Dishes at Sage include strawberry and green apple salad, scrumptious burgers topped with flash-fried sage, phyllo battered catfish with Mississippi caviar, fried green tomatoes with kimchi, and egg rolls stuffed with Sunday dinner.
Photographs by Justin Fox Burks.
From our perch at a pub table inside Sage, we watch pizza makers toss dough in the kitchen next door. Through the plate glass window, neon letters also spell Sage in reverse, a reminder to focus back on our menus and the lazy Prosecco bubbles in our pretty cylinder flutes. Around us, the busy restaurant and bar, open since early November, is popping with energy, and the vibe of the place is downright fun.
For chef Eli Townsend, the joie de vivre at Sage builds from the commitment of staff, the synergy of business partners, and his own philosophy that food moves far beyond sustenance. “Food can break down barriers and bring together people of different ethnicities,” he says. “Food is, for me, the universal language.”
Executive Chef Eli Townsend at Sage directs a soul fusion menu of casual comfort food.
Townsend’s own culinary journey started at age 8 with a summertime reading challenge from the Memphis Library bookmobile. “If you read the most books, you could win a bike, so I started checking out cookbooks,” he recalls. (He won the contest, but gave the bike to his brother.) As a young adult, he worked in catering, cooked in Nashville and St. Louis, and eventually returned home, convinced by founder Onie Johns to take over the kitchen at Caritas Village. While working in Binghampton, Townsend admired the creations of the international cooks he met at Kaleidoscope’s incubator kitchen. His love for fusion food grew.
At Sage, Townsend’s first restaurant as executive chef, the menu shifts seasonally to fuse soul food with cooking styles from around the world. The opening menu highlights Asian influences, a decision Townsend made after cooking with his sister-in-law, a Thai chef based in Los Angeles. “I want to take people on a food voyage,” he says, “mixing cuisines and building comfort and flavors.”
Consider dishes like roasted edamame hummus with garlic naan; fried green tomato and kimchi salad — a sassy combination of green tomatoes, squash tapenade, goat cheese crumbles, and kimchi sauce; or the irrepressible Soul Roll, a runaway customer favorite. For this sharable dish, Townsend stuffs egg rolls with fried chicken, turnip greens, and mac ’n’ cheese — a veritable Sunday dinner — and plates the mash-up with a sweet and spicy dipping sauce.
The menu, spread across lunch, dinner, late night, and a wildly popular weekend brunch, offers more familiar fare, as well, including grilled salmon, peach cobbler, a hearty Angus burger, and fried catfish breaded with phyllo dough (love it!) and served with black-eye pea salsa. Up next: Taco Tuesdays, a farmers market special every Saturday night, and new dishes fused with flavors from the Caribbean and Spain.
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94 S. Main St. (901-672-7902) $$
