Here’s a way to jazz up your Thursday nights: Amelia Gene’s is offering a five-course tasting menu — for only $50 per person.
It’s the brainchild of Nate Henssler, executive chef at the restaurant at 255 South Front Street.
“I’ve been kind of tinkering with the idea for a couple of months,” Henssler says. “Guests come in and have a five-course dining experience. You can move as quickly or slowly as you want.”
For an additional $30, they’re served wine that pairs with each course.
The vegetarian tasting was designed to be something special. “I don’t want to have it on the menu five nights a week. It’s not that kind of a restaurant.”
And, he says, “Portions are small. I could share more and try to make more money, but I want to get people in the restaurant and get this ritual of going out on Thursdays.”
His tasting menu evolved. “People always ask, ‘Are you going to do a tasting menu?’ Most people don’t want that. But recreational diners, so to speak, ask that all the time.”
When people select the tasting menu, they’re saying, “I’m going to put myself in the chef’s hands.”
Henssler is going to use themes for each tasting menu. “Cheese” is the current theme. “I thought it would be fun to do a menu based on the cheeses we serve on the cart.”
He only serves domestic cheese on the cart. “I want to showcase American creameries, American dairies.”
An eclair with shallot jam and honey from Hive Bagel & Deli is the first course, or “proper bite.” “Just a small eclair. Instead of pastry cream or Bavarian, we take on a cheese called ‘Shabby Shoe.’”
The cheese, made by Blakesville Creamery in Port Washington, Wisconsin, is based on the French cheese chabichou du Poitou. “This is a goat cheese and the flavor is light and citrusy.”
He mixes the mild cheese with a little salt, pepper, and mascarpone and “puts it in an eclair with dark caramelized shallots. And we drizzle it with honey we get from Hive across the street.”
For the salad, Henssler uses milkweed cheese from Tulip Tree Creamery in Indianapolis, Indiana. “That’s cow’s milk. And that one is different. It has a flavor of hay. Slightly like a mild mushroom flavor.”
It’s a “straightforward dish.” “We just take tomatoes and season them with sea salt and black pepper and let the juices come out. All with different herbs — tarragon, mint, chervil, thyme, basil, dill. We get milk bread and slice it up and sauté it in a hot pan with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper.”
He adds thinly-sliced tomatoes and lets everything slightly cool. “And finish it with the cheese and pine cone bud syrup.”
For the tempura zucchini blossom with ratatouille and lemon aioli, Henssler uses a hand-dipped ricotta. “This is sort of a dish that is something like I did back when I was working in San Francisco. My chef used to fill squash blossoms with crab meat or risotto and fry them.” Henssler fills the squash blossom with ricotta and a little bit of salt and pepper. He dips it in tempura and serves it on diced ratatouille flavored with rosemary and pink peppercorn-infused oil with house oven-dried tomato and lemon aioli.
“That ricotta tastes like really good milk. Almost grassy.”
Henssler uses a sheep’s milk cheese called piedras in his Arborio risotto with basil emulsion and sugar snap peas entree. Blakesville Creamery “only made about 15 of these and I have two of them.”
The cheese has “some earthiness. It has a dry rind, so it has a dusty flavor to it.”
To make the basil emulsion, Henssler purees basil, green garlic, lemon zest, and cultured butter. “You puree that together and get this really bright green bright finish on the risotto. It tastes very fresh and has that bright green color.”
The dessert course is “Blue Cheesecake” made with poached Bosc pears, frisée, and port wine. Bosc is a brown pear that’s firmer than other pears. Henssler poached the pears in port wine last fall. They’ve “been sitting in port wine for five months now.”
Along with the frisée, a type of lettuce, Henssler uses bleu cheese from Moo & Blue Firefly Farms in Indian Mound, Tennessee. “This is more of a soft, sweet, tangy bleu cheese. Not super stinky.”
The port wine reduction and pear adds a sweetness to the bleu cheese in the dessert, which is “more like a quiche.”
Henssler is already thinking about future Thursday night tastings. “Into fall I might want to do some different types of game meat — wild rabbit, wild boar, venison. That type of thing. Maybe you could do five different courses incorporating different shellfish. Or when the cod is in season.”
A five-course menu is “a lot of fun. And that’s why the staff really likes it. It gives us a chance to be creative for a little bit.”
The staff gets to “learn and taste different foods and sell different foods.”
And “guests also get something different.”
Speaking of guests, Henssler recently got a call from his boss asking, “Can you take a party of 20 in an hour and a half?”
The group, which arrived at Amelia Gene’s about 9:15 p.m., included Elon Musk, who ordered a steak and salad, Henssler says. “I’ve been told he had a really good dinner. And that the level of civility, hospitality, the sophistication of the restaurant, and how we were able to accommodate them quickly made him feel it was the right decision to come to Memphis.
“Indirectly, we can take credit for xAI coming to Memphis,” Henssler jokes.