Ana Gonzalez – Memphis Flyer

Have you ever stood in front of a crazy-looking vegetable and thought: What the heck is that? Well, good news. Chefs do it too. That’s what happened the other day, when Ana Gonzalez and I stopped by Memphis Farmers Market.

“They’re called muscadines,” a helpful vendor explained. “They’re like red grapes, but the skin’s a little tougher, and they’ve got one to four hard seeds inside.”

As a proud Colombian, Gonzalez can be forgiven for not knowing about muscadines, which are native to the American South. At five foot six she’s a fireball, and she has the endearing habit of calling her friends “baby.” She also happens to be the executive chef at Bleu in the Westin, where she specializes in small, shareable plates packed with bold, fresh flavors.

John Klyce Minervini

muscadines

Oh, and she’s not afraid of muscadines. After learning about them, she snags two pints.

“You can’t take a chef to the farmers market,” Gonzalez jokes. “It’s like porn for us! We wanna buy everything.”

Gonzalez has agreed to take the Flyer’s Farmers Market Challenge. That’s where we take a chef to the farmers market and make lunch. Fortunately, she’s got help: today she’s brought along her two sons, Brian (age 11) and Deven (age 5).

“They behave pretty good,” Gonzalez asserts.

“We’re decent,” Deven amends.

It’s a hot day, so we fortify ourselves with some home-made popsicles from Mama D’s. Gonzalez chooses mango, but her kids prefer cookies and cream. Then it’s time to hit the stalls.

Over the course of an hour, our market basket gradually fills with heirloom tomatoes from Plowboys Produce, herbed goat cheese from Bonnie Blue Farm, duck prosciutto from Porcellino’s, arugula from Whitton Farms, and shiitake mushrooms from Dickey Farms. We’re just about to head for the car when, all of a sudden, the brassy boom of an operatic baritone cuts the air.

“Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja, Stets lustig heisa hop-sa-sa!”

If Santa Claus had arrived with a sleigh of presents, I don’t think the crowd would have been more surprised. Upon closer inspection, the songful stranger reveals himself to be from Opera Memphis, the performance a part of Opera Memphis’ 30 Days of Opera. Gonzalez and her kids have never been to the opera before, but now they say they’re considering it.

“I like the way it sounds,” Deven sings, with an operatic vibrato.

At home in Southaven, we are greeted with a glass of white wine by Gonzalez’ husband, Brian Barrow. The two met at culinary school — Johnson & Wales University in Miami — but their cooking styles couldn’t be more different. Barrow is a classicist, favoring continental dishes with elaborate preparations. By contrast, Gonzalez is more modern, whipping up light, fresh flavors from around the globe.

John Klyce Minervini

Ana Gonzalez, chef at Bleu in the Westin, is a modernist, whipping up fresh flavors from around the globe.

How does a classicist from Los Angeles end up with a modernist from Colombia? Gonzalez says it all started one day in Advanced Pastry class.

She remembers, “It was right after Thanksgiving, and everybody was working over break. And Brian got the professor to move [our quiz] back by a day. I leaned over to my friend and said, ‘I’m gonna marry that man.'”

For lunch, we’re having … everything. Today’s menu includes grilled pork chops and salmon and steak. And peach sangria, and roasted veggies, and a watermelon salad. I assume that Gonzalez and her husband are showing off for the newspaper reporter, but Barrow sets me straight.

“Oh no,” he admonishes, “we do this every Saturday. This is just lunch.”

Lunch, indeed. While I sip wine and snap photos, the family gets to work. After 15 years of marriage, Gonzalez and Barrow function like a well-oiled machine, wordlessly, seeming to read one another’s thoughts. While she whisks the sauce, he’s outside on the grill. Even little Deven gets in on the action, trimming green beans and peeling a turnip.

“My kids are like me,” Gonzalez confesses. “They’re always working.”

John Klyce Minervini

watermelon salad

At last it’s time to eat. The meats are succulent and well-spiced, but by far the best thing on the table is the watermelon salad: an artful arrangement that includes arugula and baby kale, heirloom tomatoes, herbed goat cheese, and duck prosciutto.

True, you can buy most of these ingredients at the grocery store. But getting them fresh from the farmers market makes a difference. The flavors are electric; they are followed by little exclamation marks. Drizzle this salad with a lemon zest vinaigrette, and you’ll never look at watermelon the same way again.

There isn’t any furniture at Love Pop Soda Shop. That’s right: no tables, no chairs, no display cases. Instead, they’ve got 700 white plastic milk crates. Milk crates to sit on, milk crates to rest your glass on. The bar is actually a long row of — you guessed it — stacked milk crates, topped by a smooth wood panel. You really have to see it to believe it.

You might think that such an arrangement would be the product of necessity, a last-minute fix for a shop that didn’t have the time or money to buy proper furniture. Far from it. The design, by Memphis-based brg3s architects, is actually pretty nifty.

Think about it. Turn a milk crate on its side, stick an LED light behind it, and what do you get? A stylish, semitranslucent display case. Like Legos, Milk crates are cheap and infinitely rearrangeable.

Justin Fox Burks

More important, the design reflects the simplicity of Love Pop’s concept: Do one thing. Do it well. As you may have guessed, Love Pop serves soda — more than 200 varieties and counting — but you won’t find any Mountain Dew around here. Instead, they focus on small-batch bubbles, the kind of pop that is produced like craft beer.

A good example is Simpson Springs Sarsaparilla ($3) — a close cousin to root beer. Whereas the ingredient labels on most corporate sodas read like a chemistry textbook, this 100-year-old recipe, produced at a mom-and-pop shop in South Easton, Massachusetts, includes just four ingredients — and one of them is carbonated spring water.

And the taste? It’s like A&W Root Beer without the jet fuel (high-fructose corn syrup, phosphoric acid, sodium benzoate, etc.). I am no shill for soda, but Simpson Springs surprised me. It’s rich and smooth with undertones of vanilla and sassafras.

Co-owner Mignonne Wright says she dreamed up Love Pop back in 2005, when she and her son, Brendan, were on a road trip through the American West. While driving down Route 66, they happened on a place called Pop Soda Ranch, and Brendan says he thought he had died and gone to heaven.

“Back then I was an 8th-grader,” Brendan explains, “So the idea of over 600 different kinds of soda — that sounded like the best thing in the world to me.”

Wright says she wants Love Pop to be an all-ages hangout, the kind of soda bar that will be refreshingly new to millennials and comfortingly familiar to baby boomers, nostalgic for the lunch counters of the 1950s and 60s. At the grand opening on Saturday, they will give out free ice cream to make floats. How many kinds of ice cream, you ask?

“Just one,” says co-owner Taylor Berger. “Vanilla. We figure you’ve got enough choices with 200 kinds of soda, so you shouldn’t have to stress about ice cream.”

Love Pop Soda Shop, 506 S. Main

www.lovepopsodashop.com

Over at Bleu — the restaurant in the Westin — they’ve updated their lounge with new paint and furniture. And there’s a brand-new tap system for beer. But the real news at Bleu isn’t the lounge. It’s the revamped menu by chef Ana Gonzalez.

A ball of energy with a tight ponytail, Gonzalez comes to Memphis by way of Colombia. After attending culinary school at Johnson and Wales, she went on to work at Disney’s Contemporary Resort and the Peabody’s Capriccio Grill. In the three months since she came on at Bleu, she has given the restaurant a bold new flavor, emphasizing small plates that feature fresh, local ingredients.

Take the Bacon-Wrapped Shrimp with Polenta Cake ($8). A pair of tiny towers draped with micro-greens from Memphis’ Green Girl Produce, it’s Gonzalez’s mischievous take on shrimp and grits. (Grits and polenta are essentially the same thing; the only difference is the type of corn used and the fineness of the grind.)

Drizzled with deliciously vinegary barbecue sauce, Gonzalez’s shrimp strikes the right balance. At the top, there is the fresh taste of micro-greens like radish and daikon sprouts. In the middle, the plump richness of shrimp and bacon. And at bottom, the crisp crunch of fried polenta. The best part? It’s inexpensive, so you can order a second round.