Welcome back to Savannah Flavors, our weekly newsletter bringing you the latest delicious details from Savannah’s culinary scene every Thursday.

Here is what’s on the menu today:

• Appetite Awaits: Savannah Restaurant Development Series 🌃

• The Taco Affair team unveils Savannah's tastiest dining spots 🌮🍻

• Whip Up Pad Thai at Home with This Recipe 🍲

• Uncle June's x Late Air: Seafood and Seasonal Produce Pop-Up 🍅

APPETITE AWAITS

Auspicious Baking Co. moves into build-out phase at Turner Creek restaurant 🥐☕️

Even though we all now know that there really is no ‘downtime’ in Savannah’s tourism trade, summer understandably remains a little slower in the local restauration realm. Until the temperatures drop and the eatery activities rise, Savannah Flavors Main Dish pieces will update pending projects and developments to whet our collective appetites in the Appetite Awaits Series.

In so many ways, Savannah is really a big town more than it is a small city. No place is too far away, and wherever we go, we see friends or familiar faces, which is nice. That also means that good news travels fast, bad news even faster, and gossip is a brushfire.

For more than a year, cars cruised over the Turner Creek Bridge, drivers and passengers stealing glances at the expansive restaurant property that lay fallow following the permanent closure of Paula Deen’s Creek House in January of 2023.

Cue the collective hope, wonder, and speculation. After all, in an area surrounded by water, there is an inexplicable drought of waterfront dining in the 314-blank-blank.

On March 19, Katie Bryant and Mark Ekstrom put eager and earnest conjecture to rest, posting on the socials that Auspicious Baking Co. had, indeed, embarked on their homegrown enterprise’s next chapter with the purchase of the 104 Bryan Woods Road property.

“We actually went under contract at the beginning of November last year, the day before Mark’s birthday,” Bryant said. “I remember we did our closing paperwork on my birthday in March.”

Going in on a full-scale restaurant is the double-birthday present to beat all.

“It was a long stint to get to that finish line, but we were pretty happy to make that happen,” she added, humbly not acknowledging that faithful fans of their scratch-made breads, confections, croissants, and pastries are over the moon pie.

“We hope to be able to start running holiday pre-orders over there in November, if everything falls into place,” Ekstrom shared. “We certainly know we will be needing the refrigeration space.”

True that. Islands Expressway is going to need another lane. 🚙

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CHEF’S CRAVINGS

A Taco Affair - Jason Fizzarotti & Mike Johnson

Each week, I ask the folks behind the phenomenal food at our favorite places around Savannah these same simple questions:

When you are not in your restaurant kitchen, where do you go out to eat and what do you order?

On July 24, A Taco Affair will celebrate its first birthday, the friendchise of a New Jersey-born taqueria-bar brand brought to the 912 by co-everythings Jason Fizzarotti and Mike Johnson and business partner Brian Garbrandt. Fizzarotti and Johnson offer up this week’s Chefs’ Cravings, but be sure to stop by their Georgia-Mex Montgomery Street resto to wish them a ‘happy birthday’ between bites of a yuca stack 🎂

JF: It’s funny. If other places I go to have tacos, I like to try out theirs and see where we stand up against our ‘competition’ and to see if there’s anything we can be doing better. Not just here but anywhere. When I was in Hawaii, everywhere I went, I was eating fish tacos. Once we moved down here, we’d go to Bull Street [Taco]. We went to Tacos + Tequila to check them out.

MJ: I like grits, so when I moved to the South, I wanted to find the best place to get some grits. I’ve had the Bowl o’ Soul at Crystal Beer Parlor and then at Nectar in Bluffton.

JF: I like Nectar. That place is good. What did I get the last time we were there? I had this monstrosity of a sandwich, an enormous chicken sandwich

MJ: Yeah, they do it right 🍗

JF: My whole family loves it. One night, we were going out to eat in Old Town, and we were going to Nectar. When we got there, they were closed for a private event, and the kids were all, “Oh man!” But we ended up going to Local Pie, just down the street. Being from the New York-New Jersey area, we hold pizza at a different level 🍕 Their garlic knots, they call them Deez Knots … (pause for puerile chuckles) … I thought they were phenomenal.

MJ:Collins Quarter, I’ve never been disappointed there. I know that they’re a staple. They’re not a hidden gem. I’m not teaching anybody anything new, but I like it. Usually breakfast or lunch, something with grits in it. Everywhere I go down here now, I get grits.

And for a special occasion?

JF: I haven’t had a date night in over a year!

MJ: I had come down three months early, before we opened this place, so I was down here from May to August. My wife came down sometime in July, without the kids, and we stayed in Savannah for a night and went to The Olde Pink House. That place has been around forever, they never change their menu, but I Googled it and saw that they were known for their pork chop. It was awesome! The food’s really good. The atmosphere there, the ambience is so cool 🍸 I was sitting there eating in what was somebody’s bedroom. They’ve got the tableside singer. Really, really cool. I would go back there.

-Neil Gabbey

TRIED, TASTED, TRUE

Pad Thai

THE STORY BEHIND THE RECIPE

I freely and fully admit that I am not a professional chef. I am just a guy who has enjoyed being in his home kitchens for the last 30 years, trying and tinkering. By nature, I am cheap, and I like to figure out how to do a thing myself.

Remind me to tell you about the pool that I built during the Summers of COVID.

My estimation of most Asian restaurant cuisine, not only in and around Savannah, is smugly on the record in that it galls me to pay upwards of $15 for a plate of rice or noodles flecked with some veg and six pieces of protein. That written, my wife and I remain firm fans of Fire Street Food because the prices are appropriate, the portions are ample, and the teriyaki beef and gang leuring (yellow curry) are reliably phenomenal.

Otherwise, I (chop)stick to my own admittedly complacent contention: learn to make Asian cuisine at home because most standards are cheap and quick to prepare.

Back in Baltimore, Asia Food, a retail-wholesale market with the unimaginative yet spot-on name, was a mile south of our house. Maybe a half-dozen times a year, I would visit Mom and Pop and replenish my pantry with hoisin sauce, noodle nests, rice, rice wine vinegar, sesame seeds, soy sauce, and wonton wrappers 🍶 Bottles of fish and oyster sauces, mirin, Shaoxing wine, and sriracha, and a jar of sambal oelek might last me a year or more because a little of each goes the proverbial long way.

Here in Savannah, shopping at Chinatown Market has been an even more frequent stop on our way home from Kroger, and last week, we went into the newly opened Enson Market to check it out. The bean sproutslooked beautiful. I bagged up a couple cups, found a package of tamarind paste, and added pad thai to the week’s menu.

Honestly, I cannot recall when or where I first had Thailand’s eponymous stir fry, and over the last three decades, I have made it at home versus eating it at a restaurant in a 20-to-1 ratio, the latter happening perhaps twice. I have a feeling that Cook’s Illustrated supplied my recipe’s roots, and its ‘parent’ America’s Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook contains two very similar sets of steps.

Because I have the majority of the ingredients on hand, I could make pad thai more often, but I tend toward even simpler stir frys: chicken and baby bok choy, beef and broccoli, Mongolian anything 🥦

Sprouts now in hand, I already had a half-pound of medium rice noodles—linguine-width, if you will—plus all of the Asian accoutrements and fresh produce at home: cilantro, eggs, garlic, limes, peanuts, radishes, and scallions.

Some sort of decent shrimp seems always to be on special at Kroger, so a pound put me back seven bucks. A brick of extra firm tofu: not even $2. For just over a ten spot, this recipe makes four huge portions and is a one-wok meal, which leads to the laborious bit: preparation is key.

Making the sauce ahead of time is a cinch, even if finding tamarind paste or purée is anything but. Most Asian grocery stores have the former, and it is relatively available on Amazon. The paste requires steeping in boiling water and straining, but it can be frozen for eons.   

Before your rice noodles are sitting in boiling water, get all of the ingredients ready to wok, lined up in bowls near the stove. Once the oil is in, dinner will be served in about 10 minutes.

Tofu is not necessary, but its addition makes the meal go further. Feel free to drop it and add another pound of shrimp or replace all of the shellfish with chicken. If you like tofu, I recommend cutting, drying, marinating, and baking the pieces before they are tossed into the pad thai because they will be, at first, less likely to break apart.

For service, I put leftover bowls of cilantro, peanuts, scallions, and sprouts on the table so that any or all can be added with a squirt of fresh lime juice.

Obviously, if you do not prepare Far Eastern cuisine at home often, attempting any Asian recipe is going to require an initial investment in the aforementioned odds and ends. Once they all have their rightful places in your fridge and pantry, you will fire up the wok frequently. 

-Neil Gabbey

THE RECIPE

HARD GOODS

• 2-3 tablespoons tamarind paste (not purée)

• 2 tablespoons white sugar

• 1 tablespoon brown sugar

• 8 ounces rice noodles (sticks or linguine-width)

• 1 pound (or more) medium (or large) shrimp

• 1 block extra firm tofu

• 1 large shallot, minced

• 3 garlic cloves, minced or pressed 🧄

• 3 radishes, sliced into thin coins

• 3 cups bean sprouts

• ½ cup (or more) unsalted roasted peanuts 🥜

• ¾ cup scallions, sliced on the bias (½-inch pieces)

• ½ cilantro, rough chopped 🌿

• 1 lime, cut into wedges

• Salt, to taste

WET GOODS

• ¾ cup boiling water, plus more for the noodles

• ¼ cup fish sauce 🐟

• 1-2 teaspoons oyster sauce 🦪

• several tablespoons vegetable (or peanut) oil, used separately

• 1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar

• 3 large eggs, beaten 🥚

DO THIS

1. For the tofu (optional): drain and slice into half-inch squares or rectangles

   • Place the pieces on a sheet pan lined with paper towels (two layers)

   • Lay more paper towels (two layers) over the pieces and top with another sheet pan

   • Weigh the top pan down with bricks or heavy cans and set in the fridge for at least an hour and up to eight hours

   • Whisk together 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine, 1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon honey or maple syrup, 1 teaspoon sambal oelek, 1 teaspoon sesame oil, ½ teaspoon granulated garlic, and ½ teaspoon ground ginger

   • Put the dried tofu pieces in sealable food storage container and pour the marinade over them

   • Refrigerate for at least an hour and up to twenty-four hours, occasionally turning the container over

   • Preheat an oven to 400° F

   • Line a baking sheet with parchment paper

   • Arrange the tofu pieces in one layer and bake for 20-25 minutes, turning over once halfway through

   • Set aside

2. For the sauce: put the tamarind paste in a bowl and pour the boiling water over it 

   • Allow it to sit for 30 minutes, breaking it up and occasionally mashing it with a fork

   • Strain the tamarind sauce and discard the leftover seeds and fibers

   • Into the reserved tamarind sauce, whisk the sugars, fish and oysters sauces, 2 tablespoons of oil, and rice wine vinegar

   • Set aside 

3. For the noodles: put the noodles in a large bowl

   • Cover entirely with boiling water

   • Let sit for 10 minutes

   • Drain the noodles and set aside

4. Heat 1-2 tablespoons of oil in a wok or large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat

5. Add the shrimp and a dash of salt and allow them to cook for about 1 minute

6. Stir the shrimp and let cook for another 30 seconds (up to a minute)

7. Set aside in a bowl covered with foil

8. Add another 1-2 tablespoons of oil to the wok (skillet), now over medium heat

9. Sautée the shallot, moving it around, for about 1 minute

10. Add the garlic and sautée for another 30 seconds

11. Add the eggs and stir constantly until they are scrambled but not dry, about 30 seconds

12. Add the radishes and sautée for another minute

13. Add the drained (softened) noodles and toss the combine

14. Pour in the sauce and toss until the noodles are evenly coated

15. Add the cooked shrimp and roughly half of the sprouts,peanuts, and scallions and cook for about 3 minutes, tossing constantly

16. Remove from the heat and serve with the remaining sprouts, peanuts, and scallions, plus cilantro and lime wedges

BEEN THERE. ATE THAT.

Uncle June's x Late Air Pop-Up 🐟🍝

At this point, it seems like dining out in Savannah could be done entirely by a game plan of pop-ups. 

You do not need a special reason to go to Late Air, for either sips or bites or both, but if Reid Henninger brings his Uncle June’s brand back anytime soon, ink the date on your comestibles calendar.

I happened to bump into Henninger at Whole Foods a few days the Saturday prior, and after I ranted about the Orioles’ woeful pitching, he reminded me that he would be cooking dinner at Late Air on June 8.

My wife was heading out of town on Wednesday, so if we ate pan bagnats and sweet potato chips on Sunday and Tuesday, Henninger’s Uncle June’s x Late Air “fancy feast” of “seafood delights” would give us a nice night out before her trip 🌃

How wonderful when whims pay off.

Already guilty of burying the lede, I pause for a moment to express sincerely that this dinner was the best we have enjoyed in Savannah in the last five years, at least, and ranks as a top five in our decade in town. 

As hosts for the evening, unparalleled supporters of the local pop-up movement, and marvelous restaurateurs in their own right, Late Air’s Madeline Ott and Colin Breland are exceptional and then some. 

What is more, every bite Henninger and his team cooked up was scrumptious—perfect pairings of seafood and fresh seasonal produce in bright and light plates full of flavors fit for warm weather. While his Uncle June’s brand serves sandwiches, salads, and sides by day from the permanent container shop in Starland Yard, this event featured fish-forward fare with four small plates and four mains, each starring something from the sea 🐟

“I like to eat a little lighter than the average guy,” Henninger said of this menu’s concept, “and I like to serve food in great abundance. When you have light food, you can eat more of it.”

That we did. 🥂

Though the afternoon’s thunderstorm had passed, we opted not to walk the four blocks over to Late Air. We parked on Bull and were the first in line before Breland opened the door and welcomed us and a few more folks. By just a few minutes after five o’clock, only a few bar seats remained.

I can only imagine that every dish was superb, but I must say that my wife and I ordered well, giddily sharing four items.

The Yukon Gold potato bread was one of the best breads we have eaten out in Savannah, four thick crusty rustic slices whose chewy-soft crumb contained occasional bits of soft spud. The woefully underappreciated anchovy was blended with chives into the best of butters.

Thankfully, the heirloom tomatoes came out at the same time as the bread, meaty slabs of brick-red beasts dotted with halves of gold and red cherries, all atop the revelatory tonnato, a tuna-packed aioli, finished with cream, that needs to be our collective main mayo.

The New England-style crab roll was clearly a nod to Henninger’s Baltimore roots, flaky and lumpy crab meat slathered in dressing flecked with fresh jalapeño slivers for a little crunch and kick and dusted with Old Bay, all overstuffed into sesame-seeded potato bread slitted and grilled like a proper New England bun 🦀

More tender tomatoes, these cured, mixed with fish jus to make an orangey, unctuous, and uniquely delicious broth for the bluefin tuna tortelloni. Eight plump pouches, stuffed with what the chef called a “tuna meatloaf” blend of bluefin, egg, garlic, onions, Parmesan, whipped pork fat, and Henninger’s “secret mushroom seasoning.”

Our superb server, Mike, must have thought we had lifted each plate to our mouths and licked them clean.

A couple years ago, Henninger prepared a pop-up held at Common Thread, and this was his first event under his Uncle June’s moniker. Let us all hope that is not the last.

-Neil Gabbey