Tag: Puck Food Hall

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

City Block Salumeria, Venga, and Doughjo are Closed



Brad McCarley closed his establishments, including City Block Salumeria, at Puck Food Hall.

Chef/butcher and owner Brad McCarley has closed all his businesses at Puck Food Hall on South Main. He closed City Block Salumeria, Venga, and Doughjo July 8th.

City Block specialized in cured meats and deli sandwiches; Venga, Mexican street food; and Doughjo, pizza.

“We are officially closed,” McCarley says. “I’ve got a few irons in the fire, but not exactly sure how that’s all going to pan out. I worked with a lot of different restaurants in the past, making meats for them. So, I’ll probably continue doing that.”

As for why he’s shutting down, McCarley says, “Pretty much it was just revenues. In March, they were cut by 75 percent. And it just kept going down. So, it’s just not being able to pay the bills.”

He and Spencer Coplan, who closed his Wok’n in Memphis restaurant the same day, “came to this decision,” McCarley says.

“I grew up here and then I moved out west for about 20 years. I lived in Tucson, Arizona, and Jackson, Wyoming, and Salt Lake City. But, yeah, I came back about five years ago. I worked as the head butcher at Porcellino’s  (Craft Butcher) and then I was at the Curb Market when they reopened in Crosstown. And I opened City Block.

“I also managed the entire [Puck] hall through remodel, rebrand, and through the last year.”

McCarley plans to stay in Memphis. “I have no plans to leave. It’s my home town. I love how everyone has been so supportive of us, but it’s just this pandemic has just taken the wind out of my sails a little bit.

“The plan is to keep City Block viable and reopen it when people feel better about going out.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Wok’n in Memphis Launches Online Specialty Store

Spencer Coplan began his Wok’n in Memphis restaurant as a pop-up in 2017. For the past two years, he’s been serving his nontraditional take on Chinese food at Puck Food Hall.

Well, Coplan started something new: Wok’n in Pickle Co.

“It’s our side hustle project from Wok’n in Memphis,” Coplan says. “We open to the public Thursday, July 25th. It is an online grocery store that sells specialty provisions and products we make in-house using local ingredients.”

He’s making shiso (a plant that’s in the basil family) vinegar. It has a “floral and earthy” flavor that is perfect for salads. And, Coplan says, “A couple of dashes go well in a cocktail.”

They bought a whiskey barrel to make aged soy sauce. “It sits in the whiskey barrel for three months, and then it gets chocolatey and oak notes. And we add umami to the soy sauce. It’s a great marinade for meats or [to put] a dash of it in a rice bowl or on noodles.”

He’s also making “kimchi pickles of all varieties” and flavored oils.

Kimchi is “a Korean fermented pickle condiment. We put it in fried rice. We stuff it in dumplings. The juice is really nice and pungent. And it goes well in my Bloody Mary mix.”

The oils include garlic chili oil and coriander oil. They also make a spicy chili condiment, which is made of fried garlic and shallots, chili flakes, and sesame seeds. “That goes in all of our dumplings.”

Some of these are Coplan’s products that have been around for a while. “We’ve been making them for a long time just for us. Why not bottle and sell them?”

They’re using “all Rolling Along Farms produce out of Memphis. We’ve got cucumbers, carrots, banana peppers, green beans, peas. And then we’re making cabbage kimchi and carrot kimchi.”

Coplan created all the recipes from “trial and error. Lots of error.”

They began with the kimchi. “We’ve always done kimchi. We started selling that probably around February in 16-ounce deli cups. It kind of took off. People really enjoyed it. I thought, ‘Why not bottle and sell other items?'”

The items will be available at the restaurant and online at wokn-in-memphis.square.site.

Wok’n in Pickle Co. came into being because of the pandemic, Coplan says. “A lot of the stuff came from the fact we were really slow. I didn’t know what people were going to do. We had a lot of leftover product, and we didn’t want it to go bad. So we started preserving it in different capacities.”

Everything is made at Puck Food Hall. “We’ve got some new peach hot sauce coming out now. And we’re thinking down the road we’d like to package and sell our dumplings in the frozen variety. So you can take them home and steam them, fry them, boil them. Any way you please.”

They currently are offering about 15 products, Coplan says. “And we plan on growing from there. Add dumplings; maybe we’ll jar up some sauces we make. Things like that.”

Wok’n in Pickle Co. is “my idea of how to provide a few things for people Downtown who want to buy some specialty groceries.”

During the quarantine, Coplan says there were “a lot of late nights of bottling hot sauce and chili oil and jarring things.”

Wok’n in Memphis has been open for takeout and delivery, but now customers can eat inside Puck Food Hall. “During those times, we started focusing on other outlets of income so we could be open doing takeout and delivery or half capacity. I thought another way of making an income is this side hustle.”

His restaurant is open Thursday through Sunday.

“The General Tso’s Chicken is still our fan favorite,” Coplan says. “It’s just the tangy sauce tossed with crispy chicken served over rice. It’s our bread and butter.”

Wok’n in Memphis is in Puck Food Hall at 409 S. Main; (901) 949-4887, wokninmemphis.com.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Wrap it Up: A Roundup of 2019 Food News Tidbits

This was the year of seafood, South Main, and comeback stories, with old favorites like Fino’s and Zinnie’s making triumphant returns. Here are a few items of note from 2019.

RIP

Mary Burns, longtime owner of Java Cabana, died on October 4th after a nearly three-year battle with lung cancer. Burns purchased Java Cabana in 1998 and had become a fixture of Cooper-Young, serving as a member of the Cooper-Young Business Association and the Cooper-Young Garden Club. Burns is largely remembered for making Java Cabana what it is today, a welcoming safe haven for artists and poets alike.

City of Sole

Several seafood restaurants — particularly those specializing in crab dishes — have opened or opened new locations, including Crab’N’Go, Crab Island, DeeO’s Seafood, Red Hook Cajun Seafood & Bar, Saltwater Crab, and others.

Saltwater Crab opened its doors over the summer with an expansive menu including sushi, sandwiches, and crab options such as crab cakes, king crab, snow crab, and a saltwater crab roll. Atlanta-based restaurateur Gary Lin opened Saltwater Crab in early July, but the kitchen is managed by Memphis chefs. The menu is entirely “coastal,” so you won’t find any catfish here.

The Juicy Crab, a Georgia-based seafood chain, opened its first Memphis location on Winchester earlier this year, and The Coastal Fish Company opened in Shelby Farms in October. Mardi Gras Memphis, which specializes in Louisiana-style seafood boils, recently reopened their restaurant across from the Crosstown Concourse. And Picasso’s — a seafood and pasta place — opened in August at 6110 Macon, making it the newest seafood addition to East Memphis. The Cousins Maine Lobster food truck also opened in March.

Downtown Dining

South Main is now home to quite a few new dining and drinking destinations, including the restaurants (Hustle & Dough, Longshot), coffeeshop (Vice & Virtue), and bar (Bar Hustle) inside the Arrive Hotel, as well as those inside Puck Food Hall, Memphis’ first and only food hall, which had its grand opening in May.

The Central Station Hotel also opened on South Main in October, and with it came a new bar, Eight & Sand, and restaurant, Bishop — Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman’s newest project.

Justin Fox Burks

BarWare

BarWare, a neighborhood bar that features craft cocktails and elevated bar food, opened on Front this year, too. And several other notable establishments opened their doors Downtown, including Comeback Coffee, Hu. Diner, 3rd & Court, and more.

Old Favorites Return

This was also the year we saw many old favorites come back to life. Fino’s, the beloved Midtown deli, reopened on June 6th, bringing their classic gourmet sandwiches back after closing in late 2018.

Old Zinnie’s — the “best little neighborhood bar in the universe” — first opened in 1973 but closed abruptly in 2018, leaving many Memphis barflies feeling abandoned. They reopened on Halloween, the perfect night to welcome the regulars back to their local haunt. As if it never closed, Zinnie’s feels very much the same, and they’re even serving popcorn again like in the old days.

The infamous and inimitable Hernando’s Hide-A-Way also celebrated its reopening near the end of 2019. The spot, famous for hosting music legends like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, closed in 2007 but was recently purchased and reopened by partners Dale Watson and Celine Lee along with co-owner Patrick Trovato of Long Island, New York. The owners plan to maintain the integrity of the original, offering plenty of local music and color, and, supposedly, the “best hamburger in Tennessee.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Dr. Bean’s Coffee at Puck Food Hall

Dr. Bean’s Coffee Roasters, which is co-owned by Dr. Albert Bean and Charles Billings, imports coffee beans from around the world and “roasts them with care” to ensure an unparalleled coffee-drinking experience.

“We have always been looking for a customer-facing location,” Billings says. “When the food hall approached us about the opportunity [to move in], we thought it was the best of both worlds.”

As an incubator, Puck Food Hall offers a safe space for culinary minds to show off their creations with very little overhead, as well as a sense of camaraderie among the chefs and creators involved.

Lorna Field

“I guess it’s like culinary heaven,” Billings says of Puck Food Hall. “It’s sort of like this beautiful melting pot of everything going on in the culinary side of Memphis.”

Bean, an E.R. doctor at Methodist University Hospital, had always wanted to start a coffee business.

“Where do young doctors spend most of their time when they’re studying? Coffee shops,” Billings explains. “Because they’re going to class for 12, 13, 20 hours a day in hospitals. So [Bean] had always had the idea to it.”

Billings and Bean met as neighbors when they were young, and it wasn’t long before the two started to develop Bean’s vision.

“We had always talked about wanting to do something together. And then he took a tour of a coffee farm when he was in Panama, and that sort of rekindled that fire for doing coffee,” Billings says. “Three weeks later, he’s at a medical conference in Portland and met the guys from Water Avenue Coffee. They’re sort of coffee royalty and really great people who started to inspire us.”

Billings and Bean realized that there was a burgeoning coffee community right here in Memphis and wanted to be part of it.

“For the last five years, we’ve been sort of hyper-locally growing and building our coffee community,” Billings says. “Memphis has always had that local feel to it. Now there are six or seven local coffee roasters.

“It’s just a really, really big coffee community and a really neat time for coffee in Memphis in particular. And the community itself is great. We’ll meet for cocktails and just sort of talk about the things we’re doing with coffee, what’s fun, what’s exciting to us — any technical stuff that we’re having problems with, we can reach out and communicate.”

Members of the Memphis coffee community seem less competitive and more collaborative and supportive, Billings explains.

Billings’ and Bean’s hard work has been paying off, too: Dr. Bean’s is winning awards across the country, including second place in Coffeefest’s best American espresso competition.

“We also participate every year in one of the biggest roaster competitions in the country, which is called Golden Bean North America. This year, we came home with 17 medals — three silver and 14 bronze,” he says.

A large part of their success comes from their commitment to sourcing coffee beans from only the most reputable and prestigious farms in the world, including the Elida Estate in Panama. And as head roaster, Billings takes his duties seriously.

“We are the stewards of all of those farmers’ hard work, and then it’s my job as a roaster to highlight the best I can of that and then to train the baristas to really tell the story behind the coffee,” he says.

Both through their kinship with the local coffee community and by participating in national competitions, Billings says that they’re “always learning, always teaching.

“You’re always challenging yourself to do a little bit more and be a little bit better.”

Stop by Dr. Bean’s Tuesday through Sunday at 409 S. Main, and be sure to try the Spiced Sweet Potato Latte before it’s gone.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Giddy Up, 409: The Bar at Puck Food Hall

Three friends and a dog on Prozac walk into a bar. The bar this time around is Bar 409 inside of Puck Food Hall at 409 South Main. The dog is a well-medicated Italian greyhound named Tiger. The friends, probably also well-medicated, are just here for the drinks and conversation.

Puck Food Hall is a collection of various types of cuisine, including places that serve pizza, pasta, gelato (and vegan sorbet!), coffee, Chinese fusion, baked goods, and salads, but tonight, friends, we are here for the bar. We’re choosing spirits over sustenance.

Bar 409 is no dank hole in the wall. It’s a bright, airy space painted the deep reds, dark blues, and bright whites of a Memphis riverboat.

Bar 409 is bright and airy — and well-stocked with makings for fine cocktails.

Harvey Grillo is our bartender, and this man, when we walk in, is hard at work squeezing 100-plus oranges for drinks. He’s a Memphis transplant, having been here about seven years, but he eases into conversation with us like a born-and-raised Memphian.

Two of Bar 409’s featured drinks are the Purple Rain and the Kentucky Palm Tree. The Purple Rain is Wheatley vodka with Campari, hibiscus syrup, and a flowery liqueur, and it is as delicious as it is purple.

The Kentucky Palm Tree “tastes like the end of summer,” Harvey points out, and it does! It’s made with Buffalo Trace, Passoa, and fernet. We also tried the Ancho & Lefty, a drink with mezcal and Japones pepper syrup.

Like most brilliant mixology bars in town, Bar 409 employs homemade bitters and syrups and sets drinks off with unique garnishes. And unless the mountain of fruit before us is a mirage, the drinks’ fruity ingredients are freshly squeezed.

This is a bar made for some people-watching. It’s the first thing you see when you enter the food hall, and it’s a good place to park it if you want to take it all in. The place must be a circus with South Main’s monthly Trolley Night events since it can accommodate so many people, but, unlike most other places, it’s built for a large crowd.

It’s a multi-level hall that beckons to be occupied to the max on busy nights. On a date? Ditch them in the throngs! Have a kid? Plop them in the pop-up library adjacent to the bar! Have more than one kid? Stuff a $20 bill in one of their grubby fists and send them to get some ice cream! Have an affinity for fine drink? Venture no further than the bar!

A contained crowd in a place where there’s something for everybody is a nice change from spilling wine in a gallery, like we are wont to do most Trolley Nights, right? On top of that, Bar 409 has just installed a projector to show movies on the vast, empty wall behind and above the bar.

The bar staff is envisioning themed movie nights for bar and food hall guests, and suddenly drinking alone while watching a movie seems way less lonesome. This is now our city’s big opportunity for a collective Big Lebowski/White Russian gathering.

Bar 409 is not just accommodating of the liquor drinkers among us. They also offer a variety of local beers on tap and a small wine list, and those who want to dine can order food from any of the restaurant spaces and bring it to the bar to eat.

The night I visited, it was the middle of the week and not every restaurant space was open, but there was a decent crowd of people hanging out. It’s also an air-conditioned inside space that allows dogs, so no more heatstroke on a patio for our canine friends!

Three friends and a dog on Prozac walk out of a bar. One, a photographer, accidentally leaves his camera but, thankfully, remembers the dog. We’ve enjoyed some drinks in a place that was left empty for many years, only occasionally used as a wedding venue.

It’s another great new space for Downtowners and another beautiful building repurposed into something we can all get behind: spirits and sustenance.

Bar 409 is located inside Puck Food Hall at 409 S. Main.