photo by Steve Conroy
Zayde’s owner Marisa Baggett.
What do kosher New York-style deli meals, wedding cakes, and sushi rolls have in common? All are foods, true, but the common ground doesn’t go much further — until you meet Memphis’ own Marisa Baggett. Throughout a long and varied career, the Mississippi native has dived into each and every food experiment that caught her eye. Baggett puts her eclectic experiences and cooking skills to work as the proprietor of the kosher catering company Zayde’s NYC Deli.
Baggett herself keeps kosher, but when she looked around Memphis for New York-style deli meats, she didn’t see many options. Noticing that everything was imported, she thought, why not create it herself? “When we make pastrami, we start with a brisket,” says Baggett. “Then we brine it and cook it ourselves. That’s New York-style made right here in Memphis.”
photo courtesy marissa baggett
Baggett puts a Southern twist on some of her Japanese creations, such as Pickled Okra Sushi.
Zayde’s was founded last summer, and currently operates out of the Anshei Sphard – Beth El Emeth synagogue in East Memphis. Two separate menus circulate on a regular basis. The artisanal deli menu offers all the kosher deli cuts by the pound you might want: pastrami, corned beef, turkey, and smoked salmon. Baggett has developed other kosher staples as well. Her kitchen churns out plenty of knishes (the traditional Ashkenazi Jewish baked snack) stuffed with potatoes, spinach, and onion, and babkas (enriched sweet bread that has swirls of cinnamon, chocolate, or Baggett’s new mocha flavoring).
One of the most popular items, however, is the challah dog. “It’s an all-inclusive hot dog that’s covered in a really nice sweet bread,” she says, “and it has a pinch of salt on top.”
While the deli menu is popular, her special menu of Shabbat meals is what pushed her to make this a full-time gig. “This really got started because I was working full-time,” says Baggett, “and every week getting ready for Shabbat dinner is like the equivalent of getting home from work on a Friday afternoon and cooking a big Sunday dinner.
“And I thought there had to be a better way. Especially for people like me and my husband, who don’t want to have to buy a full pan of this or a full pan of that just to make dinner for two people. I started the first monthly meals menu in June of last year, and then by the middle of August, I had quit my full-time job as the Judaic Specialist at Temple Israel to continue with Zayde’s.”
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photo courtesy marissa baggett
Chocolate, cinnamon, and mocha babkas.
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photo courtesy marissa baggett
Zayde’s catering platter.
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photo courtesy marissa baggett
Zayde’s pastrami sandwich.
The company’s small crew accepts orders all week until Thursday night, and then begins delivery each Friday. There are also plenty of catering requests for small weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs. Zayde’s also frequently sends condolence meals. “When there’s been a loss in someone’s family, we send meals,” says Baggett. “We also get requests from people saying, ‘I have a relative, or I know someone who is sick, please prepare this and that for them.’”
One of the deli’s quirks is that there’s no phone number to call, a marketing strategy that has worked in its favor. “I’ve noticed there’s been this fun little game in the community where people are saying, ‘Where can I find Marisa’s number?’ And so it kind of becomes this little mystery like, ‘Oh, how can I place an order?’ But you can always reach me by email.
“But also, the other reason is that we spend so much time in the kitchen,” she continues. “I’m in there with the people who help me prep, and we’re really focused on cooking. With hours all over the place, I figured it was much better customer service-wise to keep everything online, and it’s worked out very well for us so far.”
The community response to Zayde’s has been enormous, according to Baggett. Plenty of people are interested in ordering Shabbat meals and deli items by the pound, or signing up for one of Baggett’s … sushi nights? While sushi might seem like a non-sequitur on a kosher deli menu, Baggett is no stranger to new and varied projects.
That type of adventurism can probably sum up her whole culinary career. While attending high school in Starkville, Mississippi, she landed her first restaurant job, joining a small Chinese establishment as a server. From there, she rotated to designing wedding cakes, then to baking full-time, and ultimately opening her own restaurant. “It was a Southern-style bistro,” she says, “with upscale sandwiches and plenty of desserts.”
But it was a chance request from a client that really expanded Baggett’s cooking repertoire. Knowing she offered catering services through the bistro, an acquaintance approached the versatile chef about throwing a sushi party. “I said, ‘Oh yeah, no problem, let’s do it,’” she recalls with a laugh. “But I’d never had sushi before. We didn’t have anything nearby for miles, and there were no good sources on the internet back then for how to do this.” With resources at a minimum, she hit the books at the local university library. But most of the literature covering Japanese cuisine had only a few pages on sushi. “So I had to get creative and make my own stuff.”
“I would say I honor the spirit of Japanese cuisine by focusing on what sushi is supposed to be,” says Baggett. “It’s not ingredient-specific, but using things that are in season and local.
The party went off without a hitch, and soon, other hungry diners were knocking on the door to see if Baggett had any leftovers. A promise to host a monthly sushi night quickly turned into multiple nights per week, and eventually, she decided sushi was her calling. She closed the doors to her restaurant and spent a year at Tsunami in Memphis before packing her bags for the California Sushi Academy in Los Angeles. “Everybody was like, ‘You’re crazy,’” recalls Baggett. “‘You’re a black woman from Mississippi, is this even possible?’”
The answer was an emphatic yes. With only $300 to her name, she started training under two sushi masters, Toshi Sugiura and Nobuo Kishimoto, and several months later became the first female African-American graduate of the school. And while her unique path to the traditional cuisine has given Baggett a distinctive style in how she envisions her sushi rolls, she believes that her approach stays true to the craft’s origin.
“I would say I honor the spirit of Japanese cuisine by focusing on what sushi is supposed to be,” says Baggett. “It’s not ingredient-specific, but using things that are in season and local. In Japan, you would go to the nearest fresh fish market and you would get what they have, and you would use whatever vegetables or pickles that you make. And I feel that I’m honoring that spirit by using what’s available to me in my environment.”
Pressed on what makes up the perfect sushi roll, Baggett points to a basic, yet crucial, ingredient: rice. “The word sushi itself means rice,” she explains. “And so the most important part of any sushi-making process is to make sure you’re cooking the rice properly. You can have the best piece of ahi tuna rolled in, but if the rice is mushy or flavorless, you have to drown it in soy sauce, and you’re really not experiencing the wonderfulness that you could have if the rice were properly cooked.”
While making sushi might seem daunting to beginners, Baggett has written several cookbooks explaining the craft, such as Sushi Secrets: Recipes for the Home Cook and Vegetarian Sushi Secrets: 101 Healthy and Delicious Recipes. After working with Karen Carrier at Do Sushi she pivoted to becoming a traveling itamae (a Japanese word for “cook” that can literally be translated as “in front of the board”). Recalling the lack of information and her late nights in the library, she wants to make sushi more accessible. “The whole point of my first book was to say, ‘You can do this at your house, and here’s how.’”
Baggett’s approach to sushi changes even more when factoring in her kosher base. Shellfish are out, but she wanted to provide people with more options than just imitation crab, tuna, and salmon. “I brought in some of those local elements” she says, “like pickled okra, and other types of Southern-style sushi. When I was younger, before being a vegetarian was as much a thing, the options were always something like, ‘Here’s your vegetarian burger, but it’s just a mushroom.’ So I always try to think of how we can make something more exciting.”
Just like with her menu at Zayde’s, Baggett’s philosophy is all about making the food accessible. She isn’t teaching as many classes while running the deli, but she’s still working to share her experience with Memphis and the Mid-South. There are plans for the deli to eventually open its own brick-and-mortar location. One final mystery remains: Who is Zayde?
“Some people always ask me, ‘Are you Zayde?’ It’s kind of an inside joke for anyone who knows Yiddish,” says Baggett, “since it’s the word for ‘grandpa.’ So sometimes I’ll just go with it and say, ‘Sure, why not, I’ll be grandpa.’ When I was thinking of a name, I wanted it to sound fun, but I also wanted it to sound Jewish without being too hard to pronounce.”
Zayde’s NYC Deli menus can be downloaded at zaydesnycdeli.com. For catering and order inquiries, contact info@zaydesnycdeli.com.
