Author: Lorna Field

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Memphis Restaurant Association Awards to Honor Shawn Danko and Pat Taylor

CREDIT: Kooky Canuck/Facebook

Kooky Canuck/Facebook

Shawn Danko has been named Restaurateur of the Year.

This weekend, the 56th annual Memphis Restaurant Association awards will honor Kooky Canuck owner Shawn Danko and Cleaner Solutions owner Pat Taylor.

Danko has been named Restaurateur of the Year, and Taylor is Associate Member of the Year. Both have been deeply involved in the local restaurant scene and are being honored for their commitment to celebrating and lobbying for the Memphis restaurant industry.

Danko, who is originally from Montreal, first came to Memphis to open the Hard Rock Cafe and later the Downtown restaurant Kooky Canuck. He serves on boards for the Memphis Restaurant Association and Memphis Tourism and has been featured on a number of food shows including Man v. Food.

Taylor worked in restaurants for almost 20 years before transitioning to the cleaning and sanitation industry. His company Cleaner Solutions has serviced hundreds of Memphis restaurants with dishwashers and cleaners for roughly 16 years. Taylor has been an active member and sponsor of the Memphis Restaurant Association and says that he is driven by his desire to give back.

The annual celebration is a major fundraiser for the Memphis Restaurant Association, and the awards ceremony will be held at 6 p.m. on Sunday, February 23rd, at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn. Go to memphisrestaurants.com/events for more info.

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

City Silo Table + Pantry To Open Second Location

CREDIT: City Silo Table + Pantry

City Silo Table + Pantry

Clean-eating cafe City Silo Table + Pantry has announced that they will open a Saddle Creek location in Germantown this fall in the former Grimaldi’s Pizzeria space.

City Silo is owned by Memphis natives Rebekah and Scott Tashie. The new 3,500-square-foot location will include an outdoor covered patio and roll-up garage doors.

“We are extremely excited to open our second location in Germ

antown. It’s a neighborhood we always knew we wanted to be a part of, and we have been working for a while now with Saddle Creek and Trademark Property Company to make this partnership happen. We feel that this development and location are a great fit for our growing brand,” Scott Tashie said via press release.

The new location will also have an expanded menu and be open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They will have a bar serving coffee, beer, wine, juice cocktails, and Proseco cocktails.

The original City Silo Table + Pantry is located at 5101 Sanderlin. The new location is slated to open this fall at 7605 West Farmington #2 in the Saddle Creek shopping center.

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Cordelia’s Market Opens Hot Bar, Offering Made-from-Scratch Meals Daily

CREDIT: Cordelia's Market

Cordelia’s Market

Cordelia’s Market, a community grocery in Harbor Town, introduced a brand-new hot bar on February 18th. It’s a welcomed extension to the market and grocery that will allow them to serve more fresh, hot meals on a daily basis.

Every week will include a Taco Tuesday, but otherwise they plan to rotate the menu each day to serve a variety of foods.

“If our customers ask for more of a consistent menu, then we will explore doing more themed days in the future,” says Erica Humphreys, the general manager.

“We plan to launch with lunch from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. and dinner from 5 until 7 p.m. daily. Brunch will be the next step on the horizon, and then breakfast,” she says.

Food on the hot bar will be served fresh and made from scratch, providing a quick and convenient new option for customers.

“Cordelia’s Market has always been committed to providing customers with a quality and convenient experience,” says Humphreys.

Cordelia’s Market –– formerly Miss Cordelia’s Grocery –– has been serving the Harbor Town neighborhood for more than 20 years. They offer a selection of organic produce, snacks, sandwiches, and beer and wine.

Cordelia’s Market is located at 737 Harbor Bend.

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

New Dining Options — and Maybe Alcohol — at Memphis Zoo this Year

CREDIT: Justin Matrose/Wikimedia Commons

Justin Matrose/Wikimedia Commons

Memphis Zoo Food & Beverage Director Eric Delmez is planning to roll out a variety of new dining options at the zoo later this year.

Delmez joined the zoo staff in 2019 after previously working for the St. Louis zoo for 11 years as its food and beverage director.

As well as shifting from prepackaged food items to fresh-made foods, Delmez wants to embrace Memphis culture by bringing barbecue options to the zoo. He also plans to include a variety of foods that are common at theme parks, like funnel cakes, as well as lower food prices to entice more people to eat while they’re at the zoo.

It’s also possible that we may see alcoholic beverages served at the zoo later this year, pending a bill filed by State Sen. Brian Kelsey. Beer and wine are a likelihood, and the zoo is even floating the idea of creating some type of beer garden on the premises.

The new food options will happen alongside a number of other major changes at the zoo this year, including renovations on the aquarium and many of the animal habitats, and the Memphis Zoological Society plans to add roughly 100 new full-time, part-time, and seasonal positions.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Crosstown’s No Meat Meet-Ups: for Vegans and Veg-Curious

Bianca Phillips has been organizing vegan events in Memphis since 2004. Phillips says that, for her, it started as a moral issue rather than one of diet.

“I consider myself an ethical vegan, so vegan for the animals,” she says. “[We] don’t want to contribute to factory farming.

“When I went vegan in 2004, I wanted to meet other vegans. I put flyers around town, old-school flyers. Like, ‘We’re going to have an animal rights meeting!’ and people came.” At the time, the focus of the group was to spread animal rights information and not to focus on the health benefits of veganism.

Bianca Phillips

No meat, no problem — Crosstown Arts hosts vegan potluck meet-ups.

“We’d organize mostly PETA protests, and PETA would send us materials and we’d go out to KFC or somewhere. … We did circus protests, vegan leafleting, dressed in full plant costumes that we made ourselves,” she says with a laugh.

“[At the time] it was called Memphis Area Animal Rights Activists, and shortly after we started, I met a guy named Vaughan Dewar, and he was interested in starting a vegan meet-up group to be more focused on the food aspects of veganism and not quite as much the protest side of things,” Phillips says.

“He joined our animal rights group, but on the side, he founded another group called Food Awareness, and he would put together these super-researched presentations and go to churches and other places to deliver these talks about the benefits of a plant-based diet.

“At some point, we merged our groups together and started doing less of the protest stuff and became more focused on vegan meet-ups. So we would get together once a month at different restaurants around town and eat vegan food together,” she says, citing popular spots for vegans and non-vegans alike, like Pho Binh, which is famous for its lemongrass tofu.

Roughly 16 years later, the vegan movement in Memphis is stronger than ever. “Just in the past two years, with the whole plant-based movement, it’s much more socially acceptable to be vegan or ‘plant-based,'” she says. “I used to feel like I knew, or knew of, all the vegans in Memphis, but not anymore.”

It does feel like there are significantly more options for vegans in Memphis now than there were in the past. With the rise of local establishments like Imagine Vegan Cafe and the Raw Girls food truck, the city is embracing veganism more than ever.

Last year, when the cafe at Crosstown Arts transitioned from a full-service lunch and dinner menu to a smaller menu of pastries and coffee, Chris Miner, co-founder of Crosstown Arts, wanted to make sure the space was kept active.

That’s when he approached Phillips about organizing a monthly vegan potluck in the cafe space. Miner was familiar with Phillips’ history of organizing vegan food and drink events and thought that would be a perfect fit for Crosstown Arts.

The No Meat Meet-Up Vegan Potlucks launched last September, with about 30 attendees at the inaugural event. Since then, the attendance has gone up each month, with attendees bringing a rich variety of vegan dishes to each gathering. While it’s not required that those who attend bring a dish, it is, of course, encouraged so there’s enough food to go around.

Some of the dishes people have brought to past potlucks include tater tot casserole, Bhel Puri, vegan pizza, and desserts. It’s a great way for even non-vegans, who may be intimidated by the perceived confines of a vegan diet, to sample a number of different vegan food options at once.

For vegans who want to gather with like-minded people, or non-vegans who are curious about plant-based diets, the No Meat Meet-Up Vegan Potlucks are an opportunity to meet, mingle, and sample different kinds of foods.

Crosstown Arts will host the next No Meat Meet-Up Vegan Potluck on Sunday, February 16th.

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Takashi Bistro Now Open in Midtown

CREDIT: Photo by Youjeen Cho on Unsplash

Photo by Youjeen Cho on Unsplash

Takashi Bistro opened in midtown last week on February 4th.

Takashi Bistro is open for lunch and dinner and serves a mix of Japanese and Thai cuisine, as well as sushi rolls, nigiri, and sashimi from the sushi bar.

The menu includes many popular Japanese and Thai staples such as Pad Thai, teriyaki chicken, edamame, and Tom Yum soup, as well as hibachi meals that come with a choice of soup, salad, and rice. They also offer a lunch special during the day.

Located in the space that was formerly Pei Wei Asian Kitchen, Takashi Bistro features an open kitchen and a full-service bar. They’re also offering delivery via the BiteSquad app.

Takashi Bistro is owned and operated by Tony Leong, Sonny Mei, and Roy Ng, who also own the Southaven restaurant Akita Sushi & Hibachi Steakhouse.

Takashi Bistro is located at 1680 Union, Suite 109.

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Chocolatier Phillip Ashley Rix To Appear on Food Network

CREDIT: Phillip Ashley Chocolates / Facebook

Phillip Ashley Chocolates / Facebook

Memphis chocolatier Phillip Ashley Rix of Phillip Ashley Chocolates will appear on the Food Network tonight.

Rix will appear on a new show called Chopped Sweets, which is a dessert-themed spinoff of the show Chopped. This is Rix’s first time competing on a television show, but it’s the third time in the past year that a Memphis chef has appeared on a national cooking show.

Erling Jensen’s chef de cuisine Keith Clinton appeared on Guy’s Grocery Games last year, and Chef Tamra Patterson of Chef Tam’s Underground Cafe appeared on Guy’s Grocery Games for the third time last week on February 5th.

On Monday’s episode of Chopped Sweets, titled “Chocolate Perfection,” Rix will compete with three other chefs to “make every chocolate lover’s dream come true by whipping up decadent, chocolatey creations that are as beautiful as they are craveable.”

The episode will air at 9 p.m. tonight (Monday, February 10th) on Food Network.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Bar Upgrades at Erling Jensen

This year, Erling Jensen The Restaurant will trade its tiny patio for an expanded bar area and fresh, new menu options.

The change will double the size of the bar room and eliminate the patio altogether, which is seen by staff as an unpopular seating choice for restaurant guests.

“No one really goes out there,” says chef de cuisine Keith Clinton. “Sometimes if it’s really crowded inside, people will, but I wouldn’t call it the best patio in town.”

Lorna Field

Erling Jenson chef de cuisine Keith Clinton (above)

You could say the patio is even kind of dismal: It’s small and lacks atmosphere, offering only a view of the parking lot and some commercial real estate nearby. And, to me, this feels like a disservice to the restaurant, which offers some of the best fine dining in the city.

Though he’s been with the restaurant for about six years, Clinton has only been chef de cuisine for the past two. However, in that time, he has received a wealth of local and national attention. Recently, Clinton was a guest on the Food Network show Guy’s Grocery Games.

“I wanted to see the TV side of it all,” Clinton says. “It’s extremely fast-paced, and a lot of the things that I thought would be fake and dramatized were not. Like the countdown was very real. When they give you 10 seconds, they really mean it.”

Renovations on the restaurant are expected to begin any day now, but they plan to stay open for the duration. The bar area will expand by roughly 100 square feet, several additions will be made to the bar menu, and they may even offer a new tasting menu as well.

“We’ve got some crazy ideas, like when we expand and [the bar] room gets bigger, we would talk about doing a tasting-only room,” Clinton says. “We would do wine tastings and food pairings and stuff like that weekly.

“It happens all the time, and it’s something people ask for. It’s not on the menu, but people can come and say, ‘Can you do something just for us?’ and we say, ‘Sure, how many courses?’ So we thought about offering a tasting menu specifically to this new area,” Clinton says, referring to the expanded bar room.

The bar hasn’t always been there, but since it was installed it’s perhaps the most popular part of the restaurant.

“We used to do all of our service drinks and wine through the server alley,” Clinton says. “The bar has done better every year since it’s gone up and has always exceeded the expectations we set out for it.

“From a business side alone, the bar is great for us. But I think for the guests who don’t necessarily go for such a fine dining experience and have to sit down and go through silverware changes and all that stuff, they can actually come in and just sit down and enjoy something [at the bar].”

The bar offers a more relaxed, intimate environment for those who just want to have a great dining experience without all the stuffiness of a fancy restaurant. The bar also has its own separate menu, but guests can order à-la-carte from the dining room menu, too.

“We come out and shave the truffles for them right here, and people really like that. It’s fun for us, too,” Clinton says.

Erling Jensen The Restaurant is known for its seasonally changing menus, which is perhaps why the majority of guests are regulars: It’s impossible to get sick of eating the same thing over and over when there are always new dishes to choose from.

Likewise, so many people feel a personal connection because the staff go above and beyond to make everyone feel comfortable and welcome. Jensen himself is there most nights and loves to walk around the dining room chatting with and thanking guests.

“We don’t take reservations, so it feels kind of exclusive in a way,” Clinton says.

Renovations are expected to be complete by the end of spring, but in the meantime, go enjoy some handmade tortellini and say “Hi” to Erling.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Finger-Licking Good: New Wing Order’s New Sauces

New Wing Order started out as a group of friends who love hot wing festivals. In less than a decade, they’ve catapulted themselves into the wing scene, sweeping competitions, running one of the city’s most popular food trucks, and launching a successful catering business.

And it’s not all about the wings: New Wing Order also has some of the best nachos around (both the fried chicken barbecue nachos and the hot wing nachos are creative and delicious) and a vegan avocado taco that puts other tacos to shame.

Partners Cole Forrest and Jesse McDonald have even more planned for New Wing Order in the year ahead.

Photos Courtesy New Wing Order

“We’ve been competing since 2012,” says Forrest. “We started the team in 2012, and [Jesse McDonald] definitely put a lot of work into developing the recipes. Then 2015 is when we won our first grand championship. And every year since, it’s been first place, third, first, second, second, and some other grand championships here and there.”

New Wing Order has won multiple awards, including first place in the Southern Hot Wing Festival, The World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest (exotic category), and the Bluff City Wing Contest.

“I don’t really have a culinary background,” says McDonald. “I don’t call myself a chef, but it’s my passion, and I’m self-taught.

“I started out in the logistics world,” he continues. “I was at FedEx Ground for a long time as a manager there. I liked it and was good at it, but it didn’t satisfy me.” After gaining some experience in the restaurant world while living in Nashville, McDonald knew he was ready to go out on his own.

“I kind of knew I wanted to start a business. Everyone kept telling me to start a food truck,” he says. “I’m from Memphis, so I decided to move back home and start it here.

“At the time, the competitions were going so well with [New Wing Order] and I was kind of bouncing around different concepts, and everything was pointing to ‘Hey, we’re successful as a competition team, let’s turn this into a business.’ So I came home, and that’s what we did.”

New Wing Order recently underwent a flavor update and launched a batch of new sauces — like Spicy Garlic and Mo-Rockin’ — at Wiseacre in mid-January. In total, the menu now includes 24 sauces, including many with Memphis names, like Grind City Gold, Mud Island Jerk, and Midtown Masala. They’ve also introduced two new premium fry options — Nikki’s Hot Fries and lemon pepper fries — and two new seasonings, Riverside Ranch and Caribbean Heat.

But New Wing Order is primarily known for their Memphis Buffalo sauce —which they’ve dubbed the “perfect blend of traditional New York heat and Memphis barbecue sweet” — and you can now buy bottles of it straight from the truck.

“The Memphis Buffalo sauce is a me-and-Cole collaboration,” McDonald says. “Once we figured out the flavor profile, we knew it could be a winner. So literally every weekend, I’d make a batch and do a little tweak, and then he’d make a batch and do a little tweak, and we just went back and forth until we perfected it. And it won us some awards, so we kept going with it.”

New Wing Order has also ramped up its catering activities and is looking forward to a busy Super Bowl season. “We updated our catering menu for the Super Bowl, so it has picked up. It’s a big day for us, for sure,” says McDonald.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

You Have Arrived: Cocktails, Coffee, and Carbs at Arrive Hotel

I’m a total baby about cold weather. If it dips below 50 degrees, I’ll easily opt for Uber Eats over a trip into the cold to get food. This is one reason I think places like the Arrive Hotel are so cool: Once you’re there, everything you need is in one place.

Arrive is home to Longshot restaurant, bakery Hustle & Dough, coffeeshop Vice & Virtue, and the lobby bar, Bar Hustle. Each has its own look, feel, and menu, so you can spend the afternoon wandering from one to the other without ever really leaving the building.

Ali Rohrbacher, formerly the head baker at the cafe at Crosstown Arts and at The Liquor Store, runs the boutique bakery Hustle & Dough and shares the lobby with Tim and Teri Perkins of Vice & Virtue.

Photos by Lorna Field

Pablo Mata, lead bartender at Arrive’s Bar Hustle

The bakery serves up homemade breads like sourdoughs and baguettes, as well as special pastries and treats. Snacks for Bar Hustle are also cooked up in the Hustle & Dough kitchen, like the mushroom toast on porridge sourdough with basil pesto, wild mushrooms, ricotta, and parmesan; or Grandma Alice’s Pecan Pie, served with an all-butter pie crust and dark chocolate ganache “black bottom” — the Rohrbacher family recipe.

Erik Hmiel, beverage director for the hotel, says that fermentation is one thing the drinks and food have in common.

“One of the parallels that Ali [Rohrbacher], as a chef and baker, and I share is a mutual interest and appreciation for fermentation,” Hmiel says. “Obviously, that’s a big part of bread-making. She’s really obsessed in a great way with fermentation, and I’ve sort of jumped on that bandwagon and learned a lot from her.”

For example, Bar Hustle serves a cocktail with fermented blueberries, as well as a seasonal kombucha.

Like fermentation, a focus on flavor is another commonality between the food and drink menus at Arrive. Bar Hustle offers a selection of specialty cocktails dreamt up by Hmiel, each with their own unique ingredients and presentation. The Bird Graveyard is prepared with aquavit, Scotch, banana, carrot verjus, and marjoram and served in a tumbler glass with one large ice cube. It tastes slightly sweet and earthy. The deep purple Fabio’s Roller Coaster is made with rye, lemon, fermented blueberry, pastis, dry vermouth, and black sesame and served in a delicate coupe glass.

The cocktail menu is just as whimsical as the decor. The lobby is filled with velvet couches, plants, and oriental rugs. It’s easy to feel like you’re in a speakeasy or in Europe or in an eccentric aristocrat’s penthouse. It certainly doesn’t feel like a hotel lobby.

And that’s, in part, because Bar Hustle is for locals as much as it is for hotel guests.

“We put a lot of time, effort, and thought into what we’re putting out there,” Hmiel says. “We also have a service industry night on Sunday. At the end of the day, we just wanted to be a fun and inviting space for everyone.

“One of the things we might do in the future is a series of pop-ups every month, or every two months. That’s something we’re thinking about right now, going into the new year,” Hmiel continues. Bar Hustle also hosts musicians on Friday nights and is looking to expand their entertainment offerings in the coming year.

So if, like me, you hate going out into the cold, but you also don’t want to feel too stir-crazy at home all winter, take a trip to Arrive. You can start your day with coffee at Vice & Virtue, have lunch at Hustle & Dough, then grab a cocktail and a show at Bar Hustle — all without leaving the hotel. And, hey, if it’s too cold to go home, you can always rent a room for the night.

The Arrive Hotel is located at 477 S. Main.