Author: Stacey Greenberg

“Sometimes it was mild, and sometimes it would be so hot I would go through a stack of napkins just wiping the sweat off my face,” says Amy Stewart-Banbury, reminiscing about the Hi-Tone’s famous hot-wing pizza.

While the live-music venue reopened earlier this summer at a new location, the pizza as of now remains a memory. There is nothing quite the same as the Hi-Tone’s “flaming” hot-wing pizza, but several restaurants have their own variations on the Buffalo chicken pizza.

In June, the Memphis Pizza Café (MPC) created a new Buffalo chicken pizza as the “pizza of the month.” It was so popular they added it to the permanent menu at every location. The pizza has an olive oil base and is topped with mozzarella, cheddar, chicken, Frank’s hot sauce, and ranch dressing.

MPC’s version definitely does not go easy on the Frank’s. The artistic drizzle of ranch dressing may take a bite out of the heat, but the heavy-handedness with the Frank’s definitely hits the spot and satisfies the strongest of Buffalo sauce cravings. The thin, famously crispy MPC crust is the perfect base and makes it (too) easy to polish off a whole pizza without blinking.

Memphis Pizza Café, multiple locations, memphispizzacafe.com

Camy’s also has a Buffalo chicken pizza available for dine-in or delivery. The Buffalo sauce is more sweet than hot, and the standout on this pizza is the red onion scattered in rings across the top. It’s tasty, but for a more “Buffalo” flavor, you can doctor it up with your own hot sauce. This is perfectly acceptable considering someone will bring the pizza to your door from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. (midnight on weekends).

Camy’s, 3 S. Barksdale (725-1667), camys.com

The fanciest Buffalo chicken pizza in town is at High Point Pizza and is aptly called the Buffalo Chicken Supreme. Its base is a regular cheese pizza with red sauce. On top is cubed chicken breast, crumbled Gorgonzola cheese, and several swirls of a housemade Sriracha ranch dressing.

The pizza has a nice heat from the Sriracha, and the red sauce is an added bonus. The Gorgonzola definitely elevates it above an average Buffalo chicken pizza. (High Point Pizza is also doing some fun specials like a greens-and-pork pizza.) Oh, and, Celiacs, rejoice: High Point offers a gluten-free crust as well.

High Point Pizza, 477 A High Point Terrace (452-3339),

facebook.com/HighPointPizza

For those not opposed to hitting the road, Buon Cibo in Hernando has a mighty fine Buffalo chicken pizza they call the Itta Bena. (Maybe B.B. King is a Buffalo chicken fan?) Buon Cibo only serves pizzas in one size — 10 inches — so it’s 100 percent socially acceptable to refuse to share. Buon Cibo’s crust is stellar. It has the perfect chew and fold, much like a perfect New York slice.

The Itta Bena starts with a cheese pizza, like at High Point, and then tops it with cubed chicken that has been tossed in Buffalo sauce and has just the tiniest bits of celery sprinkled across. The menu listing says it also includes blue cheese, but, if this is true, it is incredibly subtle. Regardless, it’s a damn fine pizza.

Buon Cibo, 2631 McIngvale, Hernando, MS (662 469-9481), buonciborestaurant.com

Amy Pickle and Hannah Phillips are bringing their love of organic raw foods to Memphians with their new food delivery service, Raw Girls Memphis. A raw diet is plant-based. It differs from a vegetarian or vegan diet in that nothing is heated over 118 degrees. This enables the foods to retain their live enzymes. Hence, raw food is often described as live food.

Phillips has been eating raw for about five years, and Pickle, a vegetarian since age 17, went raw about six months ago. Pickle says she has felt a major energy shift after only eating raw foods. She’s also lost 23 pounds and says she has healthy hair and skin for the first time.

“We’re 95 percent raw but not rigid,” Phillips explains. It can be difficult to maintain a raw diet in Memphis, especially when dining out. “When it is a struggle to find something to eat, we order salad,” Pickle says.

They say a raw diet is not about deprivation, but it can be isolating. Phillips admits that she was never good at making raw food taste great but was willing to eat foods for their health benefits rather than taste. Pickle’s culinary skills changed all of that.

Pickle attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. While there she worked two to three days a week in the Mercer Kitchen with master chef Jean George, who studied in Thailand. She did her externship at the Zuni Café in San Francisco under chef Judy Rodgers, who got her start at Chez Panisse.

Working from scratch and using seasonal foods and local ingredients became second nature to Pickle. After moving back to Memphis in 2008, she worked in restaurants but had a hard time finding her way. “There were no farmers markets, and everyone wanted to cut corners. I couldn’t do it,” she says. By 2009, she was doing computer work.

Making raw food taste great is a challenge that has reinvigorated Pickle. “I try to think about what would make hot food taste good and go from there,” she says. Her menu planning starts at a farmers market on Saturday. In addition to the produce she orders in bulk from Downing Hollow and Tubby Creek farms, she looks for inspiration. “I taste things and get excited,” she says.

Once they have their ingredients, the Raw Girls load up their backpacks with cookbooks and head to Otherlands to study recipes. On Sunday, they confirm orders, and preparation starts at 4 a.m. Monday morning.

Some of Pickle’s most popular items are bello burgers (made with almonds, portabello mushrooms, yellow bell peppers, carrots, and herbs); Thai croquettes (made with shiitake mushrooms and red and yellow peppers) served with red curry sauce; pizza (made with walnut, flaxseed meal, sun dried tomato pizza dough); and wilted kale salad.

Pickle marinates mushrooms with agave and shogu and massages greens with sea salt. “The food processor is my BFF. Walnuts and almonds are great for a base. Portabellos, red and yellow bell peppers, basil, cilantro, and garlic are must-have ingredients,” she says.

A dehydrator binds the burgers and croquettes together and make breads and pizza crusts. This can be labor intensive, and the breads can take up to 48 hours to dehydrate, but it is a labor of love. “People like raw food to look like the other foods they are used to eating,” Pickle explains.

Phillips’ specialty is dessert. Pickle describes her as “a real alchemist.” She has a raw foods certification from David Wolfe, the “rock star” of the superfoods and longevity world and author of many best selling books, including Superfoods: The Food and Medicine of the Future. She makes rich and satisfying sweets without refined sugar or syrup. Some of her most popular desserts include raw pumpkin pie, chocolate ganache, and deep chocolate (pure cacao) pudding (made with avocado and banana as the base) topped with goji berries and cacao nibs.

The raw-foods home-delivery service started in June, almost by accident. A friend offered to pay Pickle and Phillips for a daily meal delivery after tasting food they made for each other. The friend told other friends and overnight the Raw Girls had 10 clients.

In August, they started a Facebook page and began taking weekly orders. They quickly built a base of about 60 customers who order every week or every other week, for an average of 30 orders per week.

Pickle, who also runs an IT business called Pickle IT, started declining work, and Phillips, who operated Give Yoga for five years, found out the building she was renting was being sold. “It was like the universe said, ‘This is what you should be doing,'” Phillips says. “Amy and I are together 24/7 now. We’re partners in life and partners in work.”

As their business grows, they are looking for ways to improve their services. They originally offered a daily delivery of dinner Monday to Friday for $120 per week. Now they are switching to a weekly box of food delivered on Monday with five meals and ingredients for five superfood smoothies for $120 per week.

Vacuum packing foods offered them more flexibility in their menus. They hope to serve not only Memphis and the surrounding area but the entire United States. “The local market comes first, but we’d love to be huge. We are in radical times foodwise,” Pickle says.

The Raw Girls recently spent a week in Portland, Oregon, to research the raw-food scene there and have now leased a space to expand their kitchen.

“This work has been transformative,” Pickle says. “Our food is guilt-free, and it really gives back to you.”

“We have big dreams,” Phillips says.

facebook.com/rawgirlsmemphis

rawgirls@gmail.com — Raw Girls Memphis: 496-0755

Originally from Birmingham, Miles McMath, 41, is one of Memphis’ most regarded chefs, even though you may have never heard of him. He’s quietly turning St. Jude’s Kay Café into a model of efficiency and wellness, while racking up awards, participating in local charity events, and raising a family.

The recent second-place winner in the Cochon Heritage BBQ competition, McMath once owned three restaurants in north Mississippi: Timbeaux’s, Boiling Point, and Junior’s. He sold them in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. “There was a chef who needed help in New Orleans and I always loved it there, so we moved there to help out for a year before the kids were old enough to go to school,” he says.

When McMath returned to the Mid-South, it was to help launch a new seafood restaurant. However, before he could sign a management contract, a friend from culinary school told him about the renovation of Kay Café at St. Jude. “I talked to my wife about it. It would be a Monday through Friday job, which would be good for the family, and I could still cook pretty good food there,” he says. When he started in March 2008, Kay Café was just a set of drawings. Today, he is the director of culinary operations with a staff of 80.

McMath lives east of Hernando, Mississippi, with his wife, three children, and a lot of animals. There are three pigs, laying chickens, meat chickens that he calls freedom rangers, 60 Angus cattle, and wild deer. “We don’t eat much meat we don’t raise ourselves,” McMath says. He and his wife have two acres of land. His father-in-law keeps the cattle and pigs on another eight acres. His wife’s extended family has another 35 to 40 acres with even more cows.

McMath says it’s a community where everyone knows everyone else, and they share everything. “Everyone has a special thing they do. A friend grows watermelons so no one else plants watermelon, my father-in-law does peas, etc.”

He says his family is very committed to eating seasonally, and they have been known to go “forever” without eating bacon. McMath recently “processed” 25 chickens. “It had been six months since we ate any chicken. The kids watched most of it, and it didn’t bother them at all,” he says. “We have a lot of conversations about where food comes from.”

“I use everything,” he says of the chickens. “The gizzard, heart, feet — everything except the head.”

The first thing McMath made was chicken tenders for the kids. “We have never eaten at McDonald’s. That’s just not what we do,” he says, admitting that their grandparents have been known to take them to Sonic for an ice cream or two.

Feeding his kids is easy compared to feeding the employees, patients, and visitors at St. Jude. That adds up to 2,000 meals a day, plus catering. “There aren’t many places where you have the same customers every day,” McMath says. “It can be a challenge.”

Plate by plate, the food is ever-changing at Kay Café. To an outsider, it pretty much looks like the best cafeteria ever. (Kay Café is not open to the general public.) There’s a sushi station with grass-fed beef, a grill area with the usual suspects (hamburgers, chicken tenders, hot dogs), a bakery with fresh bread and pastries, a basic salad bar, a seriously fancy salad bar, a deli with homemade spreads like sunbutter and homemade pickles, wood-fired pizzas, and so much more.

McMath uses vegetables grown on site at St. Jude and is doing a special focus on sustainable seafood right now. He’s got food trucks coming on a regular basis and is also looking to partner with local chefs, like Ryan Trimm of Sweet Grass, to serve restaurant-quality dishes in the café. “I want to promote local restaurants to patients and families and give them a taste,” he says.

Ninety-five percent of patients at St. Jude are outpatient. However, there is an average of 50 beds with really sick kids. McMath says they have a room-service menu, but these kids can pretty much have whatever they want. “They want comfort food from home, wherever home is. We have an arsenal of ingredients and staples in the kitchen, and we spend time with parents to get specific brands, etc.,” he says. Right now, they have an enamel pot full of beans on the stove at all times to soothe the stomach of one Chinese patient. “His mom gave us the recipe and it took us a couple of days, but Rick Farmer nailed it,” McMath says.

Farmer and Luahn Thomas both recently left L’Ecole Culinaire to work as executive chefs in Kay Café. Of the seven certified executive chefs in Memphis, four of them work at Kay Café.

McMath says he doesn’t get to do a lot of actual cooking anymore, but he tries to cook something every day. “Cooking used to be 90 percent of my job. The administrative part can be draining, but I can always go cook when I get fed up,” he says.