Tag: Three Angels Diner

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

New ownership at Three Angels Diner and Raffe’s Deli.

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

New management is risky business. Just ask Louis XVI. When he was crowned king of France in 1774, the country had been ruled by guys like him — fat guys with rosy cheeks and beautiful blond wigs —for more than 1,000 years. Then the National Assembly came along, and — it was the darnedest thing — people’s heads started coming loose from their bodies! Poor King Louis was among those whose head was misplaced.

Change can also be good. Case in point: Three Angels Diner. Jason and Rebecca Severs, the husband-and-wife team behind Bari Ristorante in Overton Square, did a culinary 180 when they opened this restaurant four years ago in the Broad Avenue Arts District. They chose the diner format for its flexible menu with dishes agreeable to both parents and kids and for its late-night hours to serve restaurant workers, artists, and musicians. Since then, it has consistently won acclaim, including being featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with Guy Fieri.

Justin Fox Burks

Amy and Julio Zuniga of Three Angels Diner

Now Three Angels is under new management. In June, the Severses sold it to Rebecca’s sister and her husband, Amy and Julio Zuniga. Which begs the question: Can the new owners maintain the reputation for quality and consistency established by their predecessors?

The preliminary signs are good. On a recent Tuesday, the Carrot Ginger Soup ($3.50) was spot-on: rich and creamy with just the right amount of gingery tang. It neatly complemented the Second Angel Salad ($8), which combines grilled Portobello mushrooms, roasted red peppers, and goat cheese over romaine, drizzled with lemon vinaigrette.

On the whole, the dishes were like the restaurant itself — outside: minimal and stark-looking; inside: surprisingly tasty. And that’s the idea, says chef Julio. He says he wants to steer Three Angels away from a “diner” aesthetic and more in the direction of a tapas and wine bar.

The Zunigas have opened a brand-new patio, and they plan to start serving breakfast soon. They’ve also renovated the menu. They’re keeping customer favorites like the Colossus Burger ($9), a veritable mountain of ground beef, bacon, gouda, fried onions, and slaw. But they’re adding lighter fare like the Angel Wraps ($4), crisp lettuce wraps full of panko-crusted beef and Korean slaw with ponzu sauce.

It’s a revolution worth watching.

 

Growing up in Chickasaw Gardens, my friend Dan and I used to walk to Raffe’s Deli, just down the street from Poplar Plaza. The reason was simple: They had Bomb Pops. You remember those red, white, and blue popsicles that tasted like cherry, lime, and blueberry? And melted into sticky, multicolored sludge on the back of your hand?

Back then, Raffe’s was a bit of a dive, but these days a new wind is blowing at Raffe’s. On May 1st, it was bought by Sean Feizkhah, who says he plans to transform it into a proper restaurant and beer market.

Just two months later, the place is hardly recognizable. For starters, Feizkhah has torn out the chunky wooden bar and the heavy curtains. The floors have also been redone. The result is a light, airy space where you might actually want to…oh, I don’t know, eat.

Feizkhah says that over the next few months, he plans to continue his overhaul, which will include adding a growler station and expanding the menu to include Persian and Turkish fare. In the meantime, Raffe’s continues to serve its signature Greek food.

Wanna make an afternoon of it? Buy a six-pack of Tiny Bomb Pilsner ($8.99) sourced from Memphis’ own Wiseacre Brewery. Pair it with a Syrian Gyro ($6.50), a flatbread sandwich made with roast lamb and tangy Syrian tabbouleh. All right, it’s no Bomb Pop; but then again, we’re not 12 any more.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

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Beauty Shop Country Ham Hash

Beauty Shop, 966 S. Cooper (272-7111)

The Beauty Shop starts serving brunch at 10 a.m., and I recommended getting there early or making a reservation if you want a seat. On a recent Sunday, sidewalk seating was full by 11 a.m. — and it was 54 degrees outside.

Inside, it’s warm, welcoming, and totally funky in the best way. From the mismatched mugs and salt and pepper shakers to the repurposed hairdryers, there’s nothing institutional about it. The Beauty Shop is undeniably full of beautiful people — from young, urban couples (not hipsters) to fashionable forty- and fifty-somethings who appreciate that the waitress half their age calls them darlin’ rather than ma’am.

The menu is expansive and has everything you ever wanted in a brunch. If it’s hash browns you want, there are three choices: Country Ham Hash, Chicken or Beef Tenderloin Hash, and Pastrami Hash. All sell for $13.

I went for the Country Ham Hash, which, according to the menu, features: potatoes, sweet potatoes, red peppers, onions, and cracked eggs with mustard chipotle sauce. Once cracked, I asked for the eggs over hard. Smothered in the spicy sauce, they were the perfect topping for the potatoes. I don’t love sweet potatoes and wasn’t sad that there were maybe only three mixed in. I did love the addition of red peppers. The country ham is cured, so it’s drier and saltier than regular ham, which is fine by me, and there was just the right amount of it. A touch of cilantro on top gave the dish that little something extra.

The coffee is good, and the mimosas are immense.

Alchemy’s Pimento Cheese Hash

Alchemy, 940 Cooper (726-4444)

Down the road at Alchemy, the brunch scene is decidedly less “eat and be seen,” and much more “drink, eat, and relax.” If you have a hangover or like to spend your Sundays day-drinking, this is the place for you.

The separate drink menu features the most extensive list of Bloody Mary options I’ve ever seen. There’s a house-made vegan mix, 12 kinds of garnish (including the day’s pickled treat), and special add-ons like blue cheese olives. If Bloody Marys aren’t your thing, then there’s also a Bellini bar (with “Surprise me!” as an option), house-made sangria, and a variety of coffee-booze concoctions. Bartender David Parks is also happy to throw together fancy non-alcoholic beverages, which he dubs “prenatal cocktails.”

Food starts coming out of the kitchen at 10:30 a.m., and the bar closes at 4 p.m.

In terms of hash browns, there are two options, and I had to try them both. The Pimento Cheese Hash Browns, which can be ordered as a side, come in a small skillet. It’s filled with crispy diced potatoes (that look as though they were originally meant to be fries) and topped with a large dollop of house-made pimento cheese. The cheese gets a little melty when added to the hot potatoes, and the result is simply delicious. It could easily be a meal and would be the best $5 you spent all day. Trust me.

Alchemy’s Shrimp & Bacon Hash

For a fancier start to the day, there’s the Shrimp and Bacon Hash ($18), which features poached eggs on toasted French bread with salsa fresca and cotija cheese. The shrimp are plump and juicy, the bacon is thick, crispy, and crumbled, and the eggs are cooked to perfection. The French bread is slender, yet has no problem providing the perfect base for this dish. The hash browns are the middle man and make it a satisfying, hearty meal. The Shrimp and Bacon Hash makes me wish every day was Sunday.

The Kitchen Sink from Three Angels

Three Angels Diner, 2617 Broad (452-1111) If low-key is what you are looking for, then head over to Three Angels on Broad, which starts serving brunch at 10 a.m. It’s part diner, part bar and attracts a mixed bag of hipsters, families, and hipster families. By far, it has the most hash brown bang for the buck in town.

The Kitchen Sink ($11) includes beef brisket hash, homemade sausage, bacon, garlic cheese grits, flat top potatoes, cheese, two fried eggs, and homemade salsa. This has to be the most serious brunch offering in the city. I dare say there should be a food competition built around it.

The grits are smeared across the bottom of the plate. There’s at least two or three cups worth of brisket hash, full strips of bacon, sausage patties cut in half —you get the picture. My serving even included a few boiled red potatoes.

It’s a man’s dish. Or, at the very least, a roller derby girl’s.

Photographer Joey Miller, who happened to be sitting next to me at the bar eating the most beautiful blueberry pancakes I’d ever seen, said, “Last time I got the Kitchen Sink, I drank nearly a whole bottle of Jameson the night before, with no Taco Bell.”

The coffee’s nothing special, but there’s local beer on tap, and the French 75s are perfect.

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Music Music Features

This Band Is on Fire

It’s the final song of the Hussy’s set on the basement stage of Magnetic South, a residence/venue/recording studio/cassette label in Bloomington, Indiana, and Bobby and Heather Hussy are going wild. As she wails on her drums with cavewoman vigor, he unstraps his guitar and drops it to the floor at the feet of the audience. For a minute it looks like Bobby might be leaving the stage, but the lanky frontman returns with a bottle of lighter fluid and douses his guitar. He strikes a match, and the instrument erupts in a quick burst of flame. The fire burns only a few seconds before Bobby picks it back up and continues playing as though nothing has happened.
This is no shamanistic sacrifice to the rock gods à la Hendrix at Monterey but a primal piece of punk stuntwork — a daredevil conflagration that plays like a logical conclusion of the Hussy’s super-loud, super-fast rock-and-roll. Burning a guitar, however, has become something of a ritual for the Hussy, who hail from Madison, Wisconsin. “I only do it for a special show,” Bobby Hussy says. Adds Heather, “We don’t want to overdo it. There was a while there when we did it a lot, but now it’s not that often.”
The duo started setting fires at an outdoor concert in Madison — as a spoof of Jimi Hendrix. It went over well, until, as Heather recalls, “some hippie guy who was trashed tried pissing on it to put it out. It was like, dude, we know it’s on fire. It’s okay.”

“I had to stop him,” Bobby says, “because there were little kids in the audience.”
For his part, the guitarist/singer has become very adept at combining lighter fluid and match (“I’ve been a pyro since I was 5”), but there was one show at a bar in Brooklyn earlier this year when he almost brought the house down.
“I had bought a bigger-than-normal bottle that was plastic,” he recalls, “and when I threw it on the ground, it cracked and leaked all over the stage. This guy grabbed the bottle, and he ended up lighting his hand on fire. He just sat there trying to shake it out. Then this other guy threw his beer on the fire, which just made it spread wider. Everybody in the bar ran out, and the owner had to come with a fire extinguisher.”
That bit of DIY pyrotechnics has helped the Hussy build a reputation as a fierce, unpredictable live act, but it would be merely a gimmick if their music couldn’t match and even exceed the spectacle. Despite their reliance on matching pseudonyms (Bobby and Heather Hussy are not related, and those aren’t, of course, their real names), the Hussy are not a joke band.
On their third album, Pagan Hiss, they play loud, blistering punk, which, especially during their live shows, achieves a sweaty physicality as Bobby flays his guitar and Heather pummels her drums. But underneath the noise lurks sharp hooks and emphatic lyrics about alienation, despair, bad blood, and good weed. The Hussy strike a fine balance between brute force and measured subtlety, mixing hardcore, surf rock, ’60s pop, power pop, and even classic rock into a head-banging, arms-flailing, guitar-burning mix.
The pair were mainstays on the Madison scene long before there was a Hussy. They had played together in a short-lived trio called Cats Not Dogs, which Bobby says was “just to get our feet wet and learn the ropes.” Heather played drums, and Bobby played bass. They didn’t release any music, but they did tour and they did argue a lot. The frontman “thought our songs sucked and our ideas weren’t any good,” Bobby says. “He said he wanted more input from us, but then he kept saying we had bad ideas.”
Bobby and Heather grew tight as friends and as a rhythm section, eventually leaving Cats Not Dogs to form their own group. Rather than expand into a trio or quartet, they decided to remain a duo. “We can do whatever we want in this band,” Bobby says. “It’s 50/50. There’s no third person to tug at it in a weird way. If it’s an odd number, it always becomes two against one. That’s just natural. I’m surprised people even try to make a three- or four-person band work.”
Their limited lineup makes touring inexpensive and recording relatively easy. In two years, the Hussy have released three LPs, four cassettes, seven seven-inches, and a lone 10-inch — all of which they engineered and produced themselves in their tiny Madison practice space. Each subsequent release has revealed new facets of the Hussy, new technical skills as well as sturdier musical chops, culminating in Pagan Hiss, released in May on Southpaw Records. It’s a sharp blast of surprisingly sophisticated rock-and-roll: loud but austere, funny but never ironic, blunt yet nuanced.
It’s hard to imagine just two people churning up this much noise, but it’s even harder to imagine three or more musicians playing together with such intensity.
“That’s what we’ve been working for this whole time,” Bobby says. “As the years have gone by, we’ve gotten better gear and we’ve become a better band, because we’ve actually put our lives into it. It just feels like this is the right band for who we are.”

The Hussy, with Moving Finger
Three Angels Diner
Friday, July 5th