Plating for perfection: A night inside St. John’s kitchen
“There’s one that like to tug at your belt loop,” sous chef Philippe Van Grit said about a certain “ghost” as he meticulously sliced a 15-pound Alaskan halibut the size of a doormat into smaller 5 ounce-ish fillets.
Van Grit, originally from San Francisco, started his odyssey into food and beverage via Napa Valley, California, doing front-of-house duties before creeping into the kitchen where he “felt more at home with the hooligans.”
Executive chef Patrick Sawyer backs up Van Grit’s claim of paranormal activity inside St. John’s Restaurant, telling me about one night when a champagne flute fell out of nowhere and crashed to the ground into countless shards. Before the other prep cook, Tony “The Butcher” Miralles, could chime in with his ghost encounter, I changed the subject to WuTang Clan.
I’m not one to delve into supernatural conspiracy theories, but there’s no way this place doesn’t have ghosts from the past lingering around. During its illustrious 109-year life, it accommodated the upper crust, the underbelly and everything in between: railroad tycoons, bootleggers, vagabonds, silver screen starlets, murderers, pimps etc. If these walls could talk, they simply wouldn’t just talk, they’d whisper, chuckle and scream — in secret, in jubilance or in fear.
As handsome as this flatiron is, there’s something uncanny about it. There are rooms that lead to other rooms that lead to other rooms that lead to rooms you’d never thought would have ever existed. There are side rooms, back rooms, cubbies, nooks, alcoves, duckoffs and stash spots. There are stairs on the second floor that lead to nowhere.
Then, there are stairs that lead to the cavernous basement where the restaurant’s only walk-in refrigerator is located. There’s also a vault down there where bottles of Egly-Ouriet Brut Grand Cru and Mayacamas chardonnay are kept are locked away, safe and secure like an oil painting from Francis Bacon or screen print from Judy Chicago. The basement
is also where head pastry chef Olga Powers and her crew make candied pecans for the sticky toffee pudding and whip up cream cheese anglaise for the carrot cake soufflé.
ASHY TO CLASSY
In 1914, brothers Gus and Victor Ellis commissioned Civil War veteran Reuben H. Hunter to design a hotel at the tip of land where Market and King streets split. Costing the brothers around $80,000, the 100-room hotel opened the following year and boasted the finest of luxuries, including “hot and cold water” and “telephone connection.”
For the next 85 years, it was juggled from hand to hand, from name to name and slowly spiraling from splendor to squalor. It was spared the wrecking ball in 1998. A few years later the restaurant would open and catapult Chattanooga’s dining scene from “ashy to classy” as the late, great poet Christopher Wallace would have said.
In 2009 St. John’s was the first restaurant in Chattanooga to earn a James Beard Award nomination. There was another nomination the following year. In 2011, the foundation thought Andrea Reusing’s Lantern in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was better. A year later
St. John’s went on a three-year run of nominations. As recently as 2019, then-executive chef Rebecca Barron helped garner another nomination.
Barron is just one of a handful of uber-talented chefs that have passed through St. John’s kitchen: Daniel Lindley has forever changed the way Chattanooga thought of and consumed Italian food with Alleia. Kenny Burnap runs a snazzy sandwich shop that’s named after him with a croque madame that could hold its own in any arrondissement in Paris. Kenyatta Ashford has Neutral Ground, which will probably be the only time you’ll ever have yakamein outside of New Orleans or puff puff outside of Lagos, Nigeria. Then there’s Dane Frazier, who’s now doing epic things on the North Shore with Frazier Five & Dime and whom Burnap touted as the “best baker/pastry chef in Chattanooga.”
These days, Sawyer, the executive chef, is the head honcho. The Clarksville, Tennessee, native started at St. John’s on New Year’s Eve 2013 after being poached from a pizza parlor in Memphis and indoctrinated into the world of fine dining by Chef David Krog.
IN THE KITCHEN
If I had never been blessed to write about food for a living, I would have inevitably spent the rest of my life in the kitchen of a restaurant in some capacity. I grew up in the thick of food and beverage culture.
A food and beverage culture that bubbled over with toxicity, chauvinism, drunken and drug-fueled displays of machismo, frat house-quality hazing and lawsuit-worthy misconduct. I’m at home amongst the scuffed stainless steel, the constant gurgle of a dishwasher machine, the spontaneous jolt from a high-powered, commercial-grade blender. I relish the jumble of banged up stockpots, whetstones, fryer baskets and the faint fragrance of propane gas.
I’ve seen mop handles weaponized during squabbles and have sent newbies on the frivolous, never-ending search for the “bacon stretcher.” This dysfunction cultivates an intense camaraderie in the kitchen that I haven’t felt since hanging my apron up to take this job.
These days, my professional title is “food writer,” but I’m still fluent in kitchen jargon like “eighty-six” meaning, “we’re out of a certain something,” “all day” meaning “in total,” and “new day” meaning “a new ticket” is up. And I’ll probably never shake loose the habit of drinking everything — sweet tea, orange juice, riesling out of plastic quart deli containers.
So, as a “food writer,” I know the traditional thing for me to do is write about St. John’s Restaurant, the restaurant with the elegant, white table-clothed dining room, a dining room that’s fed a star-studded cast: Peyton Manning, Harrison Ford, Gilbert Godfrey , Lionel Richie, Patti LaBelle, not to mention honeymooners, mayors and higherups from Volkswagen.
Nope.
I didn’t come to St. John’s Restaurant to tell you about the antelope carpaccio. I came to St. John’s Restaurant to write about it from a different, more comfy angle: the kitchen.
Working as a dishwasher at Fig in Charleston, South Carolina, was the last time I’d been around this caliber of cooking. I’ll never, ever forget eating the buttermilk panna cotta as I watched Chef Mike Lata and Jason Stanhope do what I honestly feel like the good Lord put them on this Earth to do. The craft of feeding people thoughtful, highly curated food isn’t without rigor. At this level, even with the sharpest santoku, it’s hard to cut corners. At this level, it’s more alchemy than it is “cooking.” At this level, it’s blue collar in an artsy way.
“People make just as much money working at Chili’s, but I don’t want to kill myself at Chili’s. I’d rather die here,” sous chef Van Grit said before chirping something to a prep cook in perfect Spanish. I know just enough Spanish to successfully order arroz con gandules. Other than that, I’m usually lost in translation. Apparently Van Grit doled out a task. After their exchange, the prep cook grabbed a pair of tweezers and started plucking quills from a case of duck breast trucked in from Joe Jurgielewicz & Son — purveyor of “America’s tastiest duck.”
THE SET
It’s about three hours before the doors open for service.
I’m shooting the breeze with a line cook who had worked in a local pizza parlor while pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Feeling like he wasn’t fulfilling his purpose, he dropped out to dive head-first into the culinary arts. He shelled a pile of fava beans that would soon be boiled, blanched, blended with fresh lemon zest, kosher salt, a medley of herbs and put through a strainer, ensuring a silky smooth consistency. Deeper into the evening, that same fava bean puree will end up smeared in a streak across a ceramic plate for the red snapper “set.”
What’s a “set” you ask? A “set” consists of the components that make up a dish, built around the protein. In this case, the protein is red snapper delivered from the Gulf of Mexico, whole and butchered by Van Grit or Miralles. Aside from the fava bean puree and the snapper, the “set” also includes roasted radishes, asparagus, lemon and a reduction made of port wine and pomegranate. Absolutely nothing in a “set” is by happenstance or randomly thrown together. Through tinkering, tasting, reworking, researching, soul searching and fine-tuning, Sawyer, Van Grit and sous chef Kolby Carpenter create these sets no different than Super Bowl-winning coach Andy Reid draws up intricate bubble screens and jet sweeps. These sets are subject to change based on if Gowin Valley Farms has hen-of-the-woods mushrooms or if rainbow trout at Pickett’s Trout Ranch are still a favorable price or if it’s strawberry season or even soft shell crab season, which is why the menu is printed out daily.
By the time a ticket spurts from the machine for smoked trout crackers, it’s around 5:45. The music everybody was jamming out to earlier has been muted. For one, clear lines of communication are extremely vital. For two, the kitchen’s proximity to the dining room is a sliver and guests might not want to hear kitchen banter while they’re munching on their bresaola toast.
To know what bresaola is, you probably have to be either Italian or enough of a gourmand to know that sweetbreads are the pancreas glands of veal, not a pastry. Bresaola is cured beef tenderloin shaved to an almost translucent thinness. This toast is Carpenter’s idea of an elevated roasted beef sandwich masquerading as a tartine. It’s also a far cry from where he started, working at a Sonic Drive-In in the suburbs of Nashville. Upon arriving in Chattanooga, Carpenter spent time at Niedlov’s Bakery & Cafe. From Niedlov’s, he hopscotched to Flying Squirrel, where he was a part of the opening day crew and stayed for half a decade. Now he’s here.
AN ANNIVERSARY
Even though the smoked trout crackers are the cheapest thing on the menu ($12) and sound like something quick you could easily pull off for your housewarming party, I can assure you, it’s not. Take an element like the cured egg yolk, which is microplaned over the dish before being whisked away to the dining room. It’s a laborious process, and as Carpenter dangled a 3-foot string of 23 egg yolks he’d cured and wrapped in cheesecloth, it reminded me once more that this level of alchemy is light-years beyond bringing powdered eggs to life at Shoney’s.
At 6:23, Carpenter checks a sophisticated reservation app on his phone and immediately lets his crew members know they’d just picked up two more reservations for 7:45 & 8:30. By 6:33, Carpenter finds a lull in the action to finish his cigarette on the sidewalk outside. A line cook slouched over the concrete base of a street lamp is on the tail end of his break.
By 6:53, Carpenter peeks at his phone again and informs me that the dining room has “28 butts in seats.” Seven minutes later, a seven-top sits down at table 108. The phone app also lets Carpenter know that a certain table is celebrating an anniversary, prompting him to send them an “amuse-bouche,” beef tartare. Dishes like the beef tartare are garde manger’s Josh Watts’ time to shine.
As Watts gently separates the raw egg white from the yolk to crown the beef tartare, it dawns on me that the whole amuse-bouche thing is one of the nuances that makes
St. John’s as phenomenal as it is. Every guest in the dining room is pampered as if they’re the duchess of Cornwall or king of Zamunda. It’s a reminder that at its very best, a restaurant is just as much about the guest experience as it is about the food. One shouldn’t trump the other. It should be a “one hand washes the other, both wash the face” philosophy.
The guest experience is so paramount here at St. John’s that even the servers have assistants, known as “W.A.’s” who patrol the dining room, refilling water glasses, bussing tables, polishing silverware and more. Then there’s the food runner: Robin to the sous chef’s Batman. This evening, Rebekah Womack is the food runner. A Chick-fil-A alum, Womack not only runs food to the dining room, she is also a crucial part in plating the food: delicately sprinkling the warm beet salad with ground sumac and black sea salt, garnishing the bison ribeye with floral accents like nasturtium and wiping away random unwanted drips and splatters from the rim of the plate with a small wet sponge. Every so often, a server pops into the kitchen with a dispatch from the dining room. One server, Caitlyn Warrick, is a veteran of St. John’s and has a tattoo of Dolly Parton on her forearm underneath her crisp, white button-up shirt.
RAZZLE DAZZLE
It’s 7:20 p.m. There are six tickets on the board with a total of 11 guests.
I marvel at the razzle dazzle that is plating these dishes. For instance, the Durham Ranch elk tenderloin. After a line cook smoothes a layer of mustard yellow-hued sunchoke puree in an almost perfect circle in center of the plate, he uses tongs to carefully place a heap of sauteed Swiss chard, roasted carrots and parsnip to one side of that sunchoke puree circle. The bison tenderloin he perfectly grilled and allowed to rest is sliced in half, gently splayed to show the mediumcooked flesh and propped up against the heap of vegetables. Womack, the food runner, follows up with a subtle trail of chili oil from a squirt bottle, adding spice but also a pop of color to an otherwise earthtoned dish. Carpenter comes right over to sprinkle a blend of pink peppercorn, coriander and caraway. Womack finishes the dish with a ladle of demi-glace, a glossy brown sauce.
The elk tenderloin plate before this was on the verge of being plated flawlessly until the very last step whenever Womack used a little too much demi-glace. The line cook requested a replate. Carpenter told me and Womack that he wanted to go easy on the demi-glace. Not only would too much bully the rest of the dish, it might steal some of its visual thunder. Like his cured egg yolks, the richer than rich demi-glace was a costly, threeday labor of love.
Yes, as you could imagine, on certain nights, things in this kitchen could get hot and hectic. But this isn’t the hammed up drama you might see on the FX show, “The Bear.” It’s far more cerebral than chaotic. There are no Gordon Ramseylike meltdowns, nobody throwing pans of gnocchi in fits of rage or nursing a black eye with a bag of frozen peas. Instead the kitchen crew is “tuned into a certain frequency,” as Carpenter described it, which allows them to function like a well-oiled machine. Truffle oil, of course.
At around 8 p.m., I figured the time was ripe to make my escape. I needed to leave before I relapsed back into the mostly perilous, sometimes glorious life of cooking for a living. Furthermore, I didn’t want to stay long enough for that ghost from the restaurant’s brothel days to tug at my belt loop.
“People make just as much money working at Chili’s, but I don’t want to kill myself at Chili’s. I’d rather die here.” — SOUS CHEF PHILIPPE VAN GRIT