Get your game on. Flip Side will open its doors by the end of March.
The bar/restaurant at 1349 Autumn Avenue, across from Crosstown Concourse, will feature pinball, darts, a fresh bar with fruit cocktails and mocktails, and food. The new establishment (in the space that formerly housed The Doghouzz) is owned by the Tandem Restaurant Partners with Tony and Stephanie Westmoreland and Dr. Michael Muhlert.
Let’s talk about that food.
It’s “a Latin-inspired menu,” says executive chef Jordan Beatty, 28. “My lunch service is mostly geared towards a laid-back kind of quick-ish service where people can come in and make their order and get their food pretty quickly.”
This would especially accommodate people who “have that short-term lunch period” of maybe 30 minutes, he says. “Within 10 minutes or so you’ll have food and the rest of the time to eat and get back to work.”
The lunch menu will include tacos, burrito bowls, salads, quesadillas, and “some of our house salsas and quesos. We’re going to do a rojo, the classic tomato-based salsa, and a verde classico, green with jalapeños, onions, and whatnot.”
Then, Beatty says, “We’re going to elevate and have some dinner entrees that are only available from 5 to 9.”
Beatty, who already has four entrees firmed up, says one of them we’ll be his “Pollo Adobo Blanco,” which is “marinated chicken with a white wine adobo sauce over rice.”
He also will serve red chicken tamales filled with “our house white queso and our salsa verde.”
The Shrimp and Grits includes “Chihuahua cheese chorizo, stone ground grits, white wine, and shrimp covered with adobo butter sauce.”
He adds, “And then we have our premier vegetarian entree: Calabacitas. It means ‘squash’ in Spanish. It’s a squash casserole — green and yellow squash, corn, peppers, onions, mayonnaise, and cotija, a really dry, crumbly cheese like a Mexican version of feta cheese.”
The dish is “browned in the oven. And that’s served in a cast iron skillet — the only entree served in a cast iron skillet.”
All entrees come with Mexican rice, black beans, and pickled taqueria salad: pickled jalapeños, carrots, radishes, and onions made in house.
A Memphis native, Beatty was a sous chef at Caritas Village, sous chef and daytime chef at Tamboli’s Pasta & Pizza, and daytime chef/brunch chef at The Vault.
Now, at Flip Side, Beatty says, “I’m in the kitchen most days. I’ve been doing a lot of menu testing and tasting. I had a chef tasting last week. So, I was preparing for that over the last month, making my food over and over.”
Ben Wilson is Flip Side’s sous chef. “We’ve been going over logistics and setting up the kitchen and doing mock service to get that express idea totally put together so we don’t have anything to bog us down from 11 to 1. And we can fulfill that express idea I want to do.”
He’s excited about Flip Side, which will feature 16 pinball machines. “You come in and you put cash into the token machine. And we have Flip Side-branded tokens. Our logo on each token. That’s what you use to play all the pinball machines.”
David Yopp, Flip Side general manager, pinball aficionado, and partner, owns all the pinball machines. They have the Rush machine, which is “brand new. Just came out a few weeks ago,” as well as Godzilla, “which came out at the end of last year,” Beatty says, as well as “machines from the early ‘70s” and “everything in between.”
Yopp is “so passionate about pinball,” Beatty says. “I didn’t know much about pinball when I got this job. Over the last month and a half I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of pinball information and the history of pinball. And now I’ve played a lot of pinball and definitely enjoy it.
“When I first walked in the building, it just gave me an incredible feeling that everyone in that building was just so excited and wanting to bring together the pinball with the bar. And I was the final piece they got in the kitchen to kind of tie everything together.”
