Mementos

The first time I went to Savannah I was 19. I remember that much, and also that it was July, but not a lot else.

I’d fault Father Time for the irretrievability of the particulars, but that’d be unfair. I have an extensive collection of mental souvenirs from that summer and they’re each and every one compendious. Photographic, even. Each and every one but that one, which exhibits a kind of reverse Polaroid effect, fading the more I shake it.

If not the passage of time, what then? Why is that memento, and only that one, so fragmented as to barely constitute a memory at all? So illusive I’d suspect the trip never happened but for a few shard-like impressions?

I’d blame hard drugs, but I wasn’t doing any. And blaming alcohol doesn’t work because some of my most vivid recollections from that summer reference drunken experiences — or just the experience of being drunk, which if you ask me is gratifying enough in its own right.

I’m left with a tautological explanation. It’s possible I don’t remember much about that trip because it was just plain forgettable, which is something a trip to a city like Savannah should never be.

If that’s right, it’s not Savannah’s fault. Just like it’s not Manhattan’s fault that my two-year stint living and working in the city that never sleeps is little more than a dream — an inkling differentiated from the figmental only by the ash heap of bridges burned and a few dusty suits.

Relationships with places, like relationships with people, can be highly rewarding. But also like interpersonal relationships, partnerships with places are hard work. Success depends on reciprocity. The fulfillment you derive’s proportionate to the effort you put in. Just as you can be in a relationship with someone for decades and never really know them, you can live in a place for years and never be home.

I’ve never lived in Savannah, but I spent a good part of my life living adjacent to it. Close enough, in fact, to see cargo ships on their way to or from the port, sometimes accompanied by a Fata Morgana. Savannah’s a city I should know. A relationship I want. And I’m making an effort. I’ve been twice in four months and I’ll be back in April.

The celebrity

Mashama Bailey’s a celebrity chef. Bronx-born, Queens-raised and (eventually) French-trained, Bailey entered the culinary world in 2000 when she enrolled in what’s now the Institute of Culinary Education after being laid off (on Christmas Eve, no less) from a job coordinating after-school activities at a Brooklyn homeless shelter.

She began her professional career the next year as an extern at Jeremy Marshall’s Aquagrill, the SoHo seafood fixture famous mostly for a raw oyster menu The New York Times once declared “a wondrous thing.” (Aquagrill closed permanently during the pandemic. “[It wasn’t] a takeout-kinda place,” as one local explained.)

After “a winding few years,” to quote a James Beard Foundation profile, working as a personal chef on the Upper East Side, Bailey ended up in France, at Burgundy’s Château du Feÿ for three months of instruction at an outpost of La Varenne, the professional cooking school founded in 1975 by culinary historian Anne Willan.

La Varenne was a trailblazer of sorts. From its early days on the Rue Dominique in Paris, the school taught courses in English as well as French. The promise of bilingual instruction was a magnet for American students. In 1988, La Varenne added the Château du Feÿ satellite program. Willan was in the process of closing down that program when Bailey arrived nearly two decades later pondering a career switch from chef to food writer.

Taken with the Bronxite, Willan convinced Bailey to stick with cooking (“You should cook, because you’re really good at it”) and also to hang around the chateau for an extra two months to help wind up La Varenne’s operation at the manor. (Château du Feÿ was purchased 10 years later by an architect-entrepreneur with designs on creating a “modern utopia” on the 103-acre site.)

On Bailey’s account, it was actually Thomas Keller who convinced her to stay in professional kitchens. According to legend, Bailey was packing up Willan’s cookbook collection at Château du Feÿ when she ran across an inscribed copy of The French Laundry Cookbook. “Thank you, Anne, for all your advice,” Keller wrote to Willan. “I wouldn’t have made some of the decisions I made in my life if it wasn’t for you.”

There was Keller, arguably the world’s greatest chef and the only American to simultaneously run multiple three-star Michelin restaurants, crediting Willan’s counsel in part for one of history’s most celebrated culinary careers. Willan’s advice was apparently the sort you should take. As Bailey put it, “If Thomas Keller was giving her credit, I might as well give it a try.”

After reentering the New York restaurant scene, Bailey eventually landed at Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune, in the East Village, where she became sous chef. Hamilton’s no Keller, but she’s a somebody. Prune’s closed now. Like Aquagrill, it was a victim of the pandemic. (Hamilton penned an obituary that doubled as a hypothetical resurrection story in April of 2020.) But when it was open, it stood as a testament to the idea that humble can be a selling point.

Hamilton had no formal training when she opened the deliberately unpretentious Prune in 1999. Six years later, Frank Bruni, who was serving a five-year term as chief restaurant critic for Times, described an “adorable notion” which quickly morphed into a “formidable” player in the impossibly-competitive world of trendy New York dining. “The proof was in the long line outside the door,” Bruni wrote. “[A]t a corner table inside sat Chelsea Clinton.”

Hamilton’s also a celebrated author. The late Anthony Bourdain called Hamilton’s 2011 memoir Blood, Bones and Butter, “Simply the best memoir by a chef ever.” “Gabrielle Hamilton packs more heart, soul and pure power into one beautifully-crafted page than I’ve accomplished in my entire writing career,” Bourdain went on. “I am choked with envy.” High praise coming from a legend and the man behind what almost everyone other than its author considers to be the best chef memoir ever, Bourdain’s own Kitchen Confidential, the raw, gonzo-esque page-turner that birthed an icon.

Bailey found her footing under Hamilton. “You work under one chef and another chef, and it wasn’t until I worked under Gabrielle at about the two-year mark, that I started to feel like I was ready,” Bailey told her alma mater, for a 2018 profile.

In year three at Prune, Hamilton connected Bailey to John Morisano, a wealthy Italian-American  businessman who’d just purchased the historic Greyhound terminal on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd in Savannah. That bus station, like all bus stations in the American South, was segregated at one time. Morisano wanted to renovate it, turn it into a restaurant and hire a black chef. In Bailey, he’d found his chef.

Despite her New York upbringing, Bailey does have Southern roots. As a child, she spent summers with her grandmother in Waynesboro, Georgia. She also attended Charles Ellis Montessori Academy in Savannah, which sits about three miles from the Greyhound bus depot where, decades later, Bailey was named best chef in the Southeast by the James Beard Foundation.

I learned about Bailey and her Savannah restaurant, The Grey, the same way a lot of people did: On the popular Netflix documentary series Chef’s Table. The episode featuring Bailey first aired in 2019, but I didn’t come across it until 2023 and only then by total, ironic happenstance.

I’d found my way into a renovated 2,300-square foot “loft” space in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. “Loft” described the motif, not the elevation — it was street-level. At one time, it was a restaurant. The kitchen was commensurately large, and outfitted with brand new, commercial-grade appliances including a refrigerator large enough to store an elk in the event you — I don’t know — had an elk you needed to store.

The grandiosity of the kitchen created a psychological imperative: “You should cook,” I told myself. “Not because you’re really good at it. But because you’re wasting the best part of this space if you don’t.” So I did. Cook. Or tried to cook. Then I’d sit with my plate in a cavernous living area staring up at a 75″ flatscreen mounted to an exposed brick wall.

Despite downtown Knoxville falling woefully short on any definition of “city life,” the ambience of the space lent itself to the “blue city” vibe from the first 20 or so minutes of Heat, Michael Mann’s best work, which Netflix knew to recommend based on the algorithm’s insight into my delusions of criminal grandeur. Delusions which were magnified by my presence in a town where I once presided over a small-time racket.

One night, Heat wasn’t available. Or it anyway failed to show up on the first Netflix selector screen. Unwilling to dig for it, I scrolled down and picked the first thing that looked like it might make for a decent dinner backdrop. That’s when I met Mashama.

I finally made it to The Grey late last year. Seated uncomfortably in a too-loud dining area, I struggled to conceal my accruing disappointment with the four- (maybe it was five-) course prix fixe menu. It was underwhelming at best and the service was painfully rote. But that particular trip wasn’t about scrutinizing plates, so I gave The Grey a pass and resolved to go back soon, confident I’d be properly entranced by Bailey’s celebrated Lowcountry cuisine.

The extraterrestrials

In the spring of 1994, LaFace Records reported tentative evidence of extraterrestrial life in Atlanta, Georgia. That year, in April, two local teenagers unveiled an otherworldly, 64-minute funk-soul symphony that would’ve been impossible to describe had they not given it a name: Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik.

The album was well-received and thanks in no small part to the somewhat serendipitous circumstances which popularized its lead single, “Player’s Ball,” it was a commercial hit. But it wasn’t conclusive proof that superhuman musical genius had reached us from the deep cosmos. For that, the world would have to wait two more years.

On August 27, 1996, André Benjamin and Antwan Patton confirmed that UFOs had in fact landed in East Point. On that day, the duo released their second studio album, which begins with a hauntingly beautiful, famously cryptic one-minute prayer followed immediately by a two-word salutation from a voice with a metallic-electronic timbre: “Greetings, Earthling.” The ATLiens were here. Outkast had arrived.

If ATLiens was immaculate (Pitchfork awarded it an almost unachievable 9.6 while reviewing it early this year as part of the webzine’s 30th anniversary celebration) its followup, Aquemini, was positively sublime.

A masterpiece by any standard, Outkast’s third longplay is widely considered among the greatest song collections ever assembled, in any genre. Across 16 tracks, the album manifests both the Southern-fried funk that defined 1994’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and the extraterrestrial theme employed to such delightful effect in its followup, ATLiens.

Aquemini made it onto Rolling Stone‘s “500 Greatest Albums” list in 2003, just five years after its release. When that list was revised in 2020, Aquemini was ranked 49th. For context, that was 28 slots ahead of The Who’s Who’s Next, six slots ahead of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and a mere 18 spots below Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.

The title, a combination of the duo’s Zodiac signs, nodded to an eternal consonance in the pair’s otherwise diverging styles. Benjamin encapsulates the stylistic juxtaposition in the opening lines of Aquemini‘s second track. “[People] always be hollering ‘peace,’ You know what I’m saying, ‘Peace, my brother,’ ‘Peace’ this, ‘peace’ that. But every time I, uh, try to get a peace of mind, [they] try to get a piece of mine. So I gotta grab my piece,” he sighs.

For Benjamin, such realities — the fundamental challenges of moving beyond the stereotypes which too often define and circumscribe the lives of young black men in America — were becoming too much to bear. Patton, by contrast, accepted them as too entrenched to alter. Throughout the album, and indeed throughout the group’s entire career, Benjamin’s penchant for turning the other cheek serves as a foil for Patton’s assertive bravado.

In the album’s first single, “Skew It on the Bar-B,” Patton demands just due from a then-still-relevant Source magazine, daring the publication to deny Aquemini the coveted five-mic rating that barely escaped the duo in their debut. “I gotta hit The Source, I need my other half a mic / Because that Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik was a classic, right,” he says, matter-of-factly. (Patton got his five mics. Aquemini was the first Southern hip-hop album to receive a perfect score from The Source.)

Aquemini’s title track features one of Benjamin’s career-best verses, an intricately-crafted, emotive trip through drug-torn Atlanta neighborhoods which he closes with a riff on the old adage about judging books by their cover: “Now, question: Is everybody with dreads for the cause? Is everybody with golds for the fall?” Those are rhetorical questions, but Benjamin answers them anyway: “Naw.”

On “Synthesizer,” George Clinton drops by to officially validate Outkast’s P-Funk credentials. Three tracks later, on “Da Art of Storytellin’ Pt. 1,” Outkast deliver tales of young love, lust and loss. “We on our back, starin’ at the stars above/ Talkin’ bout what we gon’ be when we grow up / I said, ‘What you wanna be?’ She said, ‘Alive,’” Benjamin raps, of a pregnant teen who’s later found dead of a heroin overdose. A sequel track, the aptly named “Pt. 2,” finds Patton and Benjamin trading visions of the apocalypse while racing to a rendezvous point as the world crumbles around them. (“Meet me at the center of the Earth and travel carefully.”)

By the time Erykah Badu and CeeLo Green (who wasn’t yet the international superstar he eventually became) show up for “Liberation,” you’re awestruck as a listener — unsure, exactly, as to where you’ve been for the last hour and what happened while you were there. About the best you can come up with is, “I was abducted by aliens. They took me to Georgia.”

A second try

Aquemini’s second single was “Rosa Parks,” an impossibly catchy romp which earned Outkast a Grammy nomination. And a lawsuit. Benjamin and Patton were sued in 1999 by lawyers for Parks who complained, disingenuously but not inaccurately, that the song had no connection, not even a metaphorical one, to her life story.

It was later revealed that Parks suffered from dementia late in life. At least one member of her family suggested she was being exploited not by Outkast, but by her own lawyers. Eventually, Benjamin and Patton were removed as co-defendants. Parks received a cash settlement from the record company in 2005. She died six months later.

Were it not for that unfortunate episode, I’d call the civil rights connection between Aquemini and The Grey’s location (Parks is, of course, synonymous with segregated bussing) a “happy” coincidence in the context of my inclination to make Outkast the soundtrack for any trip to Savannah. The lawsuit’s a bit of a blight, though, so I suppose it’s just a “plain” coincidence.

Whatever the case, Aquemini‘s a collection of songs that feel quintessentially local anywhere in Georgia, including and especially Savannah. Patton hails from the city and Aquemini‘s eighth track is named for it. I probably should’ve chosen that track — “West Savannah” — for the five-minute drive from the Perry Lane hotel to The Grey, which I revisited in early March to give Mashama the mulligan I felt she deserved. Instead I chose “Slump,” a record so Southern it hurts. In a good way.

I eschewed my affinity for gaudy attire that evening, opting instead for a subtle ensemble that would’ve bordered on frumpy were it not for a pair of crispy White/Gums (Air Force 1s that are all white except for the soles, which are tan).

Allow me a quick aside. There are two things you should never wear twice: White t-shirts and white Air Force 1s. Those are one-and-done wardrobe items. It isn’t a matter of no one knowing the difference. It’s a matter of principle.

The most humble items in my closet are from Tribeca-based Nili Lotan and London mainstay Margaret Howell. If I had any sense about me, every item in my closet would be from Lotan and Howell, both of whom design for minimalist, understated luxury. The price point’s high, but not garish, and the pieces themselves are utilitarian and timeless. There are no logos and no labels save the inside tags.

On my second trip to The Grey, I wore a brown corduroy Margaret Howell blazer over a white Nili Lotan button-down with navy and brown stripes. I sated my vanity by carrying a Goyard messenger. The bag’s patterned canvas — the famous Goyardine — sneered at the comparatively mean jacket across which it was forced to lay. The jacket rolled its eyes, unimpressed by such vulgar pretentiousness.

I cut a sharp U-ey in front of the restaurant (you pretty much have to given the traffic logistics), pulled up to the curb and lowered my passenger window. “Are you interested in our valet service?” a man in a rainbow-colored plaid jacket wondered.

My insufferable side wanted to ask what else I’d be interested in, loitering as I was in a restaurant valet line, but the rainbow-plaid disarmed my condescension. “I am indeed. Are you my guy?” He nodded enthusiastically. “I’ll get you all squared away!” We had a brief conversation about nothing. Those pleasantries ended up being the best — and most authentically Southern — part of the evening.

The Grey’s art deco dining area is too formal to be relaxed, but not formal enough to count as prim. The same’s true of the service. That makes for an uncomfortably ambiguous dining experience. The questions inherent in that ambiguity aren’t answered, which means it’s never clear whether The Grey under-delivers or your expectations were too high.

That gets immediately to the heart of the problem at The Grey: It isn’t sufficiently attentive to the ramifications of Bailey’s celebrity status for expectations. Bad services (restaurant parlance for off nights) can, and invariably will, happen. Bad food, on the other hand, is a total non-starter from a famous chef’s kitchen, particularly when the kitchen in question is that chef’s only kitchen, as The Grey was for Bailey until L’Arrêt opened in Paris late last year.

The Grey’s food isn’t “bad” in the “Steer clear of aunt Sally’s Jell-O salad at Thanksgiving, it’s really bad” sense of the word. But it’s so wide of the mark for a chef of Bailey’s stature that it may as well be.

At The Grey, dishes are notable only for a uniform lack of depth which, in places, borders on vapidity. A crudo starter recommended by one of two bartenders exemplified the deficiency.

By definition, the fish is the star in crudo. But the accompaniments aren’t mere stage props. They’re supporting actors. It’s a delicate balance, and you can argue for erring on the side of caution: The line between enhancing the fish and overwhelming it is fine indeed. But if the accompaniments are mute, it’s not crudo. It’s sashimi. At The Grey, turnips and bees honey are insipid in their role as adjuncts. And the paper-thin green apple slices draped across the fish aren’t up to the acidity task for crudo.

Fried squash with habanero syrup and farmer’s cheese wanted to be a refined, non-confectionery take on something hoisted from a dirty fryer at a county fair (the dirtier the fryer, the more delicious). Instead, it’s an exceedingly rare exception to the old adage that says “everything tastes better fried.” (Not yellow squash at The Grey, apparently.) There was no evidence of habanero in the syrup drizzle. How one goes about hiding habanero I don’t know, but The Grey’s mastered that vanishing act.

The main — a fresh catch with little neck clams in a curry fumet blanc — would’ve counted as a good entrée at the best restaurant in a town with no good restaurants. In the context of Savannah, and restaurants run by brand name chefs, it was passable, but only barely. Even a butterscotch chess pie — something that can’t help but be rich — somehow felt empty.

The conspicuous absence of flavor at The Grey is, I suspect, correlated to the conspicuous absence of Mashama. She wasn’t there on my first visit, nor on my second. It’s hard to be two places at once, especially when the distance between the two places you need to be is 4,300 miles. But Bailey shouldn’t need to be physically present for The Grey to execute at a high level.

The staff at restaurants associated with chefs of her standing should perform as though she’s there, in the flesh, even if she’s a literal ocean away at L’Arrêt. Every plate that comes out of The Grey’s kitchen is Bailey’s plate. That’s how it works when you achieve her level of success and notoriety. There’s no distinction between you and your kitchen, nor really between you and anyone on your staff. Not in the minds of diners, anyway.

I’m more hesitant than most to put Mashama in a culinary box, which is what we do when we judge The Grey’s plates by how true they are to the idea of American “soul food.” It makes no difference to me whether The Grey’s dishes meet some amorphous definition of that (loaded) term. The Grey needn’t be “soul food,” whatever that means. But it can’t be soulless.

Bailey and Morisano have another name for The Grey’s food: “Port city Southern cuisine.” As the Times wrote last year, documenting Bailey’s quest for success in Paris, that’s a “refer[ence] to Savannah’s history as a port where enslaved Africans were brought and traded alongside goods like rice and spices.”

So it’s fusion cuisine that tells a complex, and at times sordid, story. Not unlike Aquemini which, as Pitchfork put it in a 2022 retrospective, “is many things at once — a psychic liberation from genre, expectations and lingering shreds of convention, a manifesto of self-determination, free expression and a requiem for the enslaved.” “It is funk,” the piece says, “It is soul. It is hip-hop. It is gospel. It is swamp jazz, the blues and remnants of oral tradition.”

In the documentary piece mentioned above, the Times mentions Bailey’s take on Country Captain as exemplary of Port City fusion. “[R]ich, braised chicken with currants and tomatoes deftly speak to Southern American cuisine while also incorporating ingredients like curry powder that made their way from Asia to the South through trans-Atlantic trade,” the piece reads.

Country Captain wasn’t on the menu when I visited The Grey this month. And while some dishes nodded in the direction of the restaurant’s raison d’être — a $32 cornbread dressing with smoked collards and scallops, for example, or a $35 smoked sweet potato with Syrian muhammara — other offerings didn’t even try — Wagyu tartare with capers was a transparent concession to a trendy cliché, and no, frying the capers doesn’t change that.

When The Grey approaches elevated Lowcountry cuisine from another angle — by juxtaposing the overtly humble with the unapologetically pretentious — the pairings feel too obvious. Or anyway less than clever. Hoe cakes with caviar? I’d joke that you may as well put foie gras over grits, but as it turns out, The Grey does just that.

Even the eccentric charm of the valet was tarnished when, as I poked at my chess pie, he strode across the dining area and asked for his tip, explaining that he had to leave early, an absurd decorum breach that he repeated with two other diners, interrupting the latter stages of their meals to collect. I would’ve been indignant, but I was more than ready to leave. I handed him a $20. He handed me my keys. “You’re right up front,” he said.

I ate the rest of the chess pie in one bite, paid the check and left, wishing I’d spent the last two hours making real Savannah memories over a home-cooked plate at someone’s real Lowcountry table instead of playing to my own vacuous pretensions to high society by defaulting to the celebrity chef.

As I pulled away down Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Apple CarPlay picked up right where I’d left off, midway through “Slump.”

As the track winds down, Patton uses the final 20 seconds as a segue. “This is uh… a lil’… tune that we composed back on the first album,” he says, setting up the next song, which begins on day one, literally: “February 1, 1975 — it happened / Was born in West Savannah, way before I started rappin’.”

Placed strategically in the middle of Aquemini‘s tracklist, “West Savannah” reminds listeners that even those capable of conducting a perfect symphony — of creating something that’s simultaneously coherent and infinitely complex — should leave a place at the table for simplicity.

A proudly retro record that’s all Southern and feels like it was recorded four decades previous rather than four years, there are no aliens on “West Savannah.” Just a homegrown hero celebrating his heritage.

The Grey

Aquemini by Outkast