When he was 6 years old, Ben Chavez used metal squares, circles, and triangles to create art in Montessori school. When he was 40, he used square and oval flatbread to create his “Barbecue Burnt End” and “Mediterranean” flatbreads at Terrace at the River Inn restaurant.
Whether it’s numbers, objects, art, or food, Chavez, who is chef de cuisine with the River Inn property in Harbor Town, has always been good at combining “ingredients.”
His stepfather was the cook in the family because Chavez’s mother worked long hours as a server in a restaurant. Chavez didn’t want to be a chef, but he liked to observe the cooking process. He liked to “see how it started and how it ended.”
He became more fascinated with cooking after his grandmother, who had Mexican roots, moved in with them and began making tortillas from scratch and other culinary items. “I saw a whole different side of cooking.”
Chavez, who worked in telecommunication jobs, didn’t get into cooking until he was 30. “That’s when I was sort of figuring out how to cook.”
His parents gave him a Crock-Pot. “I didn’t know what to use it for.”
He came up with chili after he went online to find out what he could cook in it. “After looking at a bunch of different cooks’ recipes, I arrived at my own.”
Chavez learned to cook by “trial and error.” Like “trying to cook a steak correctly. Cooking a pork chop right. Buying what was cheap and figuring out how to cook it.”
After he got furloughed from his job as merchandising coordinator for Levi Strauss during Covid, Chavez began painting and customizing shoes. “You put cold water in a bucket, spray paint the water, dip the shoe in, and it would create a design on the shoe.”
Chavez, who also painted his own designs on shoes, sold them for $200 and up.
His wife then discovered some of his old recipes. “She had been cleaning the house or whatever and found a bunch of old notebooks I had dating back into my 20s. I had been writing down recipes or writing down food I had liked and enjoyed or experienced.”
Looking up online culinary schools he could attend, Chavez’s wife discovered the online Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. Chavez said he’d give it a shot. “And then sort of ran with it.”
In 2021, they moved to Ripley, Tennessee, to live in a house his dad had just rehabbed. Chavez applied and got a job cooking “just very Southern old school” fare at the Old Town Hall & Cafe in Covington, Tennessee. “I worked there for free for the first 90 days.”
But, he adds, “I was getting my foot in the door.”
He created “secret dinners” at the restaurant after it closed at night. He sold tickets to the three- or four-course dinners, but he wouldn’t reveal beforehand what the menu consisted of. “I had a lot of fun. That was me learning the craft.”
After Old Town Hall, Chavez moved to The Cellar Restaurant and Prohibition Bar next door. From there, he went to Brownsville, Tennessee’s Serendipity Bar & Grill, where he “moved the menu forward. Made some changes.”
He was working at Guy Fieri’s Tunica Kitchen & Bar at Horseshoe Casino when he landed a job at Paulette’s, which includes Terrace, also located in the River Inn.
Shortly after he landed the job, Chavez and food and beverage manager Daniel Clark went to work changing the Terrace menu. Instead of serving steaks, Chavez suggested they concentrate on “good food that came relatively quickly and could be shared.”
They kept the cheese balls, French fries, and beef and lamb sliders, but they went to flatbread pizzas, which were faster and less heavy. Chavez created the Barbecue Burnt End Flatbread and Mediterranean Flatbread. “We just add the ingredients and build it like a pizza.”
Summing up his culinary career so far, Chavez, who now lives in Memphis, says, “I’m very shocked I was able to move this forward this fast.”
But, he adds, “You force yourself to rise to the occasion.”
Aika Renzo wants people to think “Japanese sweets” when they think “Wagashi Japanese Bakery.”
“‘Wagashi,’ in the literal translation, does mean ‘Japanese sweets,’ but it’s more than that,” says Renzo, 29, owner/baker of Wagashi Japanese Bakery.
They’re Japanese desserts that can be made of mochi, which is a glutinous rice flour, or red bean paste. “Traditional confections usually eaten during tea ceremonies or eaten with tea in general.”
Renzo, who operates her business out of her home, grew up eating the type of traditional Japanese sweets she makes. “I am a Memphis native, but I am half Japanese and my dad is from Memphis and he is Black. So, I grew up with two different cultures.”
She would visit Osaka, where her mother is from, eat the food there, and surround herself with the culture.
Renzo always missed the cuisine when she returned to Memphis. “Now that I have kids, that’s something I want them to grow up and love. Something as simple as Japanese homemade sweets I want my kids to grow up with and share with their friends. Something I never had in Memphis.
Castella cake, melonpan, and matcha mochi bar (Photo: Michael Donahue)
“There is no homemade Japanese bakery around, as far as I know. It’s a good type of bakery to have. We have all sorts of shops here — French pastries, croissants, and doughnuts — but we don’t have a traditional Japanese bakery. And that’s a gap I want to fill.
“I’m a self-taught baker, so I kind of taste and experiment with different recipes and mold it into what I grew up with and how I remember that nostalgic taste.”
Renzo’s first baking effort was “the classic” chocolate chip cookie. “The quintessential American cookie.”
She used a mix out of a box, but she didn’t find that satisfying. She wanted to express her creativity. “Baking anything where you’re creating is an art that comes from the heart. I know that’s corny, but it’s something you feel and you put out for everyone to experience.”
The first Japanese dessert she made was melonpan — “a Japanese sweet bread that has a cookie crunchy crust scored to look like the skin of muskmelon.”
It didn’t start out as melonpan. Renzo was making bread from a general recipe when she thought, “What if I turn this into melonpan?”
It’s like a “fluffy bread with cookie crust on top. I just kind of tweaked it with spices I attributed to my childhood taste buds of eating melonpan.”
And, she says, “I do have a special sugar I use that kind of gives it that special flair. It also has a nice coating of sugar. It’s dipped in sugar once it’s scored.”
Melonpan is “essentially more like a biscuit in the English sense.”
She let her mother try it. “She loved it. I even think she might have cried the first time she ate it because it reminded her of her childhood.”
Renzo, who officially opened her Wagashi Japanese Bakery website last November, offers melonpan in its original flavor as well as matcha flavored, which is “just green tea flavor.”
She also sells “Castella cake,” which, she says, is “essentially like a Japanese-style sponge cake. It has a honey soak on it, which gives it that moisture. But it’s made with bread flour, so it’s springy. A lot of people tell me the texture is very similar to pound cake, but way lighter.
“It’s a pretty common Japanese cake. It’s usually in a rectangular block and lined with parchment on the bottom to keep that honey soak.”
Renzo also bakes “matcha mochi bars.” “These are not traditional, but something I wanted to add to the menu just to give people other options.”
Since they sort of have the texture of a brownie, Renzo refers to them as “a Japanese mochi blondie.”
As for a brick-and-mortar storefront, Renzo says, “I don’t really see it happening in the near future. Maybe within a year or two just depending on what life throws at us.
“I would love to have it be a bakery and also a tea house. The variations would be, we would primarily serve green tea or traditional Japanese tea. Because wagashi in the general sense is eaten during tea ceremonies or special events with tea or green tea.”
Renzo wants to pair the two so people will “get the full experience. We have a lot of bubble tea places and Asian restaurants, but I want to focus more on the traditional pairing that you would see in Japan.”
To order, Renzo says, “You can go online to our website — wagashibakery.com. You can place your order online at least 24 hours in advance, so we can bake those to order. And we deliver free anywhere only in the Shelby County area.”
Eddie Pao no longer directs motion pictures like he did in Taiwan. Instead, Pao, the owner of Mosa Asian Bistro, directs his kitchen staff.
Pao — aka “Mr. Eddie” — has been synonymous with Asian cuisine in Memphis for almost half a century. This includes his famous hot and sour soup as well as his wonton and pad thai dishes.
Pao, 79, who still comes to work every day at his restaurant at 850 South White Station Road in Eastgate Shopping Center, has manned five other restaurant locations since he opened his first Memphis spot in the late ’70s.
In addition to serving lunch and dinner, Mosa caters events almost daily. The restaurant prepares meals for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and for sports teams, including the University of Memphis Tigers.
If he’s not in the office, Pao is helping out in the kitchen making sure his fresh menu items are properly prepared.
“I have known Mr. Eddie since I was a kid,” says Jonathan Mah, owner of SideStreet Burgers in Olive Branch, Mississippi. “He has the best hot and sour soup in the city.”
The soup is “the perfect blend of sweet and spicy and sour.”
Mah, who had “the spicy dumplings and Eddie’s favorite noodles” on his last visit to Mosa, says, “I love the spice in the dumplings.”
Photo: Michael Donahue
Eddie’s Way
Born in Hunan province in China, Pao and his family moved to Taiwan when he was 5 years old.
Pao was a rebel growing up; he wanted to do things his way. “When I was little, to tell you the truth, I didn’t follow after my mother and father too much because they were very old-tradition people,” he says.
His parents showed him their way of doing things. They “wanted to go this way,” Pao says, but he thought, “Maybe I can go this way faster.”
Pao’s father worked as an accountant for the government, which was under Chiang Kai-shek, but Pao’s family wasn’t wealthy.
They had “very little money,” Pao says. Their extended family of 40 people lived in one house. Some of them had to sleep on the floor, he recalls.
Pao didn’t like to study. “I go to school, but I don’t follow the teacher too much. Just like I don’t follow my daddy and momma too much.”
He played basketball, and he loved comic books, including ones about Tang Sanzang, a 16th-century Buddhist monk.
Pao’s grandfather remarried after his wife died. Shing Tai Tai, which means “new grandma,” was the cook in the family. “She liked to cook soup for us. Tofu with yellow sprouts.”
Though he serves them in dishes at Mosa, Pao stays away from sprouts. “I don’t eat that any more. Ten years I eat that every day. I miss her cooking, but I don’t eat that.”
“He’ll take out the sprouts,” adds Pao’s daughter, Michelle Pao Levine, who along with her brother, Alex Pao, helps run Mosa.
Another great cook in Eddie’s life was his mother-in-law. She made dishes Pao later would serve in his restaurants: Szechuan chicken, Kung Pao chicken, and General Tso’s chicken.
Eddie didn’t do any of the cooking back then: “I watched and I helped clean up.”
But, he says, “She showed me how to make recipes. How to cook.”
Which came in handy later. “My sauce is different from every other restaurant ’cause my sauce is homemade and the recipe came from her.”
Photo: Courtesy Eddie Pao
Lights, Camera, Action!
Following high school, Eddie enrolled in the motion picture department at an art college because he wanted to learn to make movies. “I always had an imagination from reading comic books.”
After he graduated, Eddie got a job at a privately owned motion picture studio in Taiwan.
He followed the director around at first. “One month and a half later, the director said, ‘Hmmm. How come you know that much?’”
The director was so impressed he said, “You can be my assistant director on my next movie.”
In one movie Eddie worked on as assistant director, the main director, who was from Hong Kong, only spoke Cantonese. But the actor in the movie only spoke Mandarin. So, Eddie became the translator. “The actor and the director cannot understand each other. I’m very lucky. My grandmother is Cantonese, so I can speak it. And I speak Mandarin well; that’s my own language. A lot of things depended on me to finish the movie.”
Eddie eventually moved up to become a director. He believes what he learned directing movies helped him later on in the restaurant business: how to prepare for what you want to make. And then after you make it, check to make sure you did it right, he says.
Photo: Courtesy Eddie Pao
When he was 29, Eddie directed a kung fu movie about a 19th-century judge named Pao Ching Tien, or “Pao Kung,” which was his nickname.
Eddie, who isn’t a kung fu artist, says someone else on the set taught the actors how to “hit and kick.”
He also directed a movie with Charlie Chin, who was a heartthrob at the time. “He was a very handsome man.”
The film with Chin, a “very, very famous star” in Taiwan, was the last film Pao directed. He says Chin, who was “very nice” to him, told him he’d never cried before when he made a movie, but he couldn’t stop crying on the movie Eddie was directing. Eddie believes the plot rekindled memories from Chin’s own life.
Eddie also got in front of the camera. In one movie, he played the part of a student learning from a kung fu master, but he didn’t have to do any kung fu moves in the film.
From Movies to Memphis
In 1977, Eddie, his wife, and daughter, moved to Memphis, where his sister lived. He wanted to pursue the movie business in the United States, but he had a “language problem,” Eddie says. “I have to give it up. I have to make a living.”
It didn’t take him long to figure out what to do. “At that time I thought about my mother-in-law. I learned a lot from her.”
He thought, “Okay, I’ll open a restaurant.’’ Eddie began with “a very small restaurant” and “very little money” when he was 33 years old.
His first restaurant, which he bought from some friends who were anxious to sell it, was on Summer Avenue near Holmes Street.
He kept the previous restaurant’s name, which was “Formosa,” he says. “I didn’t need to change the name. I don’t need to spend more money.”
Eddie wouldn’t open the restaurant until he was satisfied with the food he was making. “I was testing until I was happy. And then I opened.”
“Prior to him opening, most of the other restaurants were serving Cantonese-style food,” Pao Levine says. “That food tends to not be spicy.”
“He brought spicy Chinese food to Memphis,” Alex says.
Eddie’s restaurant was an instant hit. “Many customers waited for almost an hour and a half, two hours. It was a small, nine-table restaurant.”
He stayed at that location for two years. In addition to enjoying the food, his customers taught him how to speak better English.
One customer, who worked for a bank, told Eddie he should open a bigger restaurant. Later, he told Eddie, “Hey, I found some place not too far from here. It’s bigger. Go get it.”
The man also told Eddie his bank would be happy to help him.
The new location on Summer Avenue near Highland Street had 24 tables and a bigger kitchen. People were waiting outside the first day when he opened the doors for business, Eddie says. All the tables filled up, and more people were “waiting for a table” a half hour later.
Over the years, Eddie opened other Formosa locations. One, which he later sold, is still on Quince Road. In 1995, he opened a Formosa in Germantown, but he later closed it because there wasn’t enough parking.
Photo: Michael Donahue
Making Mosa
In 2004, Eddie opened his first Mosa Asian Bistro on Poplar Avenue at Kirby Parkway. Pao Levine, who began working at Mosa after she graduated from college, says Mosa “kept the greatest hits from Formosa” and added the “best hits” of other styles of Asian cuisine. They served “Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean” as well as Mandarin food.
Mosa was “more relaxed, more casual, and also a family atmosphere,” Alex says. “Formosa was a little more formal.”
The first Mosa didn’t start off with a bang. “Kirby was a tough location,” Pao Levine says. People were saying, “What is this Asian fusion? Pan Asian?”
But, she adds, “Within two months, we were a full house.”
Chinese restaurants were changing. The “tradition of an old-style sit-down full-service” Asian restaurant was dying out, Alex says.
Eddie never had a buffet at any of his restaurants. “He was always about fresh, made to order,” says Pao Levine. “Always. And still is.”
The Pao family (Photo: Michael Donahue)
In 2008, Eddie opened his current Mosa location. It was in a better building with better parking and better visibility.
They still featured some items that Eddie sold at his first restaurant location, like hot and sour soup, spring rolls, sesame chicken, fried rice, and Szechuan chicken.
They also added new items, including a range of pad thai dishes, the “most well-known noodle dish in Thailand,” Pao Levine says. Thin rice noodles stir fried and sautéed in a soy peanut sauce.
Eddie learned a basic pad thai recipe, but he made his own version, which was spicier with bolder flavors.
Mosa also began serving pho. Their head chef, A-Ton, is from Vietnam.
Asian beef sliders made with mini challah buns from nearby Ricki’s Cookie Corner & Bakery is their newest item.
When they first opened the new Mosa location, Eddie’s wife Charleen made desserts, including blueberry tortes, cheesecake, and cupcakes. They even put in a commercial bakery for her.
“Most Asian mothers do not bake American-style desserts,” Pao Levine says. “Asian desserts tend to not be as sweet.”
Charleen “just taught herself” to bake, Pao Levine says. Their mother, who is “Dad times 10,” is “such a perfectionist. No one can pipe the cream the way she wants it.”
Mosa stopped selling desserts after Charleen stopped baking for the restaurant years ago. She says she’s too busy with the grandchildren.
In October 2013, Mosa was featured on the Cooking Channel’s Cheap Eats. Eddie made his Thai Rainbow Panang Curry with Chicken.
They closed the restaurant during the shoot. “My dad, you could tell he was in his element because he loved being on camera,” Pao Levine says.
The director was a bit standoffish, but that didn’t stop Eddie. “In between takes he would just walk up to the director’s chair and say, ‘Excuse me. Can I take a quick peek at what you’ve done?’ He was really curious about what kind of angle she took a shot. He was wondering what she was trying to capture.
“Half an hour later, they were best friends. She found out talking to Eddie that he was a film director. Between every take she’d ask him, ‘What do you think about this?’ ‘What do you think about that?’ He has such a great eye.”
Mickey Blancq,
Louis Connelly, and
Dustin Brantley at
Louis Connelly’s Bar (Photo: Michael Donahue)
Something about the old Printer’s Alley bar piqued Louis Connelly’s interest.
“There’s just something about bars that are sort of old and run-down and dilapidated,” he says. “And the other people that are there are just looking to have a good time and not taking themselves too seriously.”
“You need some characters there for sure,” he adds.
Printer’s Alley was “a fun place to end the night. When every other place was closed, Printer’s Alley was open.”
Connelly is now owner of Louis Connelly’s Bar for Fun Times & Friendship, which opened February 3rd in the space once occupied by Printer’s Alley at 322 South Cleveland.
When he moved from Brunswick, Maine, to Memphis, Connelly didn’t dream he’d open a nightspot. “At that time in my life I didn’t really have enough money to even consider opening a restaurant or bar or anything.”
He used to stop in Printer’s Alley every couple of months. “I ended up there one, two o’clock in the morning. Nothing particularly bad happened while I was there. I guess it went through a series of different owners. I moved here in 2013. From when I moved here and until it got shut down, I got along with various bartenders and owners.”
He knew Printer’s Alley didn’t have the greatest reputation. “Not a good local spot to hang out,” he says. “Smoking inside, for one, turned off a lot of people. I knew that drug use was sort of rampant. I just knew it was a little bit of a shady bar. Overall, my experiences were positive.
“Now that I own it, people are telling me all sorts of stuff. Picking up ladies of the night or whatever.”
Connelly, who works at Evolve Bank & Trust, would “look at different websites that post businesses for sale.”
When he discovered Printer’s Alley, he called up the renter and went by the place. “It was pretty dilapidated as you can imagine.”
But it fit his budget. “I liked the history of the building and the spot. I don’t live in Central Gardens. I live in Cooper-Young. I always thought people in Central Gardens don’t really have a local spot to hang out.”
He signed the lease a year ago. “I got a guy in there and we drew up some plans and he started working on it.”
Connelly hired manager Mickey Blancq, a Memphis restaurant veteran.
And he hired Dustin Brantley to “help with the decor and the vibe. To get that right. He’s really punk rock.”
Brantley has been working in production design and set decoration in Memphis for the past 10 years.
He’s not a drinker, but “I’ve always been a big fan of dive bars and that culture and that feel,” says Brantley.
Searching in antique stores, private collections, and other sources, Brantley says he brought in a lot of advertising from the ’70s and ’80s, and historical pieces dating back to the ’60s.
He wanted “to honor the history” of the old Printer’s Alley space.
“Whether you’re a 70-year-old biker or a 21-year-old Midtown artist, I wanted people to feel like they belong here,” Brantley adds. “So, I just took that and ran with it. I wanted it to feel familiar in a way that all good dive bars should feel.”
Connelly kept some Printer’s Alley pieces, including a mural. As for renovations, Connelly says, “We took out the hallway that was next to the bathrooms to expand the kitchen. And then we covered up the brick wall that had a chalk wall on it on the other side with an actual wall to make it easier to hang stuff up like TVs.”
They put in a new bar. “That [old] bar was not worth salvaging. It was completely busted up. And we moved the bar from one side of the room to the other. It’s much more functional over there.”
He considered keeping the old epoxy bar top, which had pennies and old photos of Printer’s Alley customers attached to it, but, he says, “Hey, we’re going for a new bar. It doesn’t really make sense to keep pictures of people I don’t know.”
Connelly created a “full kitchen” by adding new equipment, including a flat top grill, a charbroiler, and a new stove. “They literally only had one kitchen stove. Like one that you’d have at your house.”
Blancq, Connelly, and chef Juan Amaro collaborated on the menu, which includes nachos, Philly cheesesteaks, and smashburgers. “Really solid bar food,” Blancq says. “Nothing too fancy. Just making bar food right.”
They had a great response at their grand opening February 3rd. “I think our whole vibe is different enough that we’re going to attract a new clientele,” Connelly says.
Louis Connelly’s Bar will close at 3 a.m. “We do want to stay open late.”
Not too many local bars are open late these days, he says. “The pandemic killed a lot of them. P&H is gone.”
“This is new,” Connelly continues, “but we want to make it feel like it’s been there for a while. It will take a lot more time to really get that feel. I think we’re starting from a really good place.”
Evergreen Grill will open in spring or earlier at 212 North Evergreen Street, the site of the old Cafe Society.
Chef/owner David Todd describes Evergreen Grill as “a neighborhood bar and grill.” The fare will be “Southern cuisine comfort food.” And, he says, “It’s what I always wanted to do.”
Todd, 45, who was executive chef at Longshot restaurant at Arrive Memphis hotel, as well as owner of Grub Life, a pre-ordered fully-prepared meal service, says, “I worked for a bunch of great chefs and I learned so many things from so many people.”
But, he adds, “Everybody hits that point at some point in their life, where they’re doing what they’re doing and they want to continue doing it.
“I figured out over the years, my strongest creative process and the place where I’m just the best at and happiest at as a chef, is understanding food; it’s about people, and food is about memories.”
And one of those memories involves his mother. “My mom taught me how to cook.
“I can remember being a younger cook and working with people and they’re explaining things to me or showing me this technique.”
He remembers a chef showing him how to cut oranges and grapefruits into segments. But Todd’s mother made fruit segments for him and his sister when they were growing up. “The bedrock of my palate and the way I like to cook things is influenced by my mother’s cooking.”
Food “belongs to everybody. It’s like this universal language.”
But he says, people “filter a lot of pretense into it.”
Describing Evergreen Grill’s fare, Todd says, “We really care about what we’re doing and we do it the right way, but we’re coming from that place of love, not that place of pretense. And I’m not trying to be grandiose.”
There are “unlimited images” out there of what chefs are creating. “I’m not knocking that. But also, in a weird way, it can interrupt the creative process.
“Sometimes I create the clearest when I don’t have an image I’m trying to work towards.”
Many chefs aspire to make it big in New York and California. “So many cool things exist in all those places,” Todd says, “but as chefs we get lost in this comparative culture.”
His goal? “All I’ve ever wanted to be is a Memphis chef.” And he wants the food at Evergreen Grill to reflect that. “One of the best cooks I ever met is my mother. And there’s so much technique there. So much talent there. There’s so much love in the things that she did and a lot of their mothers did. So, why don’t we highlight that?”
Instead of “lofty fine dining food with foams and that kind of stuff,” Todd will serve “approachable food” at Evergreen Grill.
He’s not using his mother’s recipes. “It’s not my mom’s cooking, but it’s leaning into that.”
Todd plans to include items people might get at other places, but not the way he’s going to prepare them.
Like country fried steak. “To me, there’s nothing wrong with putting love in country fried steak. But let’s get a good cut of meat and good breading.”
And, he adds, “I have no problem making one of the best cheeseburgers in town.”
As well as a “killer meatloaf.”
“If you want to get certain stuff now in this day and age it’s going to be premade frozen stuff,” Todd says, adding, “If it’s not of a certain tier, it’s not right to do it right and make it cool.
“We separate food into all these different classes and I just think a lot of it is kind of nonsense. It’s all applicable and it all has its space.”
Chefs can “put love into anything.”
People will know right away his sandwiches are different. “They can tell a few bites in, ‘Oh, hold on.’ Tell them we made the jalapeño jam for that patty melt here. The pastrami I smoked here. The pickled cabbage I made here.
“You can put just as much intent in a sandwich as somebody down the street would in a steak entree. And, to me, that’s a pretty cool moment.”
The Evergreen Grill will include “chicken wings. Nachos. Really good sandwiches. A few salads.”
There also will be “dinner plates,” including short rib plates and salmon plates.
But Todd won’t be serving any of the fare associated with the old Cafe Society. “This is going to be a complete departure from Cafe Society.”
As for the look of Evergreen Grill, Todd’s changes include knocking out a wall “so there would be a flow between the bar and the rest of the place.”
Todd, whose partners in the restaurant are Josh Huckaby and Meredith Brocato, didn’t want a fancy name. And he didn’t want “Grille” with an “e” in the title. Restaurants come up with super kitschy and super cool names nowadays, according to Todd. His thought was, “Let’s just open a restaurant like they did back in the day. And that’s kind of what we’re doing.”
Evergreen Grill will eventually be open for lunch and dinner. “We’ll open for dinner first, get our feet under us, and get the rhythm of it. And a few weeks later we’ll open for lunch.”
And when Todd says it’s going to be a “neighborhood” grill, he’s being literal. “This is my neighborhood. I live three-quarters of a mile away from Evergreen Grill.”
Angela Alexander, Gena Mosely, Lana Hickey, and Morgan Kelly (Photo: Frank Chin)
Crave Sweets Bake Shop owner Lana Hickey provided edible brew — pastries made with beer — to the recent Science of Beer event at the Museum of Science & History (MoSH).
And she joked, “Okay. I’m coming for the trophy this year.”
MoSH special events coordinator John Mullikin told her Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken came in number one at the event’s best food category for the past two years.
But not this year. Crave Sweets took the first place spot at the January 12th event.
“We did chocolate stout cake with rum butter cream and butterscotch beer brownies,” Hickey says. “We had people coming to our booth nonstop.”
Their molasses cookies were the only thing not made with beer. “We make our molasses cookies to be dipped in the beer.”
She was surprised at the response. Typically, “savory items,” not sweets, are paired with beer, she says.
Hickey knows a thing or two about sweets. She’s the owner of two locations of Crave Sweets Bake Shop: one at 11615 Hwy. 70 in Arlington, Tennessee, and the other at 1730 South Germantown Road, Suite 123, near Moondance Grill.
Hickey began cooking in her hometown of Sumner, Mississippi. “I did a lot of cooking in my teenage years for my siblings. My mom worked multiple jobs.”
Hickey learned a lot from her mother and her grandmother. “And the rest is pretty much self-taught. It was Southern style food. Your typical pinto beans and cornbread and meat and threes.”
But that’s not what sparked her interest in cooking. In high school, she took a class on photographing food. She thought, “People get paid to create plates like this?”
Students in the school’s home economics class provided some of the food. Hickey, who describes herself as “more of an artsy person,” says seeing the food with her artist’s eye enabled her, through “presentation and colors,” to “create art and put it on a plate.”
Before seeing the fancy plates of food, Hickey “didn’t know what fine dining looked like.”
Olive Garden was the closest she’d gotten to that type of food, she says.
Because of that class, Hickey enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Atlanta, where she concentrated on French cuisine fine dining. “That’s actually my background. It wasn’t until after I graduated and got into the food industry that I started baking pastries.”
She made salads and desserts at the old Madison Hotel, now Hu. Hotel. “Our executive chef, Chris Windsor, had a list of items he would like for us to make, but he left it in our hands to come up with recipes. That kind of thing. So, I did get to be a little creative.”
One of her first original desserts was “bananas with white chocolate chips and caramel rolled up in a wonton wrapper, deep fried, and then rolled in cinnamon and sugar.”
Hickey stopped working at the hotel after she had her first child. But, when her daughter turned 3, Hickey returned to baking big time. “She got up on the counter. I’d Google a different recipe and we’d just kind of experiment on the weekend.
“I always cooked dinner every night for my family. When she and I would experiment, it would typically be baking. I jokingly told my husband, ‘I can’t get rusty. I have to stay on top of my skills ’cause I’m going to use them one day.’”
Her husband, Ben Hickey, is a chef who worked at the old Jarrett’s restaurant before becoming executive chef at Amerigo Italian Restaurant.
Lana made birthday cakes and pastries for Facebook friends before she and her husband opened Crave Coffee Bar and Bistro eight years ago in Arlington, Tennessee. “I always wanted to open a restaurant and a coffee shop.”
They served sandwiches and soups made from scratch as well as baked items, including homemade cinnamon rolls, blueberry biscuits, and Lana’s popular “sausage cheddar muffins.”
She and her husband had a “huge following” at the restaurant, which they ran for eight years until closing it in October 2023.
In 2017, while they still owned the restaurant, Lana, who now had three children, decided to open a bakeshop. Running a bakeshop is easier than a restaurant, she says. “The hours are different. The holidays are different from a restaurant. I’m not there at night.”
She did the baking and her husband handled all the administrative duties, including finances and payroll.
Lana opened the Germantown location in October 2023. “We do all types of gourmet desserts, wedding cakes, custom cakes.”
Many of their recipes come from recipe books that belonged to Lana’s grandmother as well as grandmothers of her general managers.
Their pastry menu changes every day, but they do keep “staple items,” including their “cheesecake brownies” and “strawberry crunch bars.”
Their cheesecakes also are “never changing,” Lana says. “We recently started supplying those to Moondance. We do turtle cheesecake, red velvet, and traditional strawberry.”
And, “to be a little bit different,” she does a Biscoff or cookie butter cheesecake.
“The newest thing we have done is our banana pudding cake. Holy cow. It’s out of this world. It’s a banana butter cake with fresh bananas, white chocolate buttercream, and banana pudding filling. And then it has your vanilla wafer cookie crumble around the top and bottom edge.”
As for future plans, Hickey wants to open a third bakeshop location. She’s currently looking at Olive Branch, Mississippi, and Millington, Tennessee.
And opening another restaurant isn’t out of the question. It would be “fine dining French cuisine.”
And, yes, Hickey does take photos of her baked creations.
But, she adds, “It goes out our door so fast I mostly keep up with my photography skills with my children.”
Front St. Deli Chef Ken Hooper (Photo: Michael Donahue)
Front St. Deli will reopen at its old 77 South Front address by the end of January.
“We are doing the final touches with Ken [Hooper], the culinary brains, over there this week,” says Tony Westmoreland, who runs Tandem Restaurant Group with his wife Stephanie. The group operates other restaurants, including Carolina Watershed, Sidecar Cafe Memphis, and Ben Yay’s.
In addition to being the “culinary brains,” chef Hooper also is a managing partner at Front St. Deli. “If all goes well, he might be the new owner,” Westmoreland says.
The delicatessen, which originally opened in 1976, closed in 2020.
The building, which dates to 1853, “looks a little bit different,” he says. “We did facade renovation. Took off the whole front of the building. It’s an all-glass front now.”
The Deli exterior at the corner of Front and Union. (Photo: Michael Donahue)
They’re considering adding two garage doors to the front so they can roll them up and people can eat outside in the warmer months.
“We had to make some changes,” Westmoreland adds. “The inside has changed up a little. Mostly cosmetic.”
Changes were made to the “footprint layout,” he says. “We wanted to put in some more equipment for the variety of food we want to prepare.”
The restaurant will be “grab and go,” says Westmoreland. “With the limitations on the space, it’s a pretty much similar menu. But I think he [Hooper] wants to keep a few things from the previous menu for historic value.”
Emphasis won’t be placed on Tom Cruise and the 1993 movie, The Firm, part of which was filmed at Front St. Deli. “We’re not going to play The Firm movie over and over again, and have all the pictures of Tom Cruise.”
They’re going to play up the historic value of the building and make it “more Memphis than ‘Tom Cruise filmed a movie there.’ And that building is really old.”
The color scheme will be red, black, and white. Most of the equipment has been replaced. “We did put in a new countertop and a wall to block off the kitchen part. It’s still a half wall.”
They don’t want to make too many changes because, like their other properties, including the legendary Zinnie’s, they want to play into the “nostalgia” of “the past historical influence of some of these places.”
As for the food, expect a mix of some of the old with the new. “For instance, in the previous incarnation they had a pimento cheese and bacon sandwich,” Hooper says. “We want to bring that over. That was really iconic. The counterpoint is Cubano Memphis. It’s honey ham and pickles and Swiss cheese and — it’s supposed to be Cuban roast pork — but pulled pork on top. Just to make it fit in.We’re going to make it a Memphis thing.”
Hooper also will feature “cast iron pizzas,” including one consisting of smoked turkey, smoked pork, and smoked sausage. “Memphis is just a smoked-up town.”
Other items include the Jack & Lui — a sandwich made of house-smoked turkey and paprika mayonnaise on tomato bread.
Josh Steiner of Hive Bagel & Deli is “going to be making most of our breads, which I’m really excited about. A white baguette. A caraway dark rye, which I don’t know if you can get it anywhere else. Just gorgeous bread.”
The menu item names won’t refer to The Firm, Hooper says. The restaurant previously was “a shrine to Tom Cruise. People can like what they like, but we’re not going to emphasize that.”
Instead, they’re going to emphasize Memphis. “The sandwiches are going to be named for famous riverboats: Memphis Queen, Julia Belle Swain, and Belle of Louisville.”
Born in Spokane, Washington, Hooper moved to Memphis in 1976 — the same year Front St. Deli opened. He owned food trucks, ran food service at Levitt Shell (now the Overton Park Shell) for two years, and he was the executive chef at Growlers.
He’s excited to work at Front St. Deli, a place that has “very deep name recognition in Memphis.”
“You couldn’t spend that much money to get that hype with that name recognition. And we get to just walk right in.”
Hooper believes Front St. Deli has “got name recognition almost with Pete & Sam’s and Arcade and the Rendezvous. It’s got that deep history.”
And, Hooper says, “It’s a grande dame. A Memphis institution. We understand that. And we’re going to take good care of it.”
In addition to re-opening Front St. Deli, Tandem Restaurant Group also is in the process of opening two Uncle Red’s restaurant locations — 2583 Broad Avenue and 786 Echles Street, Westmoreland says. The restaurants will feature Christopher “FreeSol” Anderson’s turkey legs. “We shut Watershed down for the winter and we’re going to focus on getting Broad Avenue open directly after Front St. Deli,” Westmoreland says. “We hope to have that one open in February and Echles, hopefully, in March.”
Tamara Taylor’s golden-brown biscuits turned gold in more ways than one. They turned into a lucrative new job when she no longer could operate her hair salon and other businesses.
“I had a bypass in 2019,” says Taylor, owner of Tam’s Homemade Biscuits. “After that, I was really not able to go back to real estate, hair business, and the cosmetology business.”
She had to find another way to make money. “Food stamps ran out. I was in the trenches.” Baking biscuits was a no-brainer. She’d been making biscuits for 45 years with her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and sisters. “I had different experiences from so many different elders in my family.”
Making biscuits also was therapeutic. “Rolling up biscuits kind of helped my arms and all.”
Tam’s Homemade Biscuits is a combination of Taylor’s techniques and the way her relatives made biscuits.
Whether it was biscuits or regular, sweet, or crackling cornbread, bread was ever-present in her family’s household. “Bread was a highlight of our family,” Taylor says, adding, “On any given day, with the grandparents, kids, parents, you could have any one of the different types of bread.”
She developed her biscuit technique about 30 years ago when her children were growing up. “Salmon and biscuits” was a regular Sunday morning breakfast.
The “love” she puts into making her biscuits is what sets them apart, Taylor says. “If you have a passion for something, you’re going to do your best to make it the best you can make it. I have a passion for feeding people.
“It’s not just the filling of the belly I want. I want to fill the soul. I want you to feel warm when you eat my food.”
As for her biscuits, she says, “My biscuits are dense, but not heavy. You’re going to get a wholesome piece of bread. But it’s going to be light, soft, fluffy, and a little flaky. I put a delicious dot of butter on top.”
Instead of posting on social media, Taylor began selling her biscuits through referrals. She’d been baking biscuits for birthdays, graduations, or baby showers for years. “Wherever an event was going on, Tamara would be there fixing somebody some food.”
She also cooked while she and her husband, Terrance, were the owners of T’s Shear Elegance salon for about 20 years. “I’d be cooking and styling hair. We would serve food in the break room.”
Taylor, who now is on all social media outlets, including tamshomemadebiscuits on Facebook, first went online in 2021. “Now I make and sell about 1,000 biscuits a week,” she says.
She makes about 10 different types of biscuits in addition to her original biscuits. She bakes dessert biscuits with real fruit, cheese biscuits with different types of cheese, banana nut biscuits, and bourbon butter biscuits with “real bourbon liquor.”
She also makes her own butter creams with fruit, which can be used as a glaze or jam on her biscuits.
Taylor eventually branched off into making soups, including her tomato basil and her chicken Alfredo pot pie soup, aka CAPPS. “We have beef stew, broccoli cheese, potato soup, and ‘All N Broth’ — it’s got all your vegetables. All your peppers, onions, garlic, carrots.”
“Sometimes I do a bone-in broth where I mix a ham bone, chicken, or turkey part in it,” she adds.
Taylor also makes side dishes, including her greens, and desserts, which include peach cobbler and lemon pie, as well as a selection of prepared meals called Tam’s Healthy Habits — portion-controlled meals on the lighter side.
She currently sells her biscuits and other items every Saturday at the Agricenter Farmers Market. She also sets up the first Saturday of the month at Lightfoot Farm in Millington, Tennessee.
As for future plans, Taylor plans to open a brick-and-mortar cafe, where she can prepare her cuisine and customers can either dine in or get a “Tam’s to go.”
Yes, Taylor will be serving her biscuits at Thanksgiving dinner. And her biscuit dressing will also be on the table. “It’s similar to making a cornbread dressing, but I use my own biscuits in it.”
When it came to recreating cuisine from the recent Indie Memphis Film Festival showing of The Taste of Things, Dan Kopera was a perfect fit.
Or, as they say in the movies, he was typecast.
In addition to being a chef, Kopera, 49, is an actor, who has appeared on stage in local productions.
He put his take on dishes shown in the movie for a tasting October 28th at the old Pantà restaurant after the movie aired at Playhouse on the Square.
Growing up in Michigan, Kopera liked to sing and draw, but he also was intrigued with cooking. “Both my parents were home cooks, but my grandmother was a classically trained chef. She was the home editor for The Detroit News. Kay Kopera.
“One of my earliest memories was standing on the step stool cooking bacon for her when I was about 6.”
His grandmother made cooking fun. “She would explain where things came from. Some of the science behind cooking. And how to taste things along the way while you’re in the midst of making a dish.”
Kopera decided to become a chef. “When I was about 10, 12, that’s what I wanted to do. But my life took a change of direction. I ended up going into college for theater.”
Kopera played Alfred P. Doolittle in Northern Michigan University’s production of My Fair Lady. “But shortly after that, I switched over to the technical side and became a technical director and designer.”
Kopera moved to Memphis in 2001 for graduate school at University of Memphis. “That didn’t work out. I dropped out and got my job at Theatre Memphis.”
He continued to work in the technical side at Theatre Memphis for 14 years. He also spent five years at Germantown Community Theatre.
“I still did some acting here and there throughout the years. In 2019, I won an Ostrander Award for ‘Best Featured Performer in a Musical.’”
He won for his portrayal of Caiaphas, the head priest in Jesus Christ Superstar at The Harrell Performing Arts Theatre in Collierville.
Kopera was working at Germantown when Covid hit. “They kept me on salary until the end of August that year, at which time they furloughed me.”
During Covid, his wife, costume designer Ashley Whitten, began creating and sewing novelty pandemic masks.
In 2021, Kopera got a job as line cook and later rose to kitchen manager at Cafe Ole. He then got a call from Germantown Community Theatre’s executive producer. “He told me, ‘The job is still yours if you want it, but it sounds like you found a new career path.’”
Kopera began working at Pantà in November 2021. “I went with Kelly [English] to Restaurant Iris when it opened [in Laurelwood] for about nine months. And then I moved back to Pantà and became a chef over there in June.
“When they decided it was time to shut down Pantà, I just moved over to The Second Line.”
The old Pantà site is now being used as an event rental space, but Kopera and chef Derk Meitzler currently are “working on a new menu for that place. It will be under the umbrella of The Second Line: The Swamp Bar.”
“It’ll be part of Second Line, but Derk and I are kind of tag-teaming the chef responsibilities of both. Derk is the one that came up with most of the menu for both sides other than Kelly English classics like we’ll always have. I’m working on specials. And I’m working on a lot of the rentals, wine dinners, and those menus.”
Kopera can’t reveal much about The Swamp Bar, but, he says, “We are keeping the David Quarles interior design. That will remain the same.”
Kopera, who originally interviewed with New York grad schools, is glad he chose Memphis. “You can go out and do something any time of the day or night pretty much.”
And, he says, “The theater community is amazing here. The food scene is so good. There are influences from around the world here I can experience without having the stress of living in a city like New York.”
Founding Big Ass Truck member Robby Grant with a can of Malt Liquor Man (Credit: Clark Ostrieke)
Big Ass Truck now has a big ass beer named after it.
Crosstown Brewing Company will introduce its first malt liquor, Malt Liquor Man, between 4 and 6 p.m., Thursday, November 2nd, at the Concourse Block Party at Crosstown Concourse, says the brewery’s owner Clark Ortkiese. Free beer will be available for those 21 and up.
Then, between 6 and 8 p.m., Crosstown Brewing Co. will be selling the malt liquor at the brewery, which is located at Crosstown Concourse. “Big Ass Truck will be in the tap room between 6 and 8 spinning their favorite songs,” Ortkiese says.
If Malt Liquor Man sounds familiar, that’s because it’s also the name of one of Big Ass Truck’s songs.
Big Ass Truck DJ Colin Butler came up with the idea of the brewery doing a malt liquor in honor of the band, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Ortkiese says. “I think he specifically said, ‘Would you do a malt liquor?’’’
To which Ortkiese replied, “Hell, yeah, we could.”
Big Ass Truck: On steps: Robby Grant, Colin Butler, Robert Barnett. On ground: Grayson Grant, Steve Selvidge, Alex Greene (Credit: Bob Bayne)Clark Ortkiese (Credit: Clark Ortkiese)
Butler was part of the original lineup for the psychedelic/funk/rock/hip-hop band, which also included Steve Selvidge on guitar and vocals, Robby Grant on guitar and vocals, Robert Barnett on drums, Joe Boone on bass, Alex Greene (now Memphis Flyer music editor) on keyboards, and percussion player Drew Conner.
“We had never done one before and we’re kind of itching to do one. So much of craft beer can be so highfalutin and fancy at times. And all these crazy things. To me, it doesn’t have to be. I like the idea of making a craft malt liquor.”
Malt liquor is “kind of loosely defined. It’s a high-alcohol workingman’s drink. Probably ’30s, ’40s was when it cut its teeth.” The beer usually is considered “a cheap drink for the masses. It got them drunk and it was cheap to make.”
As for their malt liquor, Ortkiese says, “We thought it was fun to reimagine it and make it something elevated.”
Malt Liquor Man is “sneaky strong, very smooth, and clean. We use some corn in it to get that traditional malt liquor flavor.”
And, he says, “Paper bags are optional.”
Clark Ortkiese (Credit: Clark Ortkiese)
Ortkiese and Grant, are “allies,” Ortkiese says. Grant is executive director at WYXR radio, which also is based at Crosstown Concourse.
He and Grant also are part of “The Sunday Group,” a golf group that gets together every Sunday. “It’s a bunch of marketing people. You’d think we’d have a more creative name.
“Colin Butler played sometimes with us. I can’t remember where we were, but we were talking about doing a beer and releasing it at their 30th anniversary party. But our production schedule didn’t allow it.”
The song, “Malt Liquor Man,” which is “just about enjoying cold malt liquor on a summer afternoon,” is included on the band’s self-titled first album, Big Ass Truck, which came out in the ’90s, Butler says. He remembers how the song came to be. “That was a fun, sweltering afternoon sitting on our porch drinking some cheap 40s of malt liquor.”
Big Ass Truck: the early years. Robby Grant, Alex Greene, Colin Butler, Drew Conner, Joe Boone, Robert Barnett, Steve Selvidge (Credit: Trey Harrison)
Why malt liquor? “’Cause it was cheap, easy to get, and across the street at Peter Pan’s Pantry, which is where we’d go. We have a song called ‘Peter Pan’s Pantry,’ too.”
That song, which was named after the iconic Midtown convenience store, was written by Greene and Selvidge.
And, Butler says, “I’d seen where another local brewery had done a beer for Gonerfest. Someone did ‘GonerBrau.’ Memphis Made. And I’d seen where Crosstown brewery had done a beer for WYXR, where Robby works. I thought, ‘These guys may be into doing this for us.’”
Tom Martin designed the label for the malt liquor. “He was way into doing a design for the malt liquor ’cause he’s a friend of ours. He does all their labels. He was particularly into this one because he’s a friend of ours and a fan of the band and a fan of the song.”
“Malt Liquor Man” malt liquor
Malt Liquor Man — the brew — won’t be the last beer named after a band, Ortkiese says. “I’ve got another beer coming up in December. We’re working with another local band — Grape.”
Asked to reveal something about the beer, Ortkiese says, “You think it would have grapes in it, wouldn’t you?”
