Harrison Downing’s first cooking attempt involved cheese.
“When I was super young, my mom would let me microwave cheese sandwiches,” says Downing, 30. “Probably the only thing she would let me cook. It’s still my guilty pleasure to this day.”
Now the chef at Greys Fine Cheese & Entertaining, Downing’s sandwiches are more elaborate. A recent “Sandwich Saturday” creation was made with cotto salami, pepperoni, finocchiona, fennel, and Der Scharfe, a raw milk cheese.
“Learning about a bunch of cheeses” is one of the benefits of his job at Greys, owned by Jackie Mau and Kurt Mullican.
Mullican, aka “Cheesemonger Kurt,” “walks up to me every five seconds and hands me a piece of cheese,” Downing says.
He “gets a cheese scraper and just scrapes off a little piece,” describes the texture and how long it’s been aged, and says, “Here. Take a sip of this wine with it.”
Sommelier Bradley Sharp pairs the wine with the cheese.
Mullican also showed Downing how to properly eat cheese. “You warm it up in your hands, in between your palms, because cheese is supposed to be eaten at room temperature. You get all the flavor profiles out of it.”
A native Memphian, Downing says, “My mom was an amazing cook. She sparked my love for cooking. I’d hang out with her. We always bonded and cooked together.”
They listened to James Taylor, Carole King, as well as country artists while she cooked. “She’s a cheesy country lady.”
Realizing college wasn’t for him, Downing eventually got a job at Jim’s Place Grille in Collierville, where he began as an expediter. “That’s when I fell in love with it — watching those guys on the grill. Watching the food come out really made me want to be on that side of the kitchen.”
Under chef Nick Acosta’s tutelage, Downing rose to sous-chef before leaving the restaurant four years later.
Schuyler O’Brien helped him get a job as a lead cook at Hog Wild Pit BBQ. But Downing was laid off when the pandemic hit. To “kill time,” he and his wife picked peaches and blueberries at Jones Orchard, and Downing made jam to sell and give away.
A friend told him about Greys. “I got linked up with Kurt to help him organize his menu and do all that. Right when we talked on the phone, me and Kurt really hit it off. We knew it was going to be a good chemistry.”
Downing originally was just going to make jams and cheese boards until he told Mullican, “I can build a couple of small plates. Based off of a cheese.
“Like I have a ricotta dish, a feta dish. And people who don’t want to just eat meat and cheese, they can have a salad option. That blossomed to my obsession with all these sandwich creations. ‘Why not try to put a couple of sandwiches on the menu?’”
And, he says, “It blew up.”
“Gabagool” is made of gabagool meat, house-made spicy pickles, Brie, and raspberry coulis. “Then I smash it on the sandwich press so it’s super hard. It comes out melting hot, spicy, and sweet with the raspberry.”
For Sandwich Saturday, Downing makes a limited number of sandwiches that sell out between an hour and a half to two hours after the shop opens, he says. “I don’t tell anybody what I’m doing until Friday at lunch.”
He describes the sandwiches as “all very wild.”
“The challenge is to find a cheese I like and make something with it. These cheeses are so crazy when you taste them, it just sparks something in my head: ‘I can put this with this and it will taste like it should go with whatever.’
“I have all these cheeses from all over the world to play with that Kurt brings in.”
Downing, nicknamed “Chef Harry,” says he probably used “American Kraft Singles” on those microwave sandwiches he made as a kid. His mother used “just like basics, jack cheddars and Parmesan and things like that. All of the things that will make Kurt’s skin crawl.”
Greys Fine Cheese & Entertaining is at 709 Mendenhall Road; (901) 529-7046.
