Octavia Young – Memphis Flyer

Bruce VanWyngarden has gone fishing this week. His column returns when he does.

A few years ago, I was having lunch with a coworker who proceeded to go on a long and sort of crazy rant about how much she hates it when restaurants bundle their straws with silverware. After that, when someone complained bitterly about something of no consequence, “straws” became a sort of shorthand dismissal.

So where do we stand, Memphis, on plastic straws? Is this as an issue “straws”?

Bianca Phillips

As a single-use plastic, plastic straws are pretty bad. Millions and millions of plastic straws are used each day in America and then tossed out to litter our lands and shores. Some cities, like Malibu and Washington, D.C., have already banned them. In New York and Hawaii, legislation is pending.

In Memphis, we’re seeing more and more restaurants abandoning the plastic straw.

Janet Boscarino, executive director of Clean Memphis, which oversees Project Green Fork, estimates that about half of Project Green Fork members (about 40 restaurants) have given up plastic straws. But, as of now, Project Green Fork does not include anything about straws in their “6 Steps to Certification” for local restaurants.

“We certainly push for the elimination of single-use plastics, which straws would fall into that category,” Boscarino says.

For Earth Day, Project Green Fork did a program they called “Don’t Suck,” which highlighted recyclable options for straws, including paper and bamboo. “We are certainly trying to raise awareness around eliminating [straws],” she says.

For Boscarino, straws are just once piece of the puzzle in reducing food waste — from bags to food containers to the food itself.

Deni Reilly, owner of Majestic Grille with her husband Patrick, says that restaurant has been straws-by-request since it opened 14 years ago. They only began to use coated paper straws about two years ago. (They go through 12,000 to 14,000 straws in a month.)

Reilly says they’ve always leaned toward being environmentally conscious. They don’t provide water, except for large parties. Their to-go glasses are biodegradable.

She says with a laugh that they do it for the sea turtles.

Octavia Young, the owner of Midtown Crossing Grill, began backing away from straws in 2016 about a year after she opened. She says she was thinking about joining Project Green Fork and started looking at what she could do. She then put up a sign: “Straws are a one-time use item that never biodegrade. Your server will only provide straws upon request in an effort to reduce our footprint. Thank you.”

Young says reaction was mixed, but ultimately, no one can argue, because as the sign says, if they want a straw, all they have to do is ask.

“Hearing about how much [waste] a restaurant produces and actually looking at it for myself, I wanted to be a better neighbor in the community that we serve,” she says.

Scott Tashie has been thinking about straws a lot lately. Tashie is owner of City Silo and three area I Love Juice Bars.

“It’s something we’ve been trying to come up with a solution on for a while, actually,” he says. “And it’s super challenging. Obviously, when you’re in a beverage-heavy business, you want to always take care of your customers, and we’ve tried different options. It’s been challenging to find something that actually works.”

At one point, Tashie was using glass straws, but then his source stopped making them. He tried a bring-your-own straw approach, too. He admits that a straw is not something that’s particularly easy to carry on you, like a reusable bag.

Tashie has been experimenting with different types of straws. Forgoing them completely won’t work because of the smoothies he sells. He recently settled on corn straws that he hooked up with through his association with Malco. (He has family ties to the movie theater chain). Malco is currently working to get corn straws at all of its theaters.

Tashie doesn’t mind the extra cost of the straws. For him, it’s worth it. “There’s only one Earth,” he says. “You can’t really put a price on it.”

In recent years, Memphis has seen the resurgence of several neighborhoods that most people had written off: places like Overton Square, South Main, and Broad Avenue. Inevitably, those comebacks have been preceded by ferocious bouts of murmuring. Did you hear that Overton Square is coming back? I heard it’s coming back.

Now people have started murmuring about a new neighborhood: Crosstown. Buoyed by the redevelopment of the old Sears building, this formerly disinvested district is starting to show signs of life — and nowhere is that more apparent than at Midtown Crossing.

Justin Fox Burks

Midtown Crossing’s Octavia Young

This friendly neighborhood pub was started by chefs Jeremiah Shields and Octavia Young. Both cooked at Harrah’s in Tunica; both lost their jobs when the casino closed. But in this case, Tunica’s loss is Memphis’ gain.

“I love it here,” admits Young. “I was all set to move to North Carolina, but I wasn’t feeling it. It’s not my scene at all.”

Shields and Young want Midtown Crossing to be a center for the local community. Which is easy enough to say, but they actually seem to be following through on it. When I visited, there was a ukulele night going on in the main dining room.

The concept is simple. Take people who can play the uke and people who want to learn. Get everybody together in a big room — parents, children, hipsters, weirdos — and let them figure it out. All right, it gets pretty noisy. But it’s actually kinda cool when you think about it.

As far as food goes, Midtown Crossing serves an upscale take on pub grub: pizzas, sandwiches, nachos, cheese sticks. I say “upscale” because they do most of it in-house: They smoke their own meat and cure their own bacon. They pickle their own onions and make their own tomato jam.

The best thing I tried was the Wild Mushroom Pizza ($11). Although the mushrooms likely weren’t wild — they were too big, too unblemished — it was nonetheless quite tasty, served with crumbled bacon, caramelized onions, and topped with a fried egg.

Although many of the dishes lean heavily on meat, Young says she is interested in developing more vegetarian and vegan offerings. And she’s got time: Midtown Crossing just opened in December. For now, it seems to be hitting the right note. When I visited, it was crowded with a mix of twentysomethings, neighborhood regulars, and families.

When people talk about Maui Brick Oven, they tend to mention two things. First: gluten-free. Second: Germantown. And while both are technically correct, they also miss the point. Yes, Maui is out past Saddle Creek on Poplar. Yes, the restaurant eschews gluten, which is another word for wheat products.

But no one’s talking about the food, and food is the real story. It’s light, loaded with local vegetables — and actually pretty affordable. In a city swimming in greasy barbecue nachos, Maui is a breath of fresh air.

Take the Barefoot Bowl ($11). Beautiful portobello mushroom slices are arranged in a fan across the top of this hearty vegan dish, which includes pickled carrots, onions, and cauliflower, garlic kale, mandarin orange slices, and crispy garbanzo beans. It’s served over a bed of quinoa and brown rice and drizzled with Thai coconut sauce.

More to the point? It’s delicious.

“Sometimes these big burly dudes come in here for lunch,” says general manager Dana Doggrell, “and I can tell, they don’t know it’s gluten-free.

“And you know what?” he continues. “I don’t tell them. Because they’re enjoying it, and I don’t want to mess with that.”

Maui’s is owned by restaurateurs Taylor Berger and Michael Tauer, who launched it in partnership with the original Maui, in Hawaii. Tauer says he got the idea while vacationing with his wife, who can’t eat gluten.

In addition to pathbreaking grain bowls, the menu also features more traditional fare: things like crunchy coconut shrimp and brick-oven pizza. I particularly liked the Paradise Pesto Pizza ($14), loaded with artichoke hearts, roasted garlic, Greek olives, and feta.

If I had tasted that pizza without knowing it was gluten-free, you know what I would have said? Dang, that’s a good crust. Thin and crispy. Germantown or not, I’ll be heading back to Maui.