FO O D By L orna Field
Checking in with Ticer and Hudman The award-winning chefs talk about their new restaurant, Bishop, the fire at Hog & Hominy, and more.
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ndy Ticer and Michael Hudman have been busy opening a new restaurant, reacting to a fire at Hog & Hominy, and being honored by the James Beard Awards. Here’s a look at what’s happening with the award-winning chef team.
Hudman: Memphis is always, to us, a place that starts by acknowledging where we come from. French cooking is rooted in that same style of techniques, passed down, done right. It’s about mentorship. These are things that we value in our company. We’re always looking for ways to build our people, and this was a natural entry point. When the idea came to us, it just made sense to flex those old muscles as a callback to where we started. The moment that we saw the space that Natalie Lieberman had designed and the collateral and branding from Loaded for Bear, it clicked. We’d wanted to do a French brasserie for a while, and here it all was, ready to go.
March 19-25, 2020
Ticer: It’s funny. My brother Olivier is from France, and he just happened to be in town the week we soft opened. He told us that, often, brasseries are attached to train stations and breweries, and here we were opening one in a train station. It just made sense. We have our homage to Downtown trattorias at Catherine & Mary’s, our riffs on Southern food and oysters from the fire at The Gray Canary, and then our classic French spot attached to a train station. What was it like opening a restaurant in the Central Station Hotel? Ticer: There are challenges to opening any restaurant, but a restaurant in a hotel is a fun experience. We have to focus on all aspects of the food and beverage, from Eight & Sand and Bishop, to the events in the Grand Hall. The biggest challenge is that we really opened three spaces at once, so there are a lot of moving parts that needed to be focused on all at once.
Hudman: For us, it’s all about assembling the right team who can carry that culture 32 of our restaurants. We want everything to feel like it was paid attention to and
COURTESY OF ENJOYAM
MF: How does your new restaurant, Bishop, complement or contribute to the presence of French cuisine in Memphis?
thought about for our guests, and that takes some time to get right. We opened in the middle of the holiday season, too, which was pretty intense. How did your experience at Chez Phillippe contribute to the development of the menu and culture at Bishop? Ticer: Chez Phillippe was such an amazing experience where we really learned to cook and really understood for the first time what it meant to cook with high standards. Chef Jose Gutierrez taught us so much about how to cook, how to pay attention to the details. A lot of the traditional menu items we first tasted cooking there, and after, when we were in Lyon, we were like, “Oh, this is how that started.” What are some menu recommendations you would make for someone visiting Bishop for the first time? Hudman: That’s always so hard because we love everything. But the tinned seafood is really special and really specific to European cuisine. We have a lot of classic items to French cooking that we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel on, just
Memphis-based restaurateurs Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman (above, left to right); the new Bishop restaurant inside Central Station Hotel (opposite page) make it properly. Salade Lyonnaise, French onion soup, tarte flambée, the raclette. It’s about the classic preparation, and we had fun testing until we had it right. Ticer: I love to start with the grand aioli or the escargot, and the spinalis is beautiful. But there are lots of things. I think go in with an open mind and try things you haven’t heard of. And drink some wine! Ryan Radish, our wine director, really had a field day putting together this 150-bottle, all-French list that is really beautiful and fun to drink from. How does Bishop benefit from being part of the Central Station Hotel?
Ticer: When we first met with McLean Wilson about the hotel and he gave us his vision of it, we were like, yeah, this will be a cool thing to be a part of, a place that celebrates Memphis and really feels local. We really appreciated that McLean wanted us to open our restaurant inside the hotel and not the other way around, a hotel restaurant. It allows us a lot of freedom to do exciting and fun things with the menu. Just like our experience with Ace, there’s a lot of infrastructure that the hotel has that gives us the ability to do things we’ve never done before, including working with these awesome design teams. Because the hotel really wants to function as the living room of South Main, we see a lot of guests from all over, but we’re still a part of the fabric of South Main and the Memphis community, rather than separate from it.
