09-08-2024
Chef David Crews
All chefs “like food,” but few have the playful enthusiasm of Chef David Crews. Two minutes after we first met, as he bustled around making last-minute preparations for that night’s Delta Supper Club in Greenville, Mississippi, Crews handed me a crostini topped with local peaches macerated with honey, goat cheese, and slices of two-year-aged ham from the farm of Crews’ friend, Chef Ty Thames, a local restaurateur who’s begun putting up and aging his own ham. Few people still cure their own hams; it’s a lot of time spent for a craft that could leave you, after months or years, with nothing but broken dreams and sour hogflesh, but the freshness of the local product can be worth the gamble. “This ham is just from up the road. If it hadn’t aged right, we couldn’t have done this hors d’oeuvre, but it’s worth the risk for these ingredients,” said Crews.
These luxe ingredients, pampered by the fabled Delta soil, are what draw diners from around the nation (its over 400 members hail from nineteen states) to Crews’ table for the Delta Supper Club. The menus for each members-only event are kept secret until diners arrive, encouraging an adventurous attitude. Crews and partner Stuart Robinson started the club in 2015, after Robinson, not a chef but an enthusiastic foodie, partnered with a chef from New York for a one-off event. Crews had been planning a restaurant called The Revolving Door, a nod to the variable nature of restaurants and their staffs that would allow Crews himself to embrace change, when Robinson approached him about an event series.
The Delta Supper Club strives to find culturally relevant, off-the-beaten-path venues for its events; past events have been held at blues incubator Dockery Plantation, the Baby Doll house in which the eponymous Tennessee Williams melodrama was filmed, and the New Roxy Theatre, a Clarksdale music venue that in a previous incarnation had been one of the first integrated movie theatres in the Delta. Since the food is paramount, these venues are paired with “culturally significant” chefs; one of Crews’ favorites was Miami’s Chef Michelle Bernstein, of mixed Jewish and Cuban heritage. “She brought Cuban flair like you’ve never seen before—and in Indianola, Mississippi.” Every event also features music, a must in the Delta and, according to Crews, an equalizer that brings people together almost as well as food.
That night’s dinner would be a seven course tour-de-force by James Beard Award-nominated Chef Erik Niel of Chattanooga’s Easy Bistro & Bar and Main Street Meats, presented in an art gallery in downtown Greenville and accompanied by three passed hors d’oeuvres and a delightfully lethal honeysuckle-based cocktail. Chef Niel’s excellent menu, a collaboration with Crews, drove home the value of pacing oneself while bringing together well-executed standards (oysters grilled with fresh corn joined a simple salad dressed in a clean, refreshing vinaigrette) with more impish options (a thick pork coppa served as a ham steak instead of the traditional prosciutto-like shavings). My personal favorite was a chilled corn and buttermilk soup, dressed with minced cucumber, bright violet microgreens, and a hearty smear of labneh, the Middle Eastern yogurt dip; guests at the adjacent table, a bit more in their cups, mounted a daring strike to nab an extra, unattended platter of roasted okra. The woman seated catty-corner from me, between enthusiastic bites, commented that she’d never tried a chilled soup before and was surprised by how much she liked it… exactly the broadening culinary treat Crews wanted for his guests.
For our September supper at the West Baton Rouge Museum, Crews will take inspiration from the Delta and the wider world, with appetizers along the lines of hot tamales with fermented hot sauce and chicken-fried pork ribs and courses including pickled shrimp, grilled duck glaze with fig glaze and smashed tomato, pit-roasted pork tenderloin with jalapeno and watermelon-cilantro chimichurr ...
