Photos by Justin Fox Burks
“I wanted Tsunami to be the kind of place where people look at the menu and say, ‘This is exactly what I wanted to eat tonight,’” says Chef Ben Smith, pictured above, about the pioneering restaurant he and his wife, Colleen Couch-Smith, opened 20 years ago in Cooper-Young. Seafood and seasonal ingredients still direct the restaurant’s menus, including current small plates and specials such as warm red cabbage slaw, garlic-chili shrimp, and halibut in lemon-pepper beurre blanc.
By Pamela Denney
Twenty years ago, as Chef Ben Smith prepared to open his dream restaurant in the emerging neighborhood of Cooper-Young, friends and associates balked at his first sample menu. “They said, ‘Dude, you’re in Memphis,’” Smith recalls. “You can’t do a menu that’s all fish.”
Even his business partner at the time, the late Thomas Boggs, encouraged him to locate the restaurant in a more affluent ZIP code out east, but Smith held firm, serving fish with names most customers didn’t know in a Midtown building both quirky and historic. “I knew there would be a learning curve, but people were intrigued and excited,” Smith says about Tsunami, named Best New Restaurant and earning multiple awards for Best Seafood in subsequent years.
Along with seafood, other signature influences soon emerged, such as small plates built around seasonal ingredients, a focus Smith favored from his work with Jeremiah Tower, a pioneer of California cuisine with his San Francisco restaurant, Stars. “It was the most influential job in my career, and I continue to draw on my experience there,” Smith says. “What I learned from Jeremiah is a sense of place, and the seasonality of fresh ingredients from where you are.”
Smith’s love for Asian cooking and his three-year stint cooking seafood on the Hawaiian island of Lanai also steered Tsunami’s Pacific Rim influences, then and now. At a recent dinner, beautifully plated dishes are shareable, deeply flavored, and exciting to eat: warm shredded red cabbage in a merlot-colored mound with blue cheese and walnuts; halibut and roasted tomatoes with lemon-pepper beurre blanc; cold sesame noodles both spicy and sweet; and garlic-chile shrimp, served sizzling hot in a mini skillet.
“We have staying power and consistency and so much energy thanks to our team,” Smith says, calling Chef de Cuisine Donny Graham and Sous Chef Kevin Sullivan the restaurant’s creative backbone and crediting general manager Colleen Couch-Smith for her multiple roles.
Looking ahead, the couple’s purchase of Tsunami’s 5,000 square-foot building is reenergizing a future vision with many possibilities, including an intimate chef’s table in the restaurant’s kitchen. More immediately, look for a new casual concept rolled out in the restaurant’s south dining room and cooking classes come winter. A dinner series in July also features former Tsunami chefs who now operate their own restaurants in California, New York, and Arkansas.
Tsunami, 928 S. Cooper. (901-274-2556) $$
