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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Meals on Wheels

Memphians Kwame and Kcbena Cash formed their grocery-delivery business K+K Deliveries almost a year ago but didn’t put their business plan into action until last fall. “We’ve toyed with the idea for a long time,” says Kwame, who gave up his career as employee benefit adviser at the U.S. Department of Labor to dedicate all his time and energy to the business. “You don’t walk away from a great job on a notion,” Kwame says. “We envied some of the great metropolitan cities that offer and can support a grocery-delivery service, and we just knew that Memphis can do the same. We wanted this city to be up there with those other cities.”

Although the brothers think of their shopping and delivery service as a lifestyle solution, the wealthy, too-busy-to-shop market wasn’t the first one they thought about when developing their business.

“My brother is a Memphis police officer, and he patrols in South and North Memphis,” Kwame says. “One day, when he passed a bus stop, he noticed people loaded down with bags full of groceries. We took that cue to make sure our service is affordable enough to reach people for whom grocery shopping is a difficult task, like the elderly or people who typically take the bus and therefore can only get limited amounts of groceries.”

Currently, K+K Deliveries has working agreements with several local grocery stores, and the business is still young enough that special requests are often granted. Orders have to be placed by 10 p.m. either by phone or via e-mail to be ready for delivery the following day at 8 a.m. Standard deliveries are $15 and discounted deliveries are $10.

“We typically walk our customers through a basic grocery list to make sure they don’t forget anything,” Kwame explains. “Once we have a customer in our database, the whole process becomes a little easier. We have fairly accurate amounts for all the grocery items so our customers know how much they’ll spend before we fill the order.”

The next step for the Cashes is to create a Web site for online grocery shopping.

K+K Deliveries, e-mail address: kkdelivery@midsouth.rr.com (473-1595)

Mark your calendar for two special

Jeffrey Dunham

events at The Grove Grille. Chef/owner Jeffrey Dunham and Scott Smith of The Wine Market will offer a wine luncheon on Saturday, February 3rd. The three-course meal starts with dry chili and roast tomato tortilla soup. Spinach, pine nut, and pancetta-stuffed flounder with sweet potato purée, braised leeks, and lemon cream is followed by pear tart Tatin with cinnamon simple syrup. The price with wine pairing is $25 per person, plus tax and gratuity.

On February 7th, Dunham invites diners to the chef’s table for a “Dinner in the Kitchen.” The six-course meal includes wine pairings and dishes such as Maine lobster spring roll, sautéed Atlantic bass with black Thai rice and ponzu beurre blanc, and warm chocolate cake with vanilla anglaise and fresh raspberries. The price for the dinner is $75 per person, plus tax and gratuity.

The wine luncheon and “Dinner in the Kitchen” occur every two weeks. Reservations are required. For more information, call the Grove Grill at 818-9951.

The Grove Grill, 4550 Poplar

Chez Philippe at The Peabody hotel celebrates its 25th anniversary with a special dinner menu this week. During its 25 years, Chez Philippe has only seen three chefs — Michael Harper, Jose Gutierrez, and now Reinaldo Alfonso.

The six-course menu was created by Alfonso with the help of Harper. Dishes include seared scallops with roasted garlic purée, basil coulis, and Chablis reduction; rainbow trout en papillote with porcini mushrooms, roasted root vegetables, French tarragon, and Sauvignon Blanc; and veal tenderloin with seared goose foie gras, black truffle/potato purée, and Tennessee whiskey mushroom jus.

Chez Philippe opened in January 1982, just a few months after The Peabody reopened by Belz Enterprises. The hotel’s marching ducks extend their influence to Chez Philippe’s menu. In 1981, Gary Belz wrote a note to general manager Charles Rosemann regarding a duck dish proposed for the restaurant’s menu. “I’m extremely sensitive to the serving of duck from this menu,” Belz noted. Rosemann’s reply: “There will be no dead ducks at The Peabody!” And today, Chez Philippe might be the only French restaurant that doesn’t serve duck.

The 25th anniversary dinner is available through February 3rd. Cost for the six-course dinner is $80 per person, plus tax and gratuity. Wine pairing is available for $46 per person.

Chez Philippe at The Peabody, 149 Union (529-4188)

siba@gmx.com

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Country Cooking

Once a month, Chez Philippe takes a break from its French-Asian cuisine to give diners the opportunity to sample the foods of places such as Thailand, Italy, Portugal, and Africa.

This month’s dinner, on August 24th, will showcase the food of Cuba, which will be a culinary homecoming for Reinaldo Alfonso, Chez Philippe’s chef de cuisine. Alfonso grew up in Miami surrounded by the food of his family’s home country and was inspired by his mother’s and grandmother’s cooking. It’s only natural that he take family and childhood favorites to the Chez Philippe level of top-notch artistic presentation and fine-dining standards.

“Cuban food is Creole food. We actually called it Criolla,” explains Alfonso. “Now, you don’t want to get that mixed up with Louisiana’s Creole cuisine. Criolla is influenced by the foods of the Caribbean and Spain. In Cuban cuisine, you’ll find a lot of Spanish influences. The difference is that our food is more exotic and uses more spices — cinnamon is one example. So, Cuban food is not spicy food; we just use spices to give the dish a greater depth of flavor.”

The dinners are five-course meals with two choices for each course. Green plantain soup with roasted snapper, camarone enchilado with pan cubano, boliche with boniato puree, lime juice and brown-sugar bananas, and natilla are some of the dishes that will be on the menu for that night.

“The base for the soup is a sofrito,” says Alfonso. “Most of our dishes have a sofrito base, either green or red, which is made with onions, peppers, tomatoes, garlic, wine, and herbs. The green sofrito uses a lot of parsley and cilantro. We use sofrito in our cooking, and the French use a mirepoix [celery, onions, carrots].

“The camarone enchilado is my dad’s signature enchilado. It’s like a warm shrimp cocktail, for which the shrimp are stewed in a red sofrito with cinnamon, cumin, and lots of herbs. Boliche is like a pot roast, only I’ll be braising a chorizo-stuffed eye-round, which is served with white sweet-potato puree. Natilla, one of the desserts for the night, is a cinnamon custard that will probably be paired with lemon guava shortbread.”

The Taste of Cuba dinner at Chez Philippe is on Thursday, August 24th, from 5 to 10 p.m. The cost is $65 per person plus tax and gratuity. There are two more world dinners this year: a Taste of India on September 21st and a Taste of Italy on October 19th.

Chez Philippe in The Peabody (529-4188)

Culinary students and chefs who have an interest in foods from Spain, listen up! This is your chance to win an all-expense-paid trip to the 2006 Worlds of Flavor “Spain and the World Table” conference at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, November 2nd through the 4th.

What do you have to do? Create a recipe that highlights ingredients from Spain, and enter it into the 2006 A Taste of Spain Recipe Contest. Some of the ingredients to choose from include Spanish olive oil, olives, pimentón (smoked paprika), saffron, and cheeses.

The deadline to enter is at 10 p.m. August 29th. Winners will be announced on or after October 2nd.

www.tasteofspaincontest.com

This weekend, the Southern Foodways Alliance is hosting Camp Nashville in conjunction with the East Nashville Tomato Art Festival. According to the SFA, campers will be in for “smooth-as-silk Tennessee whiskey and hickory-smoked barbecue; tomato-themed parades and catfish-stuffed BLTs; hot, hot chicken and cold, cold beer.”

The camp highlights Southern food favorites and will feature such luminaries as E.W. Mayo, “the king of fried sweet-potato pies.” Noted food writer John Egerton will moderate a session on meat-and-threes. Other topics include barbecue, beer, and pimiento cheese. There will also be a BLT tasting, dinner at Arnold’s, and a hot chicken run and guitar pull to make sure that the campers stay busy and well-fed.

Southern Foodways Alliance Camp Nashville is August 11th and 12th.

www.southernfoodways.com

siba@gmx.com