This was some happy news in my inbox today:
“Memphis Chef Jimmy Gentry’s Corn Mash Makes New York Times List Today.”
It was named one of 26 Best Dishes Across the United States by The New York Times.
It makes me very, very happy, actually, because this is my all-time favorite dish at Gentry’s The Lobbyist restaurant at 272 South Main in The Chisca on Main.
It’s so good. The ultimate comfort food. Just reading this email at 9:44 a.m. makes me want a big helping of this super delicious dish right now.
The menu describes the dish, which is listed as “Corn Mash/Roasted Squash/Bacon Jus,” as “a bowl of decadently stone-ground grits topped with roasted squash with a bacon jus, drizzled with burnt-in oil, and topped with pepitas.”
The is what Brett Anderson of the Times wrote about it: “Jimmy Gentry built his reputation in Memphis for cooking Southern food that pushes vegetables in the center of the plate. This helps explain why there are twice as many vegetable dishes as there are protein dishes on the menu at the Lobbyist, the intelligent, accessible modern Southern restaurant he opened last year. It’s hard to say which is the star of this signature dish: the coarse Delta Grind Grits, made from Tennessee corn and enriched with mascarpone, or the roasted seasonal squash mounted on top of them.”
So, I called Gentry, who I’ve known for years, to tell me about the dish.
“Everybody wants to know where it came from,” Gentry tells me. “The way it goes, my daughter growing up always loved my shrimp and grits. Right?”
But he transformed the dish when he was restaurant instructor at the old L’École Culinaire. “Everybody was doing shrimp and grits. It became the staple of the world.”
Gentry didn’t want to do what everybody else was doing, so he began making flat iron steak with the same grits and andouille sauce. His daughter loved it. “She would request it every year for her birthday. When we got ready to open P.O. [Press Public House & Provisions in Collierville, Tennessee], she looked at me and goes, ‘You have to put that flat iron thing on there.’”
Gentry told her he wasn’t putting that on the menu. “You know when you make something over and over again you get burned out on it?”
And he didn’t think it was “a showcase item.” It was good, but it wasn’t amazing, he says.
So, Gentry got fancier.
“I love the old French way of making sauces in pans,” he says. “We start off with squash, our house-made bacon. You deglaze with chicken stock, add shaved garlic, fresh thyme, and, after it reduces, we mound it with butter.”
He also uses “turkey neck and chicken feet to make it more gelatinous.”
“Place the roasted squash in the grits [mash]. Then spoon the sauce on top. Garnish with burnt onion oil and roasted pepitas.”
Gentry added his Corn Mash when he opened The Lobbyist, which will celebrate its second anniversary in January.
And I don’t need to worry about Corn Mash not being on the menu next time I visit Gentry’s restaurant. “I haven’t been able to take that thing off since we had P.O.”