Author: Simone Wilson

For an all-around sweet Valentine head to The Peabody. Peabody Deli & Desserts is selling gourmet chocolates, chocolate hearts, and chocolate-dipped strawberries. You can place your order at 529-4188.

Chez Philippe and Capriccio Grill are offering Valentine’s menus: four courses with a choice of appetizer (oysters Rockefeller or baby Arugula salad) and two entrée choices (surf and turf or pan-roasted Atlantic salmon) for $95 per person at Chez Philippe and three courses for $75 per person at Capriccio Grill. For reservations call 529-4188 or 521-4199.

Grill 83 is offering a four-course dinner for $75 per person. Chilled lobster salad with avocado purée and domestic caviar are on the menu as is “Duck Two Ways” — crispy Hudson Valley breast and duck leg confit. Call 333-1224 for reservations.

Jim’s Place will have a three-course Valentine’s menu for “sweethearts who call Jim’s Place their place” and for those who want a really romantic setting. Call 388-7200.

Paulette’s has a four-course Valentine’s menu ranging from $49.95 per person for a choice of appetizer, garden salad, dessert, and halibut with fresh jumbo lump crab meat and Creole cream sauce to $64.95 per person for the surf and turf of Maine lobster and Angus filet mignon. Call 726-5128.

Phillip Joyner will play the piano at Garlands on Valentine’s Day, while diners enjoy a four-course menu offering such treats as a lobster scallop bisque, braised lamb shank with truffle creamed mushrooms, and chocolate cayenne cake for $65 per person. Call 682-5202.

At Erling Jensen the Restaurant, you can get a five-course menu for $65 per person. Lobster will be one of the entrée choices and chocolate flan or red velvet cake will await you at the end of the fabulous meal. Call 763-3700.

Wally Joe restaurant will be offering a six-course Valentine’s menu for $80 per person in addition to its à la carte menu. Call 818-0821.

Di Anne Price will be performing at Cielo at 7 p.m., while you and your significant other enjoy such goodies as lobster and crab beignets and filet mignon in appelwood-smoked bacon. Cielo’s four-course Valentine’s menu is $75 per person. Call 524-1886.

The Beauty Shop is offering a four-course menu for $50 per person. You can chose to start the evening with foie gras ravioli before you move on to crawfish bisque and butter-poached lobster. Call 272-7111.

If you’re looking for some continental comfort food, Chef Jose Gutierrez and his crew at Encore will have the right thing for you and your Valentine. The three-course menu for $55 per person offers two entrée choices. Call 528-1415 or visit opentable.com.

Zanzibar will have live music by Billy Gibson, flowers, champagne, and a special menu for $60 per person that starts out with a “Teaser” of crab cakes with red beet and horseradish rémoulade. After that, you’ll hopefully be ready to “Start the Romance” with a choice of two salads, so that you can move on to the “Grand Duette,” a choice of three entrées including prime rib, duck, and salmon. Finally, the “Final Touch” will satisfy your sweet tooth with chocolate truffles and raspberries. Call 543-9646.

At Mikasa Japan, two special menus will be available for diners from Friday until Tuesday: dinner for two for $39.95 per couple and a sake dinner at which you’ll get a sample of premium sakes paired with items from the sushi bar for $29 per person. Call 683-0000.

If restaurant openings were a disease, the number of new Mexican restaurants downtown and Midtown might be considered an epidemic.

The Complex is chiefly known as a bar and live-music venue, featuring the city’s hippest alternative acts. But it’s also the site of El Pollo Grille and Mexican Cantina. Bert Jamboa opened the Complex three and a half years ago and since then has worked on adding a kitchen. Although he says that the restaurant is still a work-in-progress, it’s open and serving standard Mexican fare — burritos, tacos, enchiladas, and the like — as well as all-American and all-Mexican breakfasts, which means you can get your short stack or L.A.-style huevos rancheros. The restaurant is open daily from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.

El Pollo Grille and Mexican Cantina, 704 Madison (692-9211)

Another hidden treasure can be found inside the Comfort Inn on Front Street. Sgt. Jalapeno’s Tortilla Factory Co. is a Tex-Mex family affair. Melissa and Victor Ortiz opened the restaurant in mid-December, temporarily abandoning Ortiz Tortilla Company, their Southaven restaurant.

“We are still making our own tortillas. We only closed the restaurant in Southaven temporarily,” says Victor.

It’s not just homemade tortillas at Sgt. Jalapeno’s. It’s homemade everything. The Ortizes moved here from Brownsville, Texas, where they operated Zelda’s Bakery, which specialized in Mexican pastries. When they came to the Memphis area in 1999, they brought along the flavors of South Texas and their concept of “food fast fare.”

Food fast fare? It’s hard to explain but mouth-watering nonetheless. Try Sgt. Jalapeno’s smothered burrito, a 12-inch flour tortilla filled with Spanish rice, lettuce, tomatoes, your choice of meat, smothered with red sauce and topped with olives. It’s yours for $7.95.

The restaurant is open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Sgt. Jalapeno’s Tortilla Factory Co., 100 N. Front St. (526-0583)

Transplanting a little patch of their Mexican hometown of Guadalajara to Memphis is what Andreas Flores Jr. and his dad had in mind when they opened Quinto Patio on Beale Street across from the New Daisy Theatre. The restaurant serves traditional Mexican food for lunch and dinner, as well as Italian standards — a holdover from the restaurant’s former tenant, New York Pizza. A full bar will be available once the liquor license is in place, and a patio for outdoor seating is in the works as well.

The restaurant is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. Friday and Saturday.

Quinto Patio, 345 Beale St. (523-7288)

Rio Loco’s opened last week in the old Buckley’s space about a block west of The Peabody. You can try their jumbo lime margarita for $6 during happy hour from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. Or you can stop by for one of the daily lunch specials and get a demi-margarita, the jumbo lime’s little brother, which costs only $3.

Rio Loco’s is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Rio Loco’s, 117 Union (523-2142)

Also opening: Las Margaritas Mexican Bar and Grille next week inside America’s Best Inns & Suites at 1837 Union; Garcia Wells Southwestern Grill in Overton Square this month; Happy Mexican Restaurante & Cantina next month at 385 S. Second St.; and Qdoba Mexican Grill at Poplar and Holmes in April.

If the food feature on page 44 has whet your appetite, check out the fourth annual New Year Festival presented by the Greater Memphis United Chinese Association Saturday, January 28th, at the University of Memphis.

The event will include two performances showcasing Chinese dance and music at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. at the Rose Theatre. After each show, samples of traditional New Year’s fare will be provided at the University Center. There will also be karaoke, ballroom dancing, and Chinese movies. Tickets for the festival are $8 to $15 and include the food. For tickets, call 452-0188 or 462-3084. Tickets can also be purchased at the door.

On Sunday, February 19th, at 6:30 p.m., the association will host its annual New Year’s banquet fund-raiser at the China Inn Restaurant at 2820 Covington Pike. For $50 per person (or $400 for a table of 10), you get eight courses of Chinese specialties. The meal is served family-style, so if you aren’t coming with your own family, be prepared to make new friends. For tickets, call China Inn Restaurant at 383-8211.

cnyf.memphischinese.com

Chocolate lovers, this one’s for you: the Chocolate Fantasy Weekend, presented by the National Kidney Foundation of West Tennessee. The three-day event begins at 7 p.m. Friday, January 27th, at Encore with a dinner and auction featuring a special menu created by Jose Gutierrez. Auction items include chocolate gift packages and a private tasting with Chloe Doutre-Roussel, a London-based buyer, taster, and author of The Chocolate Connoisseur. Tickets are $125 per person.

It was Doutre-Roussel who helped recruit other experts for the “Chocolate Academy,” a new, daylong event being held at The Peabody on Saturday, January 28th, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The academy will feature a demonstration by pastry chef Andre Renard of the Sug’Art Artistic School and lectures by Frederick Schilling, founder of the socially conscious Dagoba Organic Chocolates, and Steve DeVries, owner of DeVries Chocolate, plus much more. Tickets are $125.

Also on Saturday, at Oak Court Mall from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., is the Chocolate Fantasy Chocolate Tasting. Now in its 22nd year, the event draws more than 1,000 people and features samples from 31 vendors, including Godiva, Cafe Toscana, and City Bakery. Tickets are $16 in advance and $18 on the day of the event.

Closing out the weekend is a Sunday brunch at Encore at 11 a.m. Tickets are $50.

For more information, call the Kidney Foundation at 683-6185.

On Tuesday, January 31st, from 5 to 9 p.m., it’s Celebrity Waiter Night at Boscos Squared, a fund-raiser for the Ronald McDonald House. Among the celebrity waiters are the Memphis Grizzlies dancers, Rock 103’s Wake-Up Crew, and Rocky the Redbird. For more information, call 432-2222.

The theme is “Icy Hot” at this month’s Tuesday on the Terrace, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Memphis Botanic Garden. The wine tasting will feature gluhwein, a hot wine punch, as well as champagne and iced wines. Tickets are $20 for Botanic Garden members, $30 for nonmembers. Call 685-1566, ext. 107, to make reservations.

Also on Wednesday, February 1st, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Miss Cordelia’s, there’s a Wine Tasting Showdown. Participants will be given a scorecard and asked to rank a selection of six wines. The cost is $10, which includes samples of breads from local baker Sheri McKelvie and imported cheeses. Call 526-4772 for more information.

All roads lead to Memphis. Case in point: restaurateurs/caterers Ira and Stephanie Siegel, who stopped to see Graceland while on their way to New Mexico. They’d sold their house in Palm Beach, Florida, because they couldn’t face another hurricane season and were planning on moving to Santa Fe. The Memphis layover, however, turned into a relocation.

“We just liked it here,” Stephanie says. “Everybody was very helpful, and after talking to the Chamber of Commerce and the Center City Commission about our catering business, things took off.”

I. Siegel Culinary Productions of Memphis, located on South Main in the former spot of Memphis Grits, is a special-events company that does high-end, high-volume catering for everything from executive breakfasts to large-scale themed events. In addition, Culinary Productions recently started offering lunch to the public.

“We live just down the street from the kitchen, and, for dinner, Ira would often grill on the rooftop [of our building]. The neighbors would join us, so Ira kept on cooking for a few more people. We thought, Why don’t we do this in our catering kitchen and open for lunch?” Stephanie says.

And that’s what they did. There’s a $10 special every day — flank steak might be on the menu for Mondays, Fridays might be salmon — and the menu changes every week. The setup for lunch includes a salad bar, soup, dessert, soft drinks, and iced tea. Lunch hours are 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

I. Siegel Culinary Productions, 22 S. Main (523-1772)

Ed Dunkel, owner of Bittersweet Restaurant in Germantown, is another transplant. He moved to Memphis because he was fed up with the annual mountains of snow in his New Hampshire backyard. Dunkel’s sister is a FedEx pilot, and when he came to visit, he liked it so much he sold the New Hampshire Bittersweet Restaurant and opened the one in Germantown.

Bittersweet Restaurant is an upscale-casual steak and seafood restaurant that specializes in coldwater seafood. On the menu are salmon Oscar (derived from the traditional veal Oscar) and the restaurant’s signature lobster pie. The restaurant is open for lunch Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and for dinner nightly.

Bittersweet Restaurant, 7685 Farmington Blvd. (624-9499)

Moe El-Zein came to Memphis from Detroit a little over a month ago and took over Boogey’s Bistro on Cleveland, which now is called Al-Rayan. The food, according to El-Zein, is the same Lebanese fare, only better. You can be the judge of that every day from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Al-Rayan, 288 N. Cleveland (272-0227)

Around the corner another name change: Pho Pasteur is now Pho Vietnam, but it didn’t change owners or menu — just the name and the location. The popular restaurant has moved from its Cleveland location in a strip mall to a larger, stand-alone building on Poplar at Watkins.

Pho Vietnam, 1411 Poplar (728-4711)

The Flying Saucer Draught Emporium is expanding too. Its second location is scheduled to open on January 21st on Germantown Parkway in Cordova. What to expect? A never-ending supply of draughts in the usual Saucer atmosphere.

Flying Saucer Draught Emporium,1400 N. Germantown Parkway, Suite 114 (755-5530)

You know him as Parks. Everybody does. After tending bar for almost 20 years, David Parks could be the best-known bartender in Memphis. In a city where the shelf life for bartenders is usually short, Parks is the regular’s regular.

But according to him, he had a tough time getting started.

“It’s difficult to get into the business here, because Memphis is very cliquish when it comes to bar jobs,” he says. “You’d have to sleep with someone’s evil stepmother or agree to give somebody 10 percent of your income for the next year to get hired.”

When Parks first arrived in Memphis by way of Jackson, Mississippi, he was young, cocky, and already bar-savvy.

“I had probably more experience than a lot of the general managers who interviewed me, which isn’t good when you’re the new kid on the block,” Parks says.

It took him two years and a polygraph test (which he didn’t exactly pass) before he finally got hired as the bar manager for Alfred’s on Beale Street. Parks worked at Alfred’s only a few months, but that’s all it took to get him in the loop. Now his résumé reads like a laundry list of local hot spots — Wellington’s, Bistro Hemmings, Maxwell’s, Mélange, the Beauty Shop. His next stop will be the bar at The Inn at the Hunt-Phelan Home, scheduled to open this month.

He began his career essentially by accident. He was 16 years old, trying to make some money working at a gas station, a tire store, and a grocery store. A friend asked him to fill in as a bar-back — “the kid who does all the grunt work, hauls the beer and ice, restocks, and cleans the bar,” Parks explains — at a redneck biker bar in Jackson. His first night there, he made more money than he did during a week of working his three jobs.

He went on to the well-known Jackson restaurant George Street Grocery, where he learned the ropes from a Yugoslavian bartender in his mid-60s. “I just knew him as Cotton. His name had at least eight syllables, and nobody could pronounce it,” Parks remembers. “Cotton would quiz me on mixed drinks. Out of the blue he’d ask me to name the ingredients of a Bloody Mary or a Mojito, and if I didn’t know them, he made me give him a dollar.”

Twenty years in any business is a long time, but it’s an eternity in bartending. It’s a job in which it’s not unusual for your boss to accuse you of stealing, your customers to accuse you of being stingy with the booze, and your wife or husband to accuse you of cheating.

Parks’ secret to longevity? He and his wife of 17 years have three children who provide regular reality checks.

He also happens to be very good at his job. He is nice but doesn’t overdo it. He knows his customers but doesn’t favor the big shots. Plus, he can mix a martini that will make even your evil stepmother look good.

Most importantly, Parks takes the job seriously. “Slinging whiskey and making a mixed drink are two different things. It’s like being a great chef. When somebody walks into the bar and says, ‘I kind of feel like mango,’ a good bartender will mix a good drink.”

Shaken or Stirred?

Five elements of the Memphis drinker.

How does Memphis drink? We asked bartender David Parks, who has picked up a thing or two about Memphis drinkers. Here are five:

1. Memphians are becoming more sophisticated drinkers.

Beer, mixed drinks, and straight-up hard liquor are slowly feeling the threat of Sidecars and Manhattans.

2. Wine is more popular than ever.

When it comes to wine, a lot of people are still experimenting, so what they’re looking for is good taste for a good price.

3. Memphians don’t necessarily get wasted when they’re out drinking.

The “waste” factor depends on where the drinking is done.

Lounge: Drinking with a purpose — to be seen or to break the ice before a dinner meeting. The “waste” factor: low to moderate.

Restaurant: It’s all in the pacing and the tolerance. A drink at the bar before dinner, some wine during the meal, maybe another with a cigarette after dinner, can you handle it? The “waste” factor: low to moderate.

Nightclub: The conveyer belt of drinking. Purpose is to get drunk efficiently. The bartender might rarely see the face of his customers, just a subtle hand gesture to indicate that it’s time for another — and make it fast. The “waste” factor: high to extremely high.

4. Memphians don’t talk any more than anybody else.

The rule: Anyone who lingers around the bar has something to say — no matter where they’re from. What gets said is another story.

5. Memphis’ bar crowd is very disloyal.

Booze tastes essentially the same at every watering hole, so what’s the difference, really, between Bar A and Bar B? Memphians tend to leave the old watering hole behind as soon as the new place opens. It’s nothing personal. — SW

Never underestimate the power of boredom. It’s what eventually led Sheri McKelvie to open La Morinda, her Cooper-Young bakery.

About 10 years ago, McKelvie was housesitting in Oregon. “I was trapped on a really high mountain with nothing to do, but I had all the ingredients and equipment to bake bread and a book on how to do it,” McKelvie says. “I made more bread than anybody could possibly eat, and that’s how I got started.”

While many people find baking challenging, especially bread, McKelvie was a natural.

“I didn’t really think about bread baking as being difficult because I hadn’t thought about it at all,” McKelvie says. “I just needed something to do and I got lucky. My first loafs turned out beautifully. It just happened like that.”

It kept on happening.

When she came down from the mountain, McKelvie continued baking — at home first and later in different bakeries around Ashland, Oregon. Then she moved to Memphis six years ago and started baking for the now-defunct City Bread Company. When she left, she swore she’d never again work at a job which required getting out of bed in the middle of the night.

“As a baker you don’t have much of a life, and you kind of know that when you get into the business,” McKelvie says. She puts her flour-dusted hands to her cheeks to stress her point. “Look at me,” she says. “I must have aged 10 years during the three years at City Bread when my days started at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

McKelvie thought she’d never bake professionally again. She went back to school to finish her degree in elementary education but realized teaching wasn’t her passion. What she wanted was a place to bake where she could be her own boss and begin her day at 5 a.m. instead of 3 a.m.

What seemed like an easy-enough quest turned out to be more of an odyssey. It began at La Tourelle. Glenn Hays offered her use of La Tourelle’s kitchen and, much more importantly, its oven at night when the restaurant was closed. For five months, McKelvie worked through much of the night, taking catnaps while the dough was rising.

“Working like that was hard,” she says. “I mixed the dough, went home to take a nap, came back to bake some more, and then took another nap while I waited for the bread to cool.”

When Alice’s Urban Market opened downtown, she began baking her bread there, but there wasn’t enough room for both her and Alice’s cooks to work in the same kitchen. Then her friend Elizabeth Boyd rented a space in Cooper-Young to start Dish Catering and invited McKelvie to bring her bread oven, mixer, and bags of flour.

While restaurants serve La Morinda’s bread and Miss Cordelia’s and Mantia sell it, the bakery is strictly for baking. There is no sign to identify the shop, and that’s how McKelvie wants it — at least for now.

“Because we don’t do retail, there is really no reason to come in here,” she says. “A lot of people think, ‘It’s so cool. I can stop by and watch her bake bread.’ But really, it’s distracting us from getting our work done.”

Watching McKelvie mixing, shaping, and baking, you can see that the work takes a lot of concentration. Underneath her workbench are several buckets of dough sitting out to rise, and on one wall is a board marking mixing, proofing, and baking times. It’s like clockwork.

Although McKelvie is baking behind the scenes, chances are you have tasted her bread already. Maybe it was her ciabatta on the sandwich you had at Miss Cordelia’s or maybe you bought her focaccia there. Maybe it was the sourdough cheddar or cranberry walnut you tried at Otherlands or Café Francisco or Cielo.

Certainly, if you have eaten McKelvie’s bread, you are glad she had that housesitting gig when she had nothing else to do but bake.

Researchers at the USDA Agricultural Service and Mississippi State University have recently discovered that France’s red wine and the South’s muscadine grape share a common ingredient. It’s called resveratrol, which acts as a natural “heart guard.” Red wine shows high concentrations of resveratrol, but muscadines have an even higher concentration, especially in their skins.

Resveratrol consumption in France has been linked to its countrymen’s intake of red wine, which in turn creates what is now commonly known as the “French Paradox.” The paradox is that in France few people die of coronary heart disease, even though they indulge in a relatively high-fat diet.

The good news for us? We might just be one step away from a “Southern Paradox.” Two ounces of unfiltered muscadine juice have twice as much resveratrol as two ounces of red wine.

While older people from rural parts of the South might remember their mom’s muscadine jam, the sweet and musky flavor of muscadine wine, or the bitterness of a fresh muscadine’s skin, today they’d be lucky to find a grocery store that sells muscadines. We found them at the farmers’ market at the Agricenter.

Muscadines are wild grapes first discovered in 1524 by the explorer Giovanni de Verrazzano in North Carolina’s Cape Fear River Valley. It was most likely named after the French muscat grape, which is similar in its sweet flavor and musky scent. The grape Verrazzano found, unlike the common dark-purple grape, is a greenish bronze and also known as a scuppernong, after a small town in North Carolina where it was first grown. Because it thrives in a warm and humid climate, the muscadine is largely grown in the South, with most of the grapes being used to make wine and juice.

Many different varieties of muscadines have been cultivated since Verrazzano’s discovery, but the fruit is still that firm, tough-skinned, seed-studded, marble-size grape that for many is only edible if processed in a certain way. A fresh muscadine has a more pronounced flavor than a garden-variety red, seedless grape found at the grocery store. It’s in season from mid-September until late-October and is hand-harvested since not all muscadines on one vine ripen at the same time.

The secret to enjoying the muscadine is in your approach. One way is to simply pop it in your mouth and chew. But if you don’t care for the grape’s tough skin and bitter seeds, you can try squeezing and spitting. First, you squeeze the grape’s pulp into your mouth. Then you separate the pulp and seeds, spitting out the seeds or swallowing them whole.

If that’s not for you, there are a number of other ways of removing the skin and straining the seeds for jam or jellies. Muscadines also make delicious fall pies and cobblers (using pulp and skin, no seeds). And there is always wine, juice, and research.

At the USDA Southern Horticultural Laboratory in Poplarville, Mississippi, geneticist Steve Stringer is working hard to cultivate a more consumer-friendly muscadine — maybe even one that is seedless.

“Our goal is to come up with cultivars that have softer skin, melting flesh, and less bitterness but still have that characteristic muscadine flavor,” Stringer says.

But a more appealing muscadine might mean a less disease-resistant plant and possibly lower resveratrol levels — the very quality that makes the skin so tough and the grape so good for your heart. It is the paradox to the “Southern Paradox.”