Tyler Plagmann originally wanted to be a comic book artist.
“I had several characters,” he says. “I even pursued it a little bit more when I was cooking. I created a series with a chef who fought demons from hell.”
The chef’s name was Jim, says Plagmann. “It was just an amalgamation of many different people I thought an amazing chef could have been.”
Plagmann has become Jim in real life (minus the demons). A veteran chef of fine dining restaurants, he is now executive sous chef at The Peabody, as well as executive chef of the hotel’s Chez Philippe restaurant, which recently reopened after being closed since the pandemic.
Cooking wasn’t the first career for Plagmann, who is from Evansville, Indiana. “Fourteen years ago, I was a welder. I used to weld when I was younger — weld on barges.
“Because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I was just stumbling through life as most people were at that age. I was gaining new and exciting experiences. And it was a dangerous thing to learn.”
A sous chef friend at a resort asked him if he wanted a job, and Plagmann went to work as a dishwasher and pantry/garde manger cook at the resort. “It was the first time in my life I was never bored.
“I’ve never seen a job where people can just create something. Just whatever they want to do. And you’re constantly tasting. And there’s fire, knives, and yelling.”
Plagmann, who eventually rose to executive sous chef, worked at restaurants in Vermont, Boston, Portland, and Nashville before moving to Memphis.
Memphis “felt more like home than Nashville ever could. Maybe it’s just due to my upbringing and surroundings growing up, but you could see there was a lot of life in the structures, the buildings. There’s beautiful murals. Sun Studio. It’s all there. My driver picked me up at the airport and he was playing blues.”
In his Chez Philippe position, Plagmann says, “I create the menu through the collaboration between myself and my sous chef. This is the first time that The Peabody has officially ever had a tasting menu inside Chez Philippe.”
The restaurant now has a “more global-style tasting menu,” Plagmann says.
“We have a 10-course tasting menu. So, you’re getting the smaller, more flavorful, more intricate types of food, as opposed to the fine dining we did in the past.”
The menu includes an amuse-bouche snack, a bread course, a vegetable course, a fish/seafood course, an intermezzo, two meat courses, and petit fours. “You also get a take-home of bananas Foster banana bread.”
The Peabody wanted Chez Philippe’s menu “to be more modern.” That means, “French techniques, but with Asian and Nordic influences.”
The next menu, which will begin November 24th, includes “more fermentations. More Nordic-style plating with French and Asian ingredients.”
Plagmann puts a lot of emphasis on vegetables and their different preparations. The coho salmon is grilled on a yakitori grill and basted with a fermented satsuma glaze.
He plans to change the menu “every two to three weeks. We already started working on the menu after this menu.”
Plagmann worked fast after he got to Memphis. “Basically, in the span of a few weeks, I had to build my team, create a new menu, get plates, bowls, equipment, learn about the city. It’s a completely new, foreign city to me.”
The back, as well as the front of the house, had to work fast. Plagmann had to get acquainted with “local products, vendors, farms in a limited amount of time to open up Chez Philippe and present a tasting menu. It really was about two to three weeks.”
Food and beverage management had to build a team of servers and get everything going in a very short amount of time.
Chez Philippe reopened October 20th. “Every review we get, it’s a little overwhelming. It’s a very humbling experience to see just how much people have really taken to the food that we are creating and the service we are offering.”
