Savannah is a culinary lover’s dream from an array of world cuisine to its signature eccentric Southern low country dining.
What does it even mean to be a food destination?
Show Caption Hide Caption Have fine dining and good drinks for your date night at The Garage at Victory NorthDine and Dash host Martina Yvette speaks with Chef Todd Harris at The Garage at Victory North about their new menu items and cocktails.Savannah Morning News
This is a opinion column by arts and culture editor Zach Dennis
Stop the presses. Close the polls. Everyone can go home.
In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, I don’t know how official any of these rankings really are. This latest declaration hails from TripAdvisor, a travel aggregate website built on user reviews of destinations with an emphasis on rating hotels, restaurants and things to do in a given city.
Skimming through the site’s methodology, it explains that these rankings are determined by the ratings and reviews of its users in a variety of categories with their “Best of the Best” categories, in which Savannah found itself listed, coming from among the top 1% of their listings.
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I’m sorry to tell you, but the reviewers got it wrong — very wrong.
Savannah is nowhere near the fourth best food destination in the country, much less a top-10 or even top-25 option. To help visualize, Savannah is Harry Styles standing up front and accepting the Album of the Year award at the Grammys with cities such as Nashville, Houston, Chicago and Miami looking on like Beyoncé and Bad Bunny.
I could go on, but punching TripAdvisor is about the same as attacking an A.I. bot. But the ranking does beg the question…
What does it really mean to be a food destination?
Building a local roster
In what is a Savannah staple, we have to look at our sister, Charleston.
For The Food Section founder, regular contributor to the Southern Foodway Alliance and James Beard award-winning food writer Hanna Raskin, it isn’t so easy to just compare the Hostess City of the South with the Holy City.
Raskin came to the Charleston Post & Courier in 2013 after stints writing about food in Dallas and Seattle, and said early on, Charleston began to make a name for itself through its annual Wine and Food Festival. Savannah featured a similar event, but the annual food celebration was shuttered in 2020 and never returned.
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“It really was tourism dollars put in the right place,” she said. “Bringing in influential people, bringing in other chefs and really selling them on the Charleston story. That was hugely helpful in terms of media attention, (but) that’s kind of tricky because you can’t really do that (now). The food world has changed tremendously.”
With that opportunity gone, Raskin said a city like Savannah could follow two other Charleston paths to food prominence. The first, a chef-to-restaurant pipeline.
“You need decent restaurants that are good enough for up-and-coming chefs to get trained in, but not so good that they want to stay there. Charleston had a number of those back in the day like Perdita’s Restaurant and Carolina’s. I don’t know what the analogs are in Savannah, but that’s kind of what you need… a place that’s going to foster more careers.”
Savannah Techs culinary arts program is a two-year program. With the completion of the institute, second-year students will move into the expanded campus building along with baking and pastry arts students and some hotel, restaurant and tourism management students.
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The campus could prove to be a supercharged runway for filtering talent into the Savannah scene and keep “stunting” from occurring.
“I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Zingerman’s (Delicatessen) is,” Raskin said, “and the problem with Zingerman’s is nobody ever leaves… (As the deli grew) they created all of the enterprises any of their employees could ever want and so because of that, Ann Arbor has this really stunted food scene because people aren’t going off on their own.”
Another path to food prominence? A creative collaboration between local farmers and chefs.
“If you get excitement on both sides where farmers are growing what the chefs need, and the chefs are excited to showcase what farmers are growing, that seems to be a good place for a food scene to start,” Raskin said.
In Charleston, it was easy for restaurants to latch onto the seafood options in the Lowcountry, and a stable of auxiliary professionals, like local bread makers, cheese makers, etc., to funnel into the restaurants, elevated the overall product at restaurants across town. “It really is like the old it-takes-a-village thing,” Raskin said.
“I think that’s super helpful in establishing yourself as a food city because as you grow. It’s not one baker but it’s five bakers, but you really need that supply chain in place.”
Vendors such as Auspicious Bakery Company provide bread around town and Russo’s has supplied seafood for generations in Savannah. Folks such as Chef Rob Newton with Fleeting saw an opportunity to expand the portfolio with ventures such as Stevedore Bakery at the Thompson Savannah hotel.
From his background in food destinations such as New York City and Nashville, Newton said he wanted to make available some of the options he grew accustomed to in those places.
“We tried to make the kind of bread that I have in New York or Brooklyn, and globally, these really good sourdoughs, really good laminated doughs,” he said. “That’s not to say that the bakeries here are not awesome. I’m not saying that the same kind of stuff that I wanted and the kind of stuff that I experienced or the places that I thought Savannah would enjoy. I wanted to help have a hand in bringing that here, and I think we did that at Stevedore.”
Newton agrees with Raskin’s point that a true collaboration between farmers and chefs is key, adding that those types of collaborations are already happening. He’s a regular on Saturdays at the Forsyth Farmers Market and has done collaborations, such as last year’s Knead to Know series, with other chefs and farmers.
“Those are culinary, foodie moments that helped make a culinary destination.”
One distinguishing factor that lists such as TripAdvisor’s tend to leave out is the eclectic mix of hole-in-the-wall or off-the-beaten-path options that probably don’t get the attention of national or international publications. These middle- to lower-price tiered restaurants expand the food palette of the city without breaking peoples pocket books. These affordable options are what help line other prominent food destinations such as New York City, New Orleans and Los Angeles, and make food not only quality but also accessible.
“I wrote a book about Southern food, and I’m very interested in immigration patterns and who goes where,” Newton said. “I was in Berlin and I was very interested in Turkish food and recent Syrian immigrants and what they’re doing. So, I go to those places and check out their food. I learn a lot in that regard and…that helps make something a culinary destination.”
Places such as E-TANG off Oglethorpe Avenue is a “very, very legit Chinese restaurant,” Newton said. In Garden City, Pupeseria Jireh has some of “the best pupusas I’ve ever had.”
“Little things like that for people that are interested in (food),” he said. “There’s a lot of fun stuff you can do like that and all these little things add up.”
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