Zach Thomason – Memphis Flyer

If you want to take a trip around the world without leaving your dinner table, visit Savannah’s Food Co.

The current menu of the meal-delivery/catering company includes the Vietnamese-inspired North Memphis banh mi, Mumbai beans and rice, Welsh potato leek soup, Asian sesame noodles, Persian saffron and citron salmon, and Moroccan chicken.

“We represent 10 countries,” says chef/owner Zach Thomason. “We are the Olympics of food.”

He also serves fried chicken, which he describes as “your typical comfort fried chicken.” There’s also the Soul Food Catfish Special with roasted red bell pepper and goat cheese hush puppies.

“We try to develop a menu that brings in flavors from around the world,” Thomason says. “You begin to accept and gain an awareness of others through food by talking about the different flavors that each culture is bringing to a dish.”

Thomason, whose cooking experience includes jobs at Interim, Next Door Eatery, and The Gray Canary, describes Savannah’s Food Co. as “a gourmet meal-delivery and catering company using farm-fresh ingredients. I source either from the farmers markets or have some of the local farmers bring me their goods, and we go from there.”

People order 24 hours in advance for next-day delivery. “I do Memphis, Arlington, Collierville, Germantown, and Bartlett. All of the suburbs. We offer individual portions and family-size portions.” They also feature a kid’s menu.

As for desserts, Thomason says his fiancée, Gillian Lepisto, makes “some of the most astonishing desserts you can have. Delicious and homey. The point of food is to make you feel like someone cares about you.” They offer six desserts, including Lazy Lemon Cheesecake Bars. Prices for meals range from $12 to an $85 family-size.

Thomason, who is assisted by Lepisto, his brother Nick Myers, and Mason Whitman, is currently working out of Jimmy Gentry’s Paradox Catering. “Savannah” is Lepisto’s daughter Savannah Lepisto.

He would like to eventually open a brick-and-mortar business. “We definitely will have a deli counter. And the location will offer some lunch options with sandwiches and soups and to-go items. Take-and-bake things like we’re currently selling, but with more space. That opens up the possibility for countless things. We could begin hosting dinners and serving our meals hot, rather than have our customers heat them themselves.”

“There’s just more we can do with it,” he adds. “We’ll have the opportunity to talk about selling locally produced goods.”

Thomason’s main goal is to eventually be able to sell his locally sourced food to low-income families at a lower price. “I have a passion to get this food to people who need it and can use it.”

And, he says, “I truly believe when we eat closer to where we live, we are inevitably going to feel good.”

Thomason came up with the idea for his business during the pandemic. “I had been working with 275 Food Project and helping them deliver, at the time, emergency food CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] boxes. I started talking to one of the women who owns the place, Diane Terrell, and she was really helping me move my thoughts along with it.”

She told Thomason, “Think about something that you think would be impactful. Think about what you can do.”

Thomason believes he can teach people through his food. “It all starts with the fundamentals. Right now, the only thing I have to offer is food.”

“This is just dreaming,” he continues, “but in the future, I hope to have a 501c3 that helps feed and take care of people who cannot get this source of food. And also giving jobs to those who cannot get them. Whether they’re coming out of jail or rehab, homeless shelters. But none of that is possible until we can get the business up and rolling.”

To order from Savannah’s Food Co., go to savannahsfoodco.com.

Zach Thomason knew exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Sort of.

“When I was seven years old, I told my dad, ‘I want to be a Northern Italian chef, a rock star, or a doctor,'” says Thomason, 31.

Cooking was appealing. “It looked like magic. There was that science. It just popped out of a pan. I put in these ingredients, and it just developed into something really cool.”

Thomason, now a chef at Next Door Eatery, wanted to go to cooking school, but his dad nixed the idea. So, Thomason studied creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. He and his brother, Ben. who lived with him, worked in the kitchen at a local restaurant.

One night, Thomason covered a shift for his brother. “I was sending him these texts like, ‘Where are you? I’ve got stuff at school to do. This is ridiculous.’ I’m starting to freak out and there’s just something going on in my stomach that said, ‘Something’s off.'”

He began calling hospitals. “I finally got in touch with the Police Department and I said, ‘Sir, is Ben Thomason in your custody?’ He says, ‘Yes, sir, he is.’ And I say, ‘Well, may I speak to him?’ He said, ‘No, sir, you can’t.’ I said, ‘Well, has he been arrested?’ He said, ‘No, sir.’ I said, ‘Well, if he hasn’t been arrested and he’s in your custody I have the right to speak to him.’ He said, ‘Son, your brother is dead.'”

Thomason was stunned. “My brother borrowed my car in order to go get some dope. And on his way back, he flipped the car over the interstate and killed himself.”

He grabbed a bottle of Jameson from the bar. “My knee-jerk reaction at the time was to drink. I took it to the back dock, and it was on. It was not pretty, and it continued for a good while to come.”

Thomason continued to work at the restaurant. “I learned how to do the dance in the kitchen at that place. There is a dance when everything is working right. It’s this orchestrated movement. There’s no bumping into each other. You know what everyone is doing. It’s really beautiful.”

But, he said, “Problem was I learned this dance and I learned how to work drunk.”

He hopped around restaurants in different cities. “I think it started out as this desire to fill my brother’s shoes because he seemed to be going in this direction at a young age.”

But he “grew really passionate about it.”

Thomason went through homeless periods. “Living out of the back of a car, losing the car, living in a tent in Nashville.”

He felt “destined for death. But there was something — God, whatever, the great cosmic muffin in the sky — deemed there’s something better for me out there than what I was doing.”

Thomason went into recovery and, with his fiance, moved to Memphis. David Krog, who was executive chef at Interim, said he’d give him a job if he remained sober for six months.

“That kitchen was run as ‘We are good people first, and that’s how we are going to behave. As good people and caring people.’ I’d grown used to seeing these very cut-throat environments and sabotaging and backstabbing. I was only six months sober after years and years of drug abuse. My hands still shook. I had these people who were willing to be nurturing. They were probably getting very frustrated with me, but they nurtured me to a point where I can do things now. I can take care of myself.”

After Krog left the restaurant, Thomason went to work at the Gray Canary. He moved to Next Door, so he could work a daytime shift to spend more time with his fiance and her daughter.

“Eventually, I could want to open a pizza place. But, at the same token, I really am an artist. David has been teaching us how to do this tweezer food and make things very pretty. One day, whether it be with him or on my own, I would like to be a part of opening a restaurant that is geared toward very, very small, tight, pretty palate-encompassing plates.”

Wherever he lands, Thomason wants the kitchen to be like Interim’s when he worked there. “Be a part of a kitchen again where there is this genuine sense of care that we have for one another. It was really astonishing the way that everyone treated one another and was connected with one another. I don’t even see it outside in the real world on a normal basis let alone in a high-intensity kitchen. If I can manage to be a part of something like that again, I would do that in a heartbeat.”