Transcript

Location: 1217 Caledonia Street

Adrian Lipscombe: 

My name is Adrienne Lipscombe. I’m a chef, and I’m standing at 1217 Caledonia St. The awning says Root Down Yoga, but in our windows, it says Uptowne Cafe. So, we have a yoga studio on top to the restaurant. You can see what’s happening. You can see the smiling people. I remember the day when I said I wanted to take off the bread and I want to add grits. If you wanted toast, that was going to be a different charge. Because I was like the way pricing goes as a chef, you couldn’t really justify raising a basic meal price of eggs, bacon, and toast for what our bread was worth. And I remember my staff looking at me and gasping. “I don’t think that’s going to be a good idea.” And I said, “Look, if people don’t know grits. This is an opportunity to really expand what grits are, and then people who don’t like grits usually just never had really good grits. That’s usually is is the saying is just that the grits that they had weren’t really good. And I promise you, when those grits come out, they’re gonna be the best grits you’ve ever had!” and when we switched that dish, it was received very well. I was hesitant to think that people were really going to want to try it, but they did, and they loved it. And from there we added shrimp and grits to our menu, which became one of our star dishes. We were a place that cooked from scratch. We had a wall in our prep kitchen that was literally shelves from floor to ceiling of spices, and I think that’s what kind of made us different. Everybody was using the same product, and a lot of people didn’t know how to cook from scratch. Even interviewing was kind of our number one question because that’s all I knew how to do. I mean, I could order a soup. I could order a biscuit mix. But it wouldn’t be me.