Tag: Scott Tashie

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

City Silo Table + Pantry Brings Healthy Eats to Germantown

CREDIT: Samuel X. Cicci

Juice has never been so much fun.

Just ask anyone who’s been drawn in by the delicious and natural offerings of Scott and Rebekah Tashie’s City Silo Table + Pantry restaurant. In fact, the healthy Southern eats and variety of juices and smoothies at the original East Memphis location proved so popular that the couple knew it was time to pull the trigger on opening a second location.

Samuel X. Cicci

The Sunshine Burrito, stuffed with crumbled silo burger patty, two scrambled fresh farm eggs, seasoned sweet potato, red quinoa, brown rice, sharp cheddar, cashew ranch, sriracha aioli, and wrapped in a chili tomato tortilla, served with a side of pico de gallo. In the background, the Green Light Go smoothie has just enough sweet fruity flavors to finely balance out the sourness of the granny smith juice base.

“We’ve been really overwhelmed by all the support we’ve had from Memphis since we first opened,” says Rebekah. “We’ve just gotten busier and busier since we opened the first City Silo, so we wanted to have a bigger space that could accommodate more people.”

At 3,500 square feet, the Germantown spot has plenty of space for extra diners, and even includes a bar and an outdoor covered patio. And with COVID-19 in mind, the large space makes it easy to abide by social distancing guidelines.

The pair originally signed the lease for 7605 W. Farmington Blvd, Suite 2 at Saddle Creek Shopping center back in February, but the pandemic meant that their initial timetable of an August opening had to be adjusted.

“Our landlord was awesome,” Scott says. “After COVID hit, we discussed things with them and they gave us a few extra months to really focus on adapting. So we were able to give our full attention to the new location without having to rush. It was a process, but we worked with a lot of great people, and that made things really easy for us.”

Diners who walk into the new City Silo, which officially opened today, won’t miss a beat. The Tashies made sure that they captured the essence of the original City Silo brand, with both the aesthetic and menu staying true to the first location.

“Our goal was to take our original store and bring a lot of the feel and textures over from there,” says Scott. “Our big question was how do we make this space feel awesome, feel safe, feel credible, but still have it feel like City Silo. So this new location, it’s an update on our first idea, kind of like a step up, but it’s still City Silo.”

“We’re going for an airy, fresh, light, happy, warm vibe,” Rebekah explains. “We have a lot of plants, a lot of wooden decorations, and wanted to bring in a lot of cool colors to really liven it up.”

Samuel X. Cicci

The Germantown City Silo’s spacious interior provides plenty of room and natural light, and crucially for this writer, a welcome sense of relief, relaxation, and respite after almost a year of working from home. The bar at the far end of the restaurant will soon serve City Silo’s specially curated cocktail menu.

In terms of food, the menu at the new City Silo will mirror the original. But the Tashies are working to slowly integrate new items here and there. “We put a lot of thought into new dishes,” Scott says. “If you go to our original store, you can see we just added tacos. It’s a limited-time menu item, so once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

“We’ll look to include more small plates and try out different things,” elaborates Rebekah. “And when we roll them out, we’ll do it in both places simultaneously.”

But a major change brought about by the new location is the inclusion of a new cocktail menu. Once City Silo gets its liquor license, expect to see an intriguing variety of cocktails that use the Tashies’ same clean, wholesome approach to their food.

“We’re not going to go crazy with our liquor selection, but we’ve carefully selected a vodka, a tequila, a mescal, a rum, and a gin,” Scott says. “And we’re going to incorporate our juices into the cocktails as well. When this is all ready, we’ll roll it out at our East Memphis location as well, and it will be the official City Silo cocktail menu.”

While the full cocktail menu hasn’t been revealed yet, a few hints from the Tashies point toward a potential beet margarita, or a carrot juice and mezcal concoction.

Samuel X. Cicci

City Silo owners Scott and Rebekah Tashie

City Silo Table + Pantry’s Germantown restaurant is located at 7605 W. Farmington Blvd., Suite 2. Open for dine-in, takeout, curbside pick-up, and delivery. Monday-Thursday 7 a.m.-8 p.m.; Friday-Saturday 7 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sunday 9 a.m.-3 p.m. thecitysilo.com; 901-236-7223

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

City Silo Table + Pantry To Open Second Location

CREDIT: City Silo Table + Pantry

City Silo Table + Pantry

Clean-eating cafe City Silo Table + Pantry has announced that they will open a Saddle Creek location in Germantown this fall in the former Grimaldi’s Pizzeria space.

City Silo is owned by Memphis natives Rebekah and Scott Tashie. The new 3,500-square-foot location will include an outdoor covered patio and roll-up garage doors.

“We are extremely excited to open our second location in Germ

antown. It’s a neighborhood we always knew we wanted to be a part of, and we have been working for a while now with Saddle Creek and Trademark Property Company to make this partnership happen. We feel that this development and location are a great fit for our growing brand,” Scott Tashie said via press release.

The new location will also have an expanded menu and be open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They will have a bar serving coffee, beer, wine, juice cocktails, and Proseco cocktails.

The original City Silo Table + Pantry is located at 5101 Sanderlin. The new location is slated to open this fall at 7605 West Farmington #2 in the Saddle Creek shopping center.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

This Sucks

CREDIT: Bianca Phillips

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.”

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Now open in Crosstown Concourse: French Truck and I Love Juice Bar

For a while there, the running joke was that Geoffrey Meeker‘s laundry smelled like coffee.

That’s because the former chef was determined to roast the perfect coffee bean with a five-pound roaster that he operated in his laundry room.

And that is how French Truck Coffee was born.

Based out of New Orleans, the coffee roaster and shop holds itself to high standards — sourcing its beans directly from farmers around the world, delivering the freshest roast possible, and pulling the perfect espresso every time.

“The highest standard for Geoff is Blue Bottle Coffee,” says Memphis French Truck partner Jimmy Lewis.

Ah, Blue Bottle Coffee. I have stood in line in Williamsburg. It was pretty darn good, even if there was a dizzying amount of beards and tattoos and scarves.

Lewis came into the picture just over a year ago once he saw the potential for growth of his coffee roasting business, Relevant Roasters.

After several conversations with Geoff, the two created a partnership, and a Memphis French Truck Coffee was born.

“I recognized I needed help and that I wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t do this alone,” Lewis says.

Recently Lewis and Meeker have expanded from their original location on Tillman, the former Relevant Roasters shop and roastery, into the Crosstown Concourse building.

Situated in the central atrium of Concourse, the shop offers one of the most interesting people-watching opportunities in the city.

They also offer a tasty menu. The Waffle Sandwich with egg, prosciutto, and goat cheese is sensational ($9), and their avocado toast rivals any in the city, with red pepper and pickled red onion (one $6/two $9). They have a variety of toasts, actually, including B.N.B. — that would be bacon, Nutella, and basil (what?!), bacon date — bacon, date, ricotta, and pistachio crumbles, and other savory and sweet choices.

They import their pastries from Porcellino’s and have some specialty fizzy teas they can whip up for you.

For now, food is offered until 2 p.m. Hours will expand, but first they hope to remodel their Tillman location from a roastery and cafe into just a cafe where they will offer a similar menu, making the Concourse location the primary Memphis roaster.

So far, there are six French Truck Coffee locations — two in Memphis, three in New Orleans, and one in Baton Rouge.

Look out, Blue Bottle.

French Truck Coffee, 1350 Concourse, 878-3383. Open Mon.-Fri. 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sat.-Sun. 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. 584 Tillman, 458-5599. Open Mon.-Thurs., 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., Fri. 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sat. 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sun. 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. frenchtruckcoffee.com.

Part of the core mission of the Crosstown Concourse concept is to provide an environment of health to its residents and visitors, with gyms and many medical businesses setting up shop in the monolithic structure on Cleveland.

So it makes sense for I Love Juice Bar to join the party.

“I talked to them a long time ago, before the whole project here got started,” says Memphis I Love Juice Bar owner Scott Tashie. “I’ve always liked the old buildings here, and I took notice and interest in the building.”

The juice, smoothie, and wellness shop will host the opening of its second location in the Concourse building, along with the block party the project is hosting for its grand debut to the community, this Saturday, August 19th.

The first Memphis I Love Juice Bar opened in September 2015, bringing a menu of fresh and organic juices, wellness shots, smoothies, and clean grab-and-go foods to Midtown on Cooper.

Tashie also ran Cosmic Coconut, a similar concept on Sanderlin by the Racquet Club, which he recently reimagined as City Silo Table and Pantry, a restaurant concept offering most of the same smoothies and juices, but with an expanded menu of tasty breakfast, lunch, and dinner dishes.

“This location will be like the Midtown one, but with a few different grab-and-go items and some new, really neat products like bars and snacks,” Tashie says. “We will have a fully stocked grab-and-go section with quick juices you can grab, spring rolls, sandwiches, our Pad Thai bowls, and we make it all here.”

The 800-plus square-foot space will offer some indoor seating as well as open onto the block-long “patio” of Crosstown Concourse.

“It’s been a lot of fun working with the concept here with the columns inside the space, and we designed these special wooden doors to slide in when we are closed,” Tashie says.

Folks can enter either from outdoors via the patio or from inside the building.

Tashie says he’s excited to be a part of the Crosstown Concourse vision.

“It has been cool to watch this take place, and it will be interesting to watch everyone come in and out,” Tashie says.

He also thinks his product has something to offer the space.

“We have a community feel at our shop in Midtown, and it will carry over here,” Tashie says.

I Love Juice Bar, 1350 Concourse. Open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week. ilovejuicebar.com.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Cosmic Coconut “Evolving” into City Silo

A press release was issued today that the space that once housed Cosmic Coconut in East Memphis will now be a new restaurant called City Silo Table & Pantry.

The restaurant is set to open January 14th.

From the release:

City Silo Table & Pantry will offer re-imagined comfort food and drinks that replicate familiar textures and flavors with wholesome, clean ingredients. Blending characteristics from traditional dining concepts – the café and market, the juice stand, the coffee house and the bistro – City Silo’s modern, light and airy space will serve as a spot to gather, to grab quick takeaway or to sit and enjoy.

…

“Cosmic Coconut evolved into City Silo,” said Scott Tashie, Owner of City Silo, I Love Juice Bar in Midtown and the future I Love Juice Bar in Crosstown. “Cosmic Coconut created the need and expectation for creative, clean eating in Memphis. City Silo expands on that expectation and will offer all the favorites of its predecessor with the addition of egg, dairy and chicken options to create a more inclusive experience.”

But, says a rep, don’t count out Cosmic Coconut just yet. The Cosmic Coconut truck is going on hiatus through the winter but may return, and “there will be pops / references to Cosmic Coconut included in City Silo.”

Cosmic Coconut originally opened in 2011 and was an all-vegan juice bar with a small food menu.

Scott Tashie, along with partners (including the ubiquitous Taylor Berger), took over in 2012. Tashie opened Memphis’ first I Love Juice Bar in 2015. A second I Love Juice Bar is set to open next year in the new Crosstown Concourse.

Full release below:

Introducing City Silo Table & Pantry,
Located in the Former Cosmic Coconut Space

Memphis, TN (January 14, 2017): City Silo Table & Pantry will offer re-imagined comfort food and drinks that replicate familiar textures and flavors with wholesome, clean ingredients. Blending characteristics from traditional dining concepts – the café and market, the juice stand, the coffee house and the bistro – City Silo’s modern, light and airy space will serve as a spot to gather, to grab quick takeaway or to sit and enjoy. City Silo will host its grand opening on Saturday, January 14th, 2017.

Located in the former Cosmic Coconut space plus the adjacent unit, City Silo will encompass a total 2600 square feet, feature a full kitchen and provide a seating capacity of close to 50. Striving to create an inclusive dining experience that appeals to different tastes and diet needs, City Silo will now offer egg, dairy and humanely-raised chicken options while continuing to offer an extensive plant-based menu.

“Cosmic Coconut evolved into City Silo,” said Scott Tashie, Owner of City Silo, I Love Juice Bar in Midtown and the future I Love Juice Bar in Crosstown. “Cosmic Coconut created the need and expectation for creative, clean eating in Memphis. City Silo expands on that expectation and will offer all the favorites of its predecessor with the addition of egg, dairy and chicken options to create a more inclusive experience.”

Anchored by a 10-foot farm table, City Silo lives in a sunshine-filled space with whitewashed and herringboned-inspired, wood paneled walls that create a welcoming, yet stylish environment. Custom, bar tops and tables made with Woodland tree products paired with sleek, metal seating combines industrial rustic and mid-century influences for a signature design. Coolers with grab-and-go, plus a retail area with small batch chocolates, jams, fermented vegetables, organic pastas, flours and grains will pay homage to European-style markets. City Silo will be overwhelmingly organic and local whenever possible.

Executive Chef, Will Byrd developed the menu in conjunction with Tashie. Breakfast, snacks, salads, sandwiches, grain bowls/wraps, and build-your-own burgers will comprise the menu. A kids’ menu will also be available. Additionally, City Silo will feature many exclusive drink options: kombucha via kegs for kombucha cocktails; superfood wellness lattes; familiar fresh, cold-pressed juices and smoothies; a creative coffee / espresso menu and beer / wine starting later in 2017. Juice cleanses will continue to be offered. Prices range from $6 – $15.

City Silo Table & Pantry is located at 5101 Sanderlin Center and phone is: 901.729.7687. It will be open Monday – Saturday, 7am to 8pm, starting January 14, 2017. Visit www.thecitysilo.com or follow City Silo on Facebook: @citysilo and Instagram: @citysilo for continued updates.