sleeps … in 2409. Eric Sanderson loves maps. “They help us see visions of what used to be and what could be in the future,” he says. Sanderson is known for his book Mannahatta, which shows the wildland of Manhattan when Henry Hudson arrived in 1609. But what is it going to look like in 2409? Sanderson imagines a New York without suburbs or cars, filled with farms and streams. But when he shared this, he got a strange response. “People said, ‘That’s your vision. Not mine,’” he says. “And they’re right. No one of us owns the future.” This is why Sanderson has created Mannahatta2409.com where people can build their own vision of New York in the future. His hope for it: that it’ll help us all radically rethink where we’re going. 
 
 Remixing the book in the digital age. A book is not just a collection of static words on a page, but an evolving organism — a machine and a landscape. Artist Brian Dettmer explores these concepts through his work where he binds the sides of books and carves intricate patterns and designs into them. Like a DJ, he remixes the knowledge found inside. Like an archeologist, he excavates the potential of their wisdom. He believes that the book will never die, but will and must adapt to hold its place in the new digital information age. 
 
 Health lessons from the monarch butterfly. As the drugs we rely on to protect us from disease lose their efficacy, Jaap de Roode suggests we turn to animals for medical alternatives. While learning from larger animals is hardly new, smaller-brained insects have been discounted as too simple to offer us insight. But de Roode’s research proves that monarch butterflies recognize the medicinal qualities of plants, and that monarch mothers strongly prefer to lay their eggs on milkweed to reduce disease symptoms in their offspring. De Roode thinks that, some day soon, these monarch doctors might lead us to medicine to treat our own diseases. 
 
 Tiny robots that could have big impact. Sarah Bergbreiter creates robots the size of ants. She shows us a 4 millimeter bot that can jump 40 centimeters, a centimeter-long bot that can run 10 body lengths per second, and a bot the size of a Tic Tac that can sense light. Why take the time to address the engineering challenges that come with creating robots so small? Because, working together like ants or termites, these robots could do incredible things. They could search through rubble after disaster to look for survivors, they could run around a bridge to inspect it, or even swim through our blood to perform an operation. It’s a small project with many possibilities. 
 
 A lesson in sexism from a video game. As a teenager, Lilian Chen began competing nationally as a Super Smash Bros. Melee gamer. The gaming community offered a welcoming, accepting alternative to the bullying she faced in school, but eventually the sexism she encountered from other gamers, and the misogyny she internalized herself, became too much to handle. A Facebook post denying the existence of sexism in the gaming world helped her find her voice, and she co-founded The New Meta, a panel with the NYU Game Center that raises awareness of gender issues in the community without shaming male gamers. “Everyone in this room has a voice,” she says. “You have to use it, and you have to use it responsibly.” 
 
 Eat a beet, help the planet. Fifteen-year-old Flynn McGarry is no stranger to the culinary world, as he already hosts hugely popular supper clubs in both New York and Los Angeles. One day, his father inspired him to use a highly underrated vegetable to help people eat healthier and care for the planet: the beet. By cooking a beet the same way as he would a steak, he encourages creative and conscious eating by offering alternatives to meat and fish, which both take large tolls on the environment.
– You probably wouldn't pay $160 to have any 16-year-old cook you dinner, but you might if the teen in the chef's hat is Flynn McGarry. The self-taught chef and recent high school graduate's first New York City restaurant, Eureka, opens Saturday, the New York Post reports. It won't be easy to get in, and not just because there are only 12 seats in the place. Flynn has an impressive résumé for one so young, reports Food & Wine. His California supper club—also named Eureka after the street on which he used to live—landed his face on the cover of the New York Times Magazine at 15, and he's since worked at elite restaurants Maeemo in Norway and Geranium in Denmark. He also has a TED Talk under his belt and recently met Martha Stewart. At his pop-up counter restaurant on a corner in the West Village, he'll serve 14-course tasting menus with a $160 price tag three nights a week. Among the dishes that may make the cut: seawater-brined sea urchin with carrot cremeaux and coffee-pickled carrots; a beet dish involving fermented beet butter; a tomato-lobster dumpling in rose-hips tea; and his signature peanut Ritz crackers with foie gras terrine and sour cherry compote. "Peanut butter and Ritz is everyone's favorite snack," Flynn tells Food & Wine, but that doesn't mean he loves making the dish. The crackers are "fun, but a pain in the ass. I make the ridges on each cracker with a toothpick," he says. The Eureka website has already crashed once, and reservations are sold out through mid-October. Flynn's very 16-year-old advice on Twitter, "Everyone needs to chiiiiiiiiiiilllllllllll out..."