This seasonal dinner series is a home for acclaimed chefs, young restaurant workers, foodies, and more
We thought the rain might come any minute.
The sky had been suggesting—threatening, even—all damn day. Earlier, I’d run my first half marathon on the banks of the Mississippi. I was ravenous. The heavens held for me then, and I was hoping they would hold for us now, as over a hundred of us lined up deep in an old railway switchyard.
When the sky finally did give in, no longer able to hold back its warm torrent, we saved handmade paper menus from their demise on the long line of tables that stood set in the gulch of the switchyard. Beneath the scant cover of the awning, we stood with the blue cardstock tucked under our jackets, sipped our drinks, and made friends out of strangers, watching the water make a forceful wall just beyond our shoulders.
We were all here for dinner, though none of us knew what to expect.
We had no connection to each other except that we all cared about food enough to spend our entire night in this strange yard with these strange people, trying to make familiarity out of the opaque.
We moved the tables inside and huddled together. We were all here to make sense of something—this place. We were here for Etowah.
The Muskogean word etowah means “place” or “town.” It’s the word that hospitality veteran Josh Conley and chef Cole Jeanes chose for their dinner series, which began in 2020. The first iteration of the dinner series was held in a soybean field in rural Arkansas. Cole prepped that evening and cooked over open fire. It was their first time doing anything like it. For the first few times, it was mostly a friends-and-family affair.
“We were just kind of trying to figure out what it felt like, and having fun with it,” Josh says. “And we did several of those before we said, ‘You know what? This could be kind of be cool to do the same concept, but in town.’”
Josh and Cole put one together, expecting to sell 40 tickets or so. Instead, they sold out—over 100 tickets.
“The entire idea was just to bring in people who we were inspired by and put on a really unique event,” Josh says. “We try really hard to not make it feel like a wine dinner.”
So far, Etowah dinners have been cooked, served, and eaten in the likes of a 1920s parking garage, the basement of an abandoned strip club, and an artist’s studio.
Those cooking the food—the guest chefs—have come from all over the United States, from as close as Jackson, Mississippi, and as far as San Francisco.
Josh and Cole are on their eighth official dinner in the series—two full years. There are four dinners a year, one for every season.
The concept is built around each guest chef interpreting and translating their perception of season through food.
They serve their concepts in courses at lengthy tables while they explain each dish to the hungry, jubilant crowd. The wine flows freely alongside each dish. As the dinner goes on, the din and chatter grow louder, the eyes and mouths in the crowd become more animated. Strangers sitting next to one another become friends.
All is possible because of food that unlocks nostalgia.
“It takes a special type of person who’s adventurous enough to take on this type of challenge,” Josh says. “I ask them to build it wholly off of food memory.”
He pushes the visiting chefs to lean into moments in their childhood when food played a pivotal role—to remember and reimagine the place and time in vivid detail: “What is it? What texture is it? What does it smell like? What does it feel like?”
Laurence Faber, executive chef and owner of Potchke—a dairy-forward Jewish deli and bakery in Knoxville—orchestrated Etowah’s dinner series number five.
“I’m in the process of opening a dinner restaurant, and we don’t have a name yet for it. And we’ve just been hitting hurdle after hurdle,” Laurence says. He wanted to open his dinner concept before Potchke even opened in 2022. Potchke is Yiddish for “fussing around in the kitchen.”
“We opened up Potchke to mess around and do a pop-up while we’re waiting for the dinner restaurant to open,” Laurence says. “And now the dinner restaurant still hasn’t opened.”
Laurence brought some of his brimming dinner ideas to fruition at his edition of the dinner series: a fine-dining Ashkenazi meal. There was Ukrainian shchaveloviy borscht made with Appalachian sorrel; chraime, a spicy Libyan trout stew with tomatoes, served with sunflower seed tahini; and, for dessert, Ukrainian varenyky cheese dumplings with a strawberry sauce and sour cream.
He brought a sous chef with him to help execute the dinner, but the hands of an ever-growing team of young hospitality professionals brought it to life.
“I’m just like a little history book of Jewish food,” Laurence says.
“I love seeing all the young cooks there, coming to learn, asking questions. That’s what I was like, you know, eight years ago as a young cook, working with guest chefs.”
As Etowah has grown from the soybean fields to the city, it has amassed its own regular crew—all of whom are eager to learn and grow within the industry, but also help cultivate the growth of the industry in Memphis.
“We’ve added so many cooks and front-of-house people to help. What we’re starting to see is that this is much bigger than we thought,” says Cole.
Etowah is carving an avenue for local service industry workers looking to learn and grow in their careers, Cole explains. Instead of having to pay out of pocket for unpaid stages in restaurants overseas, they can learn from guest chefs right here at home.
“It’s like these little bitty seeds that get planted that could blossom into something huge down the road for these younger people that are cooking with us,” Cole says. “I’m just excited that they get to pick up those traits and use them in their day-to-day life as they cook.”
Joshua Scott is in his first year in the industry. He’s fresh out of culinary school, having transitioned into the culinary arts from coffee. He wanted to work at Kinfolk—the Harbor Town restaurant Cole owns—but didn’t have any experience working in a kitchen. So before Cole committed to hiring him, he told Joshua to give an Etowah dinner a try. Joshua walked into Ysaac Ramirez garnishing 100 plates with tiny flowers.
He was hooked from the get-go.
“There were a lot of people that were talking me through things, and teaching me,” Joshua says. “There’s so much care put into every single aspect of every single dish. And to be able to do that fast and learn every step of the way—it was fascinating to me.”
Joshua works the line at Kinfolk now, which he loves. He says working Etowah dinners throughout the year refreshes him and augments his everyday work.
“It taught me how to be particular, and I’m learning from people who own restaurants in all of the US, and who all have different standards, but all of their standards are equally high. They just do things very differently,” he says.
He notes Laurence’s dinner as a particularly inspirational one.
“He was just so chill and relaxed and present,” Joshua says. “It’s such a quality of food that I’ve never tasted before. It’s absolutely unreal.”
Though he’s not quite ready to share it yet, Josh Conley says there are big things on the horizon for Etowah that he hopes will bring even greater opportunities for hospitality work in Memphis. Just as Etowah has created a sense of place for its dinner guests, he wants to see it evolve to cultivate a greater sense of place here, at home, for the people who make its blood flow.
“We’re getting to a point now where it’s got its own heartbeat and another group of people who are shepherding it into places that are really interesting and fun,” he says. “They want to do it because they want to be a part of it. And that’s, that’s just really awesome. That tells me that we’ve got something really special.”
Joshua Carlucci is a food writer and professional cook from rural Central California. He is a Memphis transplant by way of New Orleans and New York City. He has a BA in English from UC Berkeley, a culinary diploma from the Institute of Culinary Education, and is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Memphis. @joshuadcarlucci
Jordan Finney is a photographer and cinematographer specializing in commercial work, narrative, and branded content. @robertjordanfinney