Take pride in your sandwich spot
Take pride in your sandwich spot
Your mid-week dose of Southern food news
Asked if she’s from the area where she recently opened Mechanicsville Kitchen, an Owensboro, Kentucky diner named for its neighborhood, Tia Johnson pauses briefly.
“Well, my mom is from West Tenth and my dad is from Ninth,” she says, citing the cross streets bounding her business’ block.
It probably ought to be an aphorism: If you measure your relationship to the community in blocks, you’re running a true neighborhood restaurant. That was Johnson’s aim when she gave up her food truck for a permanent location.
“There are no guests here: We’re family,” she says.
Literally, in some cases. When Johnson was planning her restaurant, she asked customers to share pictures of the building which previously housed Mendy’s Kitchen and the Dairy Bar. One woman gave her a photograph of the squat brick structure in its pre-restaurant days, when the woman’s branch of the Glover family called it home.
“My granddad married into the Glover family, but I didn’t know [the history],” she says, still marveling at the discovery.
Accordingly, along with breakfast sandwiches and burgers, Johnson is serving a menu of homestyle dishes that she couldn’t prepare in her truck.
“Like today, I’m having salmon patties and fried potatoes and green beans,” she says. “If we did that on the truck, we had to put it in a Crock-Pot.”
The advantage of cooking on a stove is “you can dip your spoon in the juice to taste if it’s right.” So far, Johnson adds, guests have concurred with her verdicts.
Chicagoans like Ryan Long know the city’s proudest contribution to the pizza canon is a tavern pie, not the deep-dish casseroles that Uno Pizzeria & Grill helped make famous across the country. So, when Long last month opened his Chicago-style pizza parlor in Memphis, he anticipated plenty of fellow transplants would order thin-crust pizzas.
Long was wrong.
Izzy and Adam’s sold 40 deep-dish pizzas in its first two hours. “We didn’t sell a single thin crust,” Long says. “People don’t want that here.”
Well, one person did. But when a thin-crust order finally came in, “Our guys were in such a rhythm, they just put out deep dish.”
Following the chaos of opening day, Long shut down the restaurant for several days and retooled its menu. While he didn’t anticipate the deep-dish emphasis, Long--who managed small pizza shops north of Chicago before relocating to Memphis for his wife’s job in pharmaceuticals--says the shift has allowed him to streamline operations.
“The kitchen can pre-roll the crust and put the dough in pans,” he says.
Even with the adjustment, Izzy & Adam’s is still racing to keep up with its instant popularity. The new menu warns that customers should be prepared to wait an hour for a pie.
Jenna Baker launched Vid’l in Knoxville with the intention of offering cooking classes and take-home meals, but her partner had another idea.
As a property owner in need of a restaurant tenant, the partner suggested moving Vid’l out of its subleased space inside a yoga studio and into a sit-down dining venue. The revamped Vid’l opened last month, serving heirloom soup beans, toasts spread with fruit, and a daily porridge, such as a black rice version topped with coconut yogurt and pumpkin seeds.
“I try to lead with fact that the food is delicious, because people seeking it out already know, and I want to draw in people who are curious,” Baker says of the plant-based menu.
Baker was eager to combine her fine dining experience and interest in nutrition, but at first wasn’t sure where to locate her business. Then she noticed that Whole Foods Market had just opened its first Knoxville store and reasoned she could ride the coattails of its demographic research.
“So many people are saying Knoxville needed this,” she says.
First things first: Lust Gentleman’s Club is not a strip club.
“It’s like calling a McDonald’s a steakhouse,” marketing director Steve Todd protests.
Still, Todd will be glad to see its name in proximity to the phrase he scorns, since online searches for “strip clubs” in Myrtle Beach outpace searches for “gentleman’s clubs” by roughly 8-to-1. He admits he’s had to manipulate the new venue’s website to fool search engines into finding Lust’s nude entertainment.
But Todd is hoping that Lust will also attract customers with its ambitious food menu, which he believes will appeal to people of all genders, including those who aren’t necessarily in the mood to “get down with your favorite girls privately.”
“I’m a foodie myself, so we’ve got some interesting things,” Todd says, touting Lust’s brick-oven pizza and barbecue smoked in house. He suspects guests will also gravitate to the steak (rib eye, not strip.)
“We’re going to get a great service industry crowd,” he predicts, noting that most full-service restaurants in Myrtle Beach close their kitchens by 9 p.m. “When they leave work, there’s nothing but Cook Out or Waffle House. We’re going to three or four o’clock in the morning.”
And there’s no shame in seeking out spiralized shrimp or a prime rib sandwich at Lust, he adds.
“It’s more of an experience than getting a lap dance and pulling up your hoodie when you leave,” he says.