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“We are doing private dinners, and it honestly started because of the show,” she says. “I met people who were curious about how they can have a more intimate dining experience [with me] or have us come cook for an event or even in their home.” Savannah sees the venture expanding into a dining concept that’s fully their own. “Our end goal is to have a brick-andmortar,” she says. Savannah also resumed her role as chef de cuisine at M Tempura, where she continues to enjoy working jointly with Michael. “He’s still my mentor … and I can bounce ideas off him,” but now their relationship feels more collaborative, she says. The two put their heads together to shape the restaurant’s first brunch menu, which debuted in spring 2024 and features dishes like an omelette with carmelized leeks, maitake mushrooms and masago (a type of fish roe) a la carte, a departure from the restaurant’s traditional kaiseki and omakase menus that are served Tuesday through Saturday evenings. M Tempura’s open kitchen adds fuel to her fire. Her hands dice, fry, stir and plate without missing a beat as she engages in conversation with patrons seated across the counter. “It energizes me as much as it takes preparation and energy,” she says. Much of the daily work revolves around prepping fresh ingredients. “I think that some people might find it to be repetitive, but I find it to be meditative,” Savannah says. There’s a certain calmness she enjoys in meticulously cleaning vegetables and fish, carefully readying each element to be combined into a final polished plate. “The thing I really appreciate about this place is that consistency that I can rely on, because you already know that craziness is going to happen,” Savannah says. “It’s kind of fun to deal with it while you’re peacefully peeling lotus root and cleaning mushrooms. And then 5 o’clock hits, and the restaurant fills up, and everyone’s looking at you.” – by Renee Ambroso
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Rissi palmer issi Palmer vividly recalls weekends
spent cleaning the house with her mother, the warm hum of vinyl records setting the soundtrack. “I distinctly remember listening to Patsy Cline and Chaka Khan records and James Taylor and Phoebe Snow and people like that,” the country music artist says. “That informed my listening to this day, and it also kind of informed the way that I sing.” Her roots trace back to the Pittsburgh suburbs, but her family relocated to St. Louis when she was 12. She later pursued her studies at DePaul University, but the call of music was too strong to ignore. “I lasted one year before I got my first publishing deal in Nashville,” Rissi says. “I moved to Atlanta and would commute back and forth until [I] finally moved full time to Nashville in 2006 and [was] signed.” Her marriage in 2010 brought her to North Carolina. Rissi and her then-husband, Bryan Stypmann, called Raleigh home until 2016 when they made the move to Durham. Despite her diverse musical Singer-songwriter; influences growing host, Color Me Country Radio; up, country music special correspondent, captured her heart. “I loved the stories,” Country Music Television; Rissi says. “Patsy curator, The WavemakerS Cline and Dolly Parton were my Series, Carolina Theatre first introductions to this really rich storytelling, and I loved that. I loved the instrumentation; there’s something really intimate about a lot of those records. … You listen to a good country song, you can smell it, you can taste it, you can see it and you can touch it. And that drew me in.” Rissi credits her first managers – whom she met in high school but, at her mother’s insistence, didn’t start working with until after graduation – with encouraging her to pursue country music despite the industry’s lack of Black artists. “I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, I loved it, but I did notice as I got older that people who look like me were not singing it and they weren’t performing it,” Rissi says. “That caused me to become self-conscious about liking it and knowing it.”