 
“It will be the first time in one hundred years that we’ve had bees at the Hunt Phelan,” Hassinger notes, explaining his plans to relocate a colony from a farm in Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River. Seen through his critical eye, Hunt Phelan is not a dusty period piece, but a once self-sufficient farm that’s begun life anew. For ingredients for his specialties, which include grilled quail, lamb, and duck, and straightforward Southern-themed dishes such as savory oysters atop black-eyed peas and pickled red onion and jalapeńo vinaigrette, and halibut flanked with forkfuls of couscous, Swiss chard, and smoked tomato vinaigrette, Hassinger culls through the bounty that lies just outside his kitchen door, or heads over to the Memphis Farmers Market, located at the Central Station Pavilion just a few blocks away. The farmers’ market, now in its second year, offers both restaurants and home chefs a smorgasbord of choices. Homemade pies crowd tabletops already covered with bags of freshly picked arugula. Glossy purple eggplants and perfect green watermelons vie for attention alongside jars of honey from Hassinger’s apiary mentor, Richard Underhill, tomatoes and greens from Lori Greene’s West Tennessee farm, peaches from Jones Orchard, and a variety of homegrown plants and produce from Whitton Flowers and Produce in Tyronza, Arkansas. “I always cook locally,” says the chef, who cut his teeth at Bayona and Café Degas, two acclaimed Crescent City restaurants. “I grew up with a garden, and when I started cooking I was working in a small artisan bakery where we made our own yeast and ground our own flour. Organic is important, but I think local is even more important. Shaking hands with the farmer and making a connection is so satisfying, and more delicious and nutritious than anything you’ll find in a shiny carton.” “I sound like a tree hugger,” Hassinger says, his eyes crinkling as he lets loose a hearty laugh, “but it’s all just part of the real food revival.” Less than four miles away, Brett “Shaggy” Duffee, another New Orleans transplant, also works hard to create world-class cuisine from local ingredients. Most mornings, Duffee drops into the Viet Hoa supermarket to select fresh produce that will elevate the taste of his daily fish special to an entirely new level. Back at the Beauty Shop, the Cooper-Young bistro where Duffee works as the chef de cuisine, he’ll combine exotic datu puti, a sugar cane vinegar, with rendered bacon fat to make a dressing for a “sad,” or wilted, salad, or transpose a package of ham hocks into a hearty broth with star anise, Chinese celery, and garlic, topped with a wild mushroom crepe and a fillet of bluenose sea bass. Although Duffee didn’t begin cooking professionally until he moved to Memphis in the mid-1990s, he’s already dazzled crowds at the James Beard Foundation in New York and at the Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. He’s also made epic changes at the Beauty Shop (yes, it’s housed in an old beauty shop where in the sixties Priscilla Presley routinely got her bouffant teased to new heights), and today, his casual Southern-meets-European style is lauded by locals and tourists alike. There’s no kitchen garden here: compact is the only way to describe Duffee’s work space. The back door gives way to a gravel parking lot; inside, gold-leafed walls and gussied-up stationary hair dryers anchor the dining room, which opens off the long, polished bar and community table up front. “The farmers’ market and the Vietnamese market have both been inspirational for a lot of chefs around here,” notes Duffee, who shops for his produce daily. “It’s nice to see these guys do something we can put on our menus. Sometimes I’ve even been shocked to see what they’re growing. When that happens, you can bet it’s on the menu immediately.” Duffee admits to a strange dichotomy in being a Memphis chef. “What I’m putting out looks French. It might be an old Mediterranean recipe. But I’m using Southern-styled ingredients like pork belly,” he says. “But this is how we live; this is what I do. I am Southern. I wake up, put my pants on, and that’s who I am. I go to the market, and grab whatever I’m going to cook that night.” Duffee pauses and considers his next words carefully. “The South,” he announces, “is really coming back in a hard way.” No one would agree with that statement more than Kjeld and Melissa Petersen. The couple visited Memphis last year on a whim, determined to eat their weight in barbecue. “Eventually, we wondered, who’s cooked at the James Beard House?” Melissa Petersen recalls. “We found Wally Joe, Felicia Willett, Stephen, and Shaggy.” Intrigued, and inspired, by the talent they found here, the Petersens pulled up stakes in Portland, Oregon, and moved to downtown Memphis in early 2007. Melissa, a founder of the regional food publisher Edible Communities, immediately launched Edible Memphis, a quarterly magazine with a print run of 15,000 copies, while Kjeld helped found Slow Food Memphis, a regional chapter of Slow Food International. “People have come to Memphis for a long time for barbecue and music, but there’s so much more to be proud of,” Melissa Petersen insists. “There’s a place in Tennessee that makes tofu, and there’s caviar here. There are people here who have cooked forever, but don’t consider themselves chefs, even though they’re really good at what they do.” “With the Slow Food movement, people are coming out of the woodwork. They want to eat local, and they want to eat seasonally. I’ve encountered a number of chefs who are doing it, too. They just don’t talk about it much,” she says. “Nobody in Memphis is bragging about their food, although they could and they should. When it comes to good cuisine, this town is a real sleeper.” |
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