COURTESY NEW SOUTH RESTAURANT GROUP
Meet the New South Restaurant Group The Crescent City Grill opened along with the Purple Parrot Café as the Purple Parrot Grill, as a lowerprice option for diners. After realizing the two names only confused patrons, St. John changed the name to the Crescent City Grill and adopted the New Orleans-inspired seafood-rich menu it offers today. The Mahogany Bar (or The Hog as many locals call it) opened in
your growth as a chef?
™ How did you get into writing cookbooks? Here’s the deal: I’m a mediocre chef, an average writer and a good restaurateur. But I hope to be a great dad, so there’s that. But the cookbook thing happened because I started writing a column. It was pretty bad at first but then I started developing a passion for that, too, and I really liked that. A lady who eats here all the time was always trying to get me to do stuff. She started saying, “Robert, you need to do a cookbook.” And she kept on, and kept on and then one day she was sitting out at table 3 at the Purple Parrot with a gentleman, and she said, “Robert, come sit down. This is so-and-so with a publishing company. Tell him about your cookbook.” Well, I hadn’t even thought about it other than telling her I didn’t want to do it. So, trying to think quickly on my feet, I said: “Well, if I was going to do a cookbook, I’d have recipes I’ve developed here at the restaurant. I would have stories about the South and food of the South. And then I would have watercolors by Wyatt Waters.” And without missing a beat, this guy says, “Well, if you get Wyatt Waters, you’ve got a deal.” The problem was, I didn’t know Wyatt Waters at the time. … So very unlike me, the next day I drove up to his gallery in Clinton, walked in and introduced myself. And about six hours later, I think I left. We just hit it off instantly, and within a month or two we were best friends. We did that book, which was called “A Southern Palate,” and it was just this crazy thing.
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How so?
Well (we ended up self-publishing). So this book came out maybe the end of October, and we sold out before Thanksgiving. It was just nuts. There will never be anything like that, and there hasn’t been. … It was all we could do to keep up. We were out in three weeks, and we almost sold out the second printing without even having the book. We were selling these little packages that had a promise for a book.
™ “An Italian Palate” is your ninth book as author and third collaboration with Wyatt Waters. How did it come together? Again, by accident. I don’t plan a lot; things just sort of happen. My friend David Trigiani in Jackson is a dual-citizen Italian, and he’s a great Italian cook, so I would go up once a week and spend time with him in his house learning his mama’s gravy and this sort of thing. Wyatt would come over a lot, and the three of us would have lunch. I had been planning a trip with my wife and two kids to Europe—we did 17 countries on two continents in six months—and as I planned this trip, I brought it up to Wyatt and said, “Why don’t you come over—maybe our next book is done in Italy?” And it was like (snaps fingers): Boom, he was in. (My family) had been over in Europe; we had hit about 10 countries by the first of October, when we picked Wyatt up. He had been in Venice for 10 days, and then he spent the next 10 weeks with us. We covered from the southernmost tip of Sicily to the Alps. In the morning we’d get in the car and go into Florence or wherever, and … he would go paint, and I would go eat. He had the tougher job, really. Sometimes I would be back in the kitchen with the chefs in their restaurants. We made a lot of friends over there, and I would go to their homes and cook. The thing about it was, Wyatt had never been in a situation where all he had to do was paint. … In 10 weeks, he finished 128 watercolors. He was a machine over there. It’s some of the most beautiful work he’s ever done.
™ Tell me about your nonprofit, Extra Table. We’ve always been plugged in to the community here. We just want to help everybody we can help, so we get a lot of calls. I got a call one day from the Edward Street Fellowship Center, which is a mission pantry here in town that fed about 800 families a month (at the time—now it feeds 1,200). They had completely run out of food, and they were freaking out, and they said, “Is there anything you can do to help us?” So I said, “Sure.” I figured the easiest, best, quickest way to help them would be to call my Sysco rep, just put together an order and have them drop-ship the truck to the agency. And I started thinking, bet people would give more often and more freely if there was an easier way to do it. So I went ahead and grouped all those foods I had found
St. John’s restaurant complex recently underwent a huge renovation and expansion.
LIZ LANCASTER
You know, I’ve been voted Best Chef in Mississippi (by Mississippi Magazine) three times, and I promise you I’m not even the best chef in my own restaurant. There are five or six guys that can run circles around me in this place. To be honest, I’m a pretty mediocre chef who has just gotten really lucky. I’m a much better eater than I am a chef.
1991 and boasts extensive craft beer and whiskey selections. A New Orleans-style courtyard offers outdoor seating off the bar. Branch, which opened just under two months ago, is the newest addition, an upscale cocktailsand-small-plates bar with a gorgeous wine cellar in view of diners holding some of the more than 1,000 wine labels offered.
Jackson restaurateurs Jeff Good (left) and Dan Blumenthal (not pictured) partnered with St. John (right) and Extra Table to provide healthy food to local mission pantries and soup kitchens.
into three packages—$250, $500 and $750. And I went to Sysco and said, “I’ve got this idea: What if every restaurant, business and home had an extra table where they could feed those in need?” (Sysco agreed to) deliver the food and give us rock-bottom wholesale prices. Then I started traveling the state going to soup kitchens and mission pantries, and to be honest with you, I hate to admit it, but I was even a little skeptical that we had a hunger problem. This is the United States of America. And I learned quickly how wrong I was. It was a cold slap in the face of reality. I ran into single moms, like I had, who were holding down two jobs and trying to make ends meet. Seniors—a lot of what you see at soup kitchens are seniors living on fixed incomes trying to figure out, “Can I pay the more ST. JOHN see page 17
jacksonfreepress.com
Robert St. John’s restaurants and watering holes can all be found in the same location (3810 Hardy St., Hattiesburg), but each offers its own atmosphere and dining experience. The Purple Parrot Café is the flagship, which St. John opened in 1987. It’s one of the oldest whitetablecloth fine dining restaurants in Hattiesburg still enjoying success more than two and a half decades later.
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