Tag: Alcenia’s

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Local Chefs Do BBQ: Part 2

Italian barbecue pasta at Tamboli’s (Photo: Miles Tamboli)

Since May is the month of the big “B” in Memphis, more area chefs share their thoughts on barbecuing. After all, this is Memphis. Barbecuing is sort of second nature. Right?

Miles Tamboli, owner of Tamboli’s Pasta & Pizza: “I made a barbecue pasta sauce that I’m really proud of to this day. I broke down barbecue sauce to its basic flavors and recreated it from scratch using Italian ingredients. Tomato base, caramelized onions, garlic confit, red wine, balsamic vinegar, smoked paprika, anchovy, and some more stuff. Tasted just like barbecue sauce. We tossed bucatini in it and topped it with seared sous vide pork belly from Home Place Pastures and nasturtium micros. It was excellent.”

Karen Carrier, chef/owner of restaurants, including The Beauty Shop: “Applewood smoked barbecued char siu salmon with crystallized ginger, candied lemon zest, and an avocado, watermelon, radish, and orange supreme relish.”

Joseph Michael Garibaldi Jr., Garibaldi’s Pizza owner: “We use a combination of fine- and medium-chopped hickory smoked pork shoulder and combine it with just the right amount of our sweet and sour sauce for it to caramelize the brown sugar on top and keep the pork moist and tender. … Our fresh, hand-tossed crust, signature fresh-packed tomato pizza sauce, and shredded mozzarella cheese provide a perfect base for the perfect barbecue pizza.”

Andy Knight, chef at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar: “Opening Loflin Yard and Carolina Watershed — both on Carolina Avenue — I attempted Carolina barbecue with a Memphis twist. I would cook the butts Carolina style — vinegar-based — then lather them up later with a rich Memphis-style sauce. Both locations were successful, but could never beat Memphis-style. From vinegar-based pork butts to 12-hour smoked beef brisket, nothing beats the dry rub and a rich barbecue sauce of Memphis-style barbecue.”

Betty Joyce “B.J.” Chester-Tamayo, chef-owner of Alcenia’s: “Barbecued chicken. I bake it first if I’m doing it at the restaurant. Sometimes I marinate it overnight with my Italian dressing.”

She also uses her eight seasonings, including Italian dressing, fresh rosemary, and even some of her homemade apple butter. She adds her barbecue sauce when serving. “I take barbecue sauce from the store and add my own ingredients: lemon juice, ketchup, Lipton onion soup mix, and other seasonings.”

Jonathan Mah, chef/owner SideStreet Burgers in Olive Branch, Mississippi: “My signature is the Korean barbecue — Le Fat Panda. My favorite cut is the pork steak marinated in Korean flavors and grilled. It’s a soy-based marinade with honey and mirin, green onions, and sugar, as well as sesame oil. Red pepper flakes for a little spice. Chargrilling is my favorite so that you burn that sugar a little bit on the grill. That’s the best part, to me.”

Jeffrey Zepatos, owner of The Arcade Restaurant: “We used to do barbecue at the Arcade. And we had a barbecued grilled cheese sandwich. So, I’d stick to something along those lines. Smoked pulled pork barbecue on Texas toast with a smoked cheddar cheese to top it off. Now we obviously don’t have smokers at the Arcade, so I was buying a great pork shoulder from a local vendor that we could heat up on our griddle. I think that was fun because it added flavor from our griddle to the barbecue, which gave it a unique taste from all the bacon and sausage we cook on it.”

Mario Gagliano, Libro chef/owner: “I’m from Memphis and I only know pork ribs with that classic vinegary Memphis sauce. All I’d do is take some baby backs and massage them with a nice dry rub, lightly sear it on low heat so as not to burn the sugars in the rub. Flip them and render some of that flavor off the bone. Then halfway submerge the ribs in boiling pork stock. Cover in foil and cook in the oven for a couple hours on 400 degrees. Remove them, brush some Memphis barbecue sauce and broil for a few minutes. Essentially, braising the pork, but it falls off the bone, super tender and moist. And you can find it cooked just like this at Libro at Laurelwood all through the month of May, baby.”

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No “Soul” Sign (Yet) But Leaders Approve A New Downtown Market and A Glow Up for Alcenia’s

Proposed temporary installation on Mud Island.

Downtown leaders sent that “soul” sign proposed for Mud Island back to the drawing board this week but they approved projects that could bring another (smaller) grocery Downtown, revive a blighted building, and give Alcencia’s a glow up. 

The Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC) Design Review Board (DRB) voted down a planned art installation on Mud Island from the Memphis River Parks Partnership (MRPP) on Wednesday. The installation would have brought a large (40 feet tall and 46 feet wide) black and yellow sign (which some said looked like a billboard) to the island. The sign was to face Downtown from the island with large words reading “we have no time for things with no soul.”

MRPP leaders hoped the sign would have drawn visitors to the island from Downtown. For this, they pointed at the success of the “MEMPHIS” sign they erected on the island in 2019. The sign quickly became one of the city’s most Instagrammed spots. 

DRB board members invited the MRPP to submit new designs for the installation. 

Big River Market (516 Tennessee)

Photos and renderings from Urban Arch Associates

At that same Wednesday meeting, DRB members helped move forward a plan to bring a small market (think: light groceries, coffee, grab-and-go food) to the old Emerge Memphis building in South End. The application for Big River Market describes it as a “boutique market store.” The 2,000-square-foot store would have food, drink, groceries, and coffee. 

This comes after last months’ announcement from Castle Retail Group (the company behind Cash Saver and South Point Grocery) to put a full-fledged grocery store on South Main. 

“The applicant is excited to join the newly announced South Point Grocery in bringing food accessibility to the southern end of Downtown,” reads the DRB staff report. “The applicant views this market not in competition with the grocer, but as a small market option for those who live or work within a .3-mile radius of the site. 

“The business model is built upon having an established consumer base within walking distance. The location especially provides convenience for the South Bluff neighborhood, residents of the Lofts, and the Tennessee Brewery residents.”

Brown Girls Development (337 S Fourth)

Photos and renderings from Self+Tucker Architects

The DRB also approved the renovation of a dilapidated building at Fourth and Vance into a modern building with a mix of retail spaces, apartments, and a bar. 

Brown Girls LLC is leading the renovation project for the building that has laid dormant, broken, and graffitied for years. The building would feature 15 retail spaces. Twelve of them would be “micro-suites” and the other three would be traditional retail sizes. The building would also house four apartments and a bar on the first floor.

Alcenia’s (317 N Main)

Photos and rendering from Self+Tucker Architects

Soul-food icon Alcenia’s was approved for a project to spruce the place up inside and out. 

Exterior improvements include new paint, new awnings, new lightings, new trim, and new windows and doors. It will also bring a handicap accessible entrance and a new outdoor seating area. 

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Soul Food From the Heart at Alcenia’s

B.J. Chester-Tamayo is known for hugging customers who enter her restaurant, Alcenia’s.

She doesn’t do that anymore since she converted the restaurant to takeout only because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s “very hard” not to hug people, Chester-Tamayo says. “One of my girlfriends said, ‘If you can stop hugging, anybody can.’ And I have to catch myself. I just bump elbows. Bump, bump, bump. I don’t know how long it’ll be before we’ll ever be able to do that again.”

Her restaurant is open, but she won’t let people eat in the dining room. “This is too serious. People’s lives are too important. This is not over.” And, she says, “I can’t take a chance on my people and my employees’ lives.”

B.J. Chester-Tamayo

They can’t dine in, but fans can tune in to Chester-Tamayo on their phones or computers. She stars in her own cooking show, Alcenia’s Family With Southern Girl, which airs at 1 p.m. Sundays on YouTube Live.

She recently made her buttermilk pie on TODAY with Hoda & Jenna. “They loved it.”

That was the second time she appeared on the show, but her fourth time on NBC. She’s appeared twice on Sunday TODAY with Willie Geist.

Guy Fieri, host of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, gave Chester-Tamayo a shout-out on a CBS News segment on June 28th. Fieri, who visited the restaurant in 2008, referred to Alcenia’s as a “tasty little joint.” About the segment, Chester-Tamayo says, “That show probably has been the biggest impact on Alcenia’s.”

But people still want to be able to taste Chester-Tamayo’s cooking. She offers her complete menu, which includes her classic dishes, such as smothered pork chops and salmon croquettes, for takeout. And she’s selling her products, including her preserves and pies, online.

“What I’m trying to do is stay in business,” Chester-Tamayo says.

She’s in her restaurant’s kitchen Tuesdays through Saturdays. On one recent day, she made an array of desserts, smothered pork chops, yams, smothered chicken, baked tilapia, baked catfish, fried catfish, meatloaf, pinto beans, mashed potatoes with gravy, rice and gravy, lima beans, green beans, and cabbage.

And when she got home? Marie Callender’s frozen pot pie and some boiled corn because she was so tired. “You know, that’s a crying shame,” she says.

Some people are confused about the name of her restaurant, but Alcenia was Alcenia Clark- Chester, Chester-Tamayo’s mother, who died at age 98 on December 29th of last year. Her mother taught her to cook after Chester-Tamayo opened the restaurant on November 7, 1997. “She didn’t make me do anything growing up. I was an only child. I did not even boil water. I ate, but I didn’t cook anything.”
[pullquote-2] She got the idea to do the YouTube cooking show last year. “God gave me this idea 9, 10 months ago,” she says. Chester-Tamayo had her own ideas about how she wanted her to show to be. “I didn’t want a show just me standing up just cooking because that’s what everybody does.” She wanted to cook “with people in the home.”

The three or four people on her show are cooking along with her on YouTube from their homes across the country. They cook recipes from Chester-Tamayo’s cookbooks, Soul 2 Soul from Alcenia’s to the World, and Alcenia’s Healing the Soul Autobiography/Cookbook. As for the latter, she says, “My son, Will A. Tamayo III, would have been 46 years old May 6, 1974. That’s the book I wrote about dealing with his death.”

An episode, which she titled “The Brothers,” features four men who are cooking with her. “We cooked the vegetables together. We cooked fresh snap beans with white potatoes. We cooked Alcenia’s corn. It’s like fried corn. Bell pepper and celery. It’s a recipe I made up ‘cause I couldn’t do corn on the cob like my mom did. The old-fashioned way.”

Dessert was Strawberry Delight Cake, one of her mother’s recipes. “My mom always made it every Fourth of July in our house. It’s an angel food cake with Philadelphia cream cheese and sour cream or cream cheese frosting. And frozen strawberries and fresh strawberries.”

Chester-Tamayo has done shows featuring just herself.

In her first show, she made her oven-fried chicken. “I did it like you are going to fry it with flour and seasoning and everything, but we made a gravy so you could cook it in the oven. We wanted that fried effect, but instead of doing it on the stove, we did it in the oven. We did cabbage. We did hot water cornbread.”

On her “Breakfast, or Dinner, or Me” episode, she made salmon croquettes and fried green tomatoes. “Some people have salmon croquettes for breakfast, some people have salmon croquettes for dinner, some have salmon croquettes for both of them.”

She also made biscuit toast. “When you have biscuits left over, you take them and cut them in half and you put margarine or butter with cinnamon and toast them just like you would if you were making regular toast.”

Chester-Tamayo likes to make a complete dinner, so people who are watching the show and cooking with her will have a complete Sunday dinner when they’re finished. “One meat, bread, vegetable. I want to make sure they have a meal. I want it to taste good enough so they can sit down with their family and enjoy this meal.”

She has entertainment on her show. One episode featured her friend, Memphis Music Hall of Fame member Charlie Musselwhite. “I just asked him, ‘Will you be on my show?’” Musselwhite “made up an Alcenia’s song” that he played on guitar, she says. “I was hoping he’d do something with his harmonica, but he did an original song.”

Her friend, Dr. Darrell Murray, wrote her show’s theme song.

Another musician, Robert Sampson, told her he named his guitar “Alcenia” after her mother. “For somebody to tell you something like that, it just touches my heart. My mom would have been happy to hear that.”

Chester-Tamayo’s sense of humor shines through in the episodes. For her Easter show, she dolled herself up in her spring finery and made Gogo’s Pecan Pie, which was named after her late son. “I dressed up like I’d been to church. I have a big white hat on with my beads.”

She told her viewers she’d “been to Bedside Baptist with Pastor Pillow.” But what she meant was she had just gotten up from her bed and her pillow.
[pullquote-1] “People say, ‘Your last show, girl, you were just so funny.’ I just be me. I don’t know anybody else to be but me. I’ve always been the same way. If I like you, I deal with you. If I don’t like you, I don’t deal with you. God, forgive me, but that’s just the way it is.”

Chester-Tamayo does get serious on her show, too. “I told people I really needed their help. It was Easter Sunday. That I was not going to make it on takeout. I need people to support me through my cooking show and through my website, alcenias.com. They can go subscribe and help me.”

God also gave her the idea to start shipping her products, she says. “I’m shipping pies, preserves, T-shirts, cookbooks, aprons. I have about 10 items. They have to order it from me. Apple butter, cha cha, pickled tomatoes. As the season goes on I try to let people know what I have. Peach preserves, pear preserves. People have just been awesome. That’s what’s keeping me in business right now. Ninety percent of my customers were out-of-towners.”

Her restaurant already was having problems because the renovation of Cook Convention Center made it difficult for people to get to her location, she says. “I already lost money because of that. Then COVID-19 comes in. I looked up and told God and my mom this morning, ‘Thank you. If I didn’t have these products, I’d probably be closed.’

“The only reason I’m still in business is God and the people he has put in my life. I didn’t cook growing up. No culinary skills. Strictly by the grace of God and people he has put in my life and people he’s keeping in my life.”

And, Chester-Tamayo says, “Once you come in my life any kind of way, you’re part of Alcenia’s family. I’ve got the world’s largest family.”

Alcenia’s is at 317 N. Main; (901) 523-0200.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The story of Alcenia’s B.J. Chester-Tamayo

BJ. Chester-Tamayo never cooked until she opened her restaurant, Alcenia’s, in 1997.

“Had never been a waitress,” she says. “Didn’t cook. Didn’t do anything.”

The recipes came from her mother, Alcenia Clark-Chester. She called Clark-Chester, who lived in Meridian, Mississippi, and asked her how to cook greens and other soul food items. “She would call me from Meridian and say, ‘It should be ready by now. Look at the color. The color should be dark.'”

More than 20 years later, Chester-Tamayo still uses her mother’s recipes as well as her own. She’s been on the Food Network four times. She was on Chopped last December. Her restaurant was voted as one of the 200 places to visit in the United States by the New York Times. “I’ve been in a Japanese tour guide book, a French tour guide book.”

She was included in the July 2017 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine in the article, “The U.S. of Yum — Our Favorite Food Finds from all 50 States.” She represented Tennessee.

Chester-Tamayo discussed her first cookbook, Alcenia’s Healing the Soul: Autobiography Cookbook, with Jenna Bush on the Today show.

She released her latest cookbook, Soul 2 Soul from Alcenia to the World in August. That cookbook is “about my customers. I have the world’s greatest customers. When I say that, I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

Her mother grew up on a farm in Kemper County before moving to Meridian, where Chester-Tamayo was born. “My mom started cooking at the age of nine.”

Growing up, Chester-Tamayo didn’t hang out in the kitchen. “I didn’t cook. I washed dishes. That was about it. She just never made me do it.”

Singing was Chester-Tamayo’s passion. “I remember writing Diana Ross … and telling her I wanted to be discovered,” she says. “It didn’t go anywhere. I don’t think I even mailed it.”

Chester-Tamayo had one son, Will A. Tamayo III, but she called him “Go Go.”

She went to seven colleges before she graduated from LeMoyne-Owen. “I majored in social work. … But I changed it to business administration.”

She graduated from Lemoyne-Owen in May 1996. Her son was killed in a motorcycle accident that August. “I shut down for two years.”

His daughter, Alcenia Tamayo was born March 1997.

Chester-Tamayo wanted to pursue her dream of going into manufacturing. “My mom always had peach preserves, pear preserves in the summertime. I didn’t want her legacy to die with her.”

She opened as “Alcenia’s Desserts and Preserves Shop.” But, she says, “Everybody kept coming in and saying, ‘Do you have any chitterlings? Do you have any greens?'”

Chester-Tamayo called her mother. “She gave me her recipes, and I went out and went shopping. As long as I had her recipes, I was confident. I told people, ‘I don’t need your recipe. I got my mom’s. I got the world’s greatest cook’s recipes.'”

Her restaurant is filled with color. “I think my life is not brown and beige. I’m not a brown and beige person. I’ve always been that flamboyant person that just loves fashion.”

Every customer gets a hug from Chester-Tamayo at Alcenia’s. “That was just natural. If I saw family, we hugged each other.”

Chester-Tamayo’s real name is Betty Joyce Chester-Tamayo. People called her B. J. in high school and the name stuck.

Asked how many people think her name is Alcenia, Tamayo says, “Did you hear those ladies that just left saying, ‘Bye, Alcenia’? People assume that when you open a business, you name it after you.”

But she named it after her mother. “My mother is such a giving, loving person. She still cooks certain things today. Even at 97. Her hands are just in bad shape. I’ll call her in a minute right now and say, ‘Tell me how to do this, that.'”

Or, she says, “I’ll take something home so she can critique it. I made some homemade apple butter. If it’s not right, she’s going to tell me. ‘Cause that’s her recipe.”

Peach Cobbler from Michael Donahue on Vimeo.

The story of Alcenia’s B.J. Chester-Tamayo.