Sweet Grass chef Ryan Trimm and chef de cuisine Marissa Griffith, pictured below in their refurbished restaurant, steered a new menu that includes seasonal cocktails and small, medium, and large shared plates.
Photographs by Justin Fox Burks.
After yet another day of rain in early May, we stop by Sweet Grass, located near the corner of Cooper and Young. We want soup, not a heavy stew to beckon winter, but something light and bright like spring vegetable minestrone, one of two dozen new dishes on the restaurant’s revamped menu. Along with the soup, we order Tonkatsu sandwiches, Japanese-style pork cutlets, breaded and fried and layered with shaved cabbage and mustard and Kewpie spread.
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General Tso’s cauliflower.
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A Japanese-style pork loin sandwich on no-crust white bread.
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Spring minestrone soup.
Our dinner is superb, although the mix-and-match options seem like a departure from previous Sweet Grass menus. Not so, says Chef Ryan Trimm, who served the now-popular style of shared plates when he opened his signature restaurant in 2010. “The restaurant had gotten further and further away from what we were,” Trimm says. “So, we went back to our roots and our original recipes.”
Sweet Grass staff spent two months developing the new menu, introduced after a week-long renovation by Parker Design Studio to paint, refurbish restrooms, and reset the space with rattan light fixtures, banquettes, and bar tables down the center of the dining room. “We’ve always been a learning kitchen,” Trimm explains. “Everybody had the opportunity to bring something forward, and the menu was more fun to develop that way.”
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To start, cooks studied the restaurant’s old recipe books and videos, looking to adapt the old with the new, explains Chef de cuisine Marissa Griffith. She points to the restaurant’s eponymous shrimp and grits now served with scallops — like the original — and a sublime risotto made with mushrooms, English peas, and a reduction of honey and thyme. “We found the honey thyme reduction in the restaurant’s original duck recipe,” she says.
Along with food, changes at Sweet Grass extend to house-made sangria, specials on the cocktail menu, and more wine and beer on tap. A rotating selection of pintxos (bite- size finger foods) also is in the works, adding to the restaurant’s spontaneity. For Trimm, the restaurant’s new personality is exactly right: “I want Sweet Grass to be a place for people to celebrate, not just because it’s their birthday, but because its Tuesday or Wednesday and they want to hang out.”
