Walt Stallings describes his first cooking job as super Southern. “My first job was at a Waffle House,” says Stallings, who was a teenager at the time. “I worked the graveyard shift. I wish I’d kept a notebook that year. I might have a book out now.”
Stallings, who was a short-order cook, says. “My friends would come in after punk rock shows. And I thought it was cool that I could feed them.”
Born and raised in Memphis, Stallings, 38, moved to Chicago for seven and a half years. He’s now back home and working as the executive chef at Josephine Estelle, the new Andrew Ticer/Michael Hudman restaurant slated to open Memorial Day week at 6695 Poplar Avenue.
Growing up, Stallings and his family were into music. He and his mom played drums and his dad played the saxophone. “I grew up in a house that always had jazz, funk, rock, and Memphis soul music playing.”
Stallings was also a big eater. “My mom begrudgingly cooked every night. She would do it. She hated cooking, but she appreciated food. She liked listening to punk rock, playing drums, and doing karate. She was not into cooking at all. But when I first started cooking, she thought that was really cool. She loved that I had an interest in it.”
His father exposed him to “different cuisines.” While Stallings was at his drum lessons, his dad picked up Ethiopian food at Kwik Chek or something different from another restaurant.
It was the “older generation of women” in his family who were the “super good cooks.” They cooked “all Southern foods — Mississippi Delta cuisine” from scratch. “Fried chicken, biscuits, strawberry shortcakes, Mississippi mud pie.”
Stallings considers the old The Grove Grill as the first serious restaurant he worked in. “I learned a ton of technique. A lot of how to conduct myself in a professional kitchen.” Chef/owner Jeffrey Dunham and Josh Perkins taught him the basics. “Things as simple as how to season a salad properly. How to really control heat on the eye of the stove.” He also learned how to conduct himself in a kitchen. “The ‘Yes, chef,’ ‘No, chef’ vernacular,” he says.
“After that, I went to Alchemy, which had just opened. I liked the idea of working in Midtown, which, to a kid who grew up in East Memphis, was where I thought everything was happening.” As he eventually became lead line cook, he learned a lot from chef Nick Seabergh, including “the joy in professional cooking and the joy of learning about the roots of the dishes I was making.” Seabergh was “a huge influence” on him. “His knowledge of Creole, Cajun, and regional Southern cuisine really blew my mind.”
But Stallings wasn’t interested in cooking as a career. He was also in the Memphis punk rock scene. “I played drums for a band, The Angel Sluts. I played in The Drawls with Ben Abney. Years later, I played in Hardaway.”
He also loved to write short stories and poems. He wrote profiles of cooks and dishwashers he worked with.
Eventually, Stallings moved to Chicago for graduate school in rhetoric at DePaul University. He met executive chef Chris Thompson when he walked in Coda di Volpe and asked if he could stage (“stahj” — work without pay). Thompson, who had worked at the prestigious A16 restaurant in San Francisco, told him, “You’re from the South, so you probably know how to cook meat. You’re on the grill tonight. We got over 300 on the books.”
Stallings rose to the occasion. “I staged for that one night. And then he hired me at the end of the shift.”
Later, Thompson invited Stallings to work with him at his new French bistro, Lardon. When Thompson moved to Telluride, Colorado, to open The National restaurant, Stallings moved from being sous chef to executive chef at Lardon. Thompson inspired him to become a professional chef, Stallings says. “Once I worked with him and saw the way he ran a kitchen, I knew it was something I wanted to do.”
They still keep in touch. “Oh, yeah. I text him every day.”
Stallings, who was “bummed” when Thompson left, eventually left Lardon and got a job at a Michelin-starred Korean restaurant, Parachute, “to see if I still had the passion for it.” He then “hopped around to a couple of different Chicago restaurants,” including an Indian restaurant, Superkhana International, before returning to Lardon for a year.
Feeling homesick one night, Stallings sent a telegram to Trevor Anderson, the culinary director for the Andrew Michael restaurants. “I knew who they were. I owned their cookbooks.”
Hudman called and said he was interested in talking to him about a new restaurant he and Ticer were opening. “Once I came down here and spent three days with those guys, I knew it was a good fit. I wanted to work with those guys. Besides some very similar influences in our cooking, I think the one thing we really shared that stuck out to me was this deep love of Memphis. Here are two people who’ve had their whole career here. They could have left and gone to a bigger culinary scene, but they wanted to do what they’re doing here.”
Stallings moved back to Memphis last January. “I believe in what we’re here doing here.” His wife, Diana Ramirez, also believes in it, working alongside Stallings in production and as lead pasta cook at the restaurant.
The fare at Josephine Estelle is “very Italian American with the emphasis on very high-end versions of red sauce classics.”
Stallings is glad to be back home. Memphis is considered to be “a boogie man” to some people, he says. “They don’t understand it. Don’t understand the deep roots of our community, don’t understand the deep love and the deep hurt that is ever present here.”
Stallings is also excited about getting to hire “a bunch of cooks from a lot of different restaurant backgrounds. I get to teach them the technique. How to conduct themselves in this kitchen. Let them get to be a part of something they can be proud of.”
