At the Grey in Savannah, history takes another turn

A few days before she drove into town to run the kitchen at the Grey, one of the most talked-about new restaurants in the country, Mashama Bailey treated herself to an eating tour of the South.

She had spent a chunk of her childhood in Savannah, between the ages of 5 and 11, but she remembered those years only in flashes. Her formative years had really been in New York City, and she thought a fast immersion in Southern cuisine would be inspiring, instructive and delicious.

So curving south from North Carolina to New Orleans, she tasted buttermilk and sorghum and Benton's bacon, Nashville hot chicken and Cajun boudin, oyster po' boys and red beans and rice. Then in Mississippi, at a Jackson landmark called the Mayflower Cafe, it all clicked: She ordered deviled crabs, whose accompanying sauce she recognized from childhood.

"I called my mom," she said. "I was like, 'Mom, this place has the dressing that you used to make for us when we were little!' "

The tangy-creamy memory source was Comeback Sauce, the Delta version of rèmoulade. That sauce, and Bailey's spin on deviled crabs, appeared as a special this month at the Grey, a restaurant with a symbolic power that is hard to ignore.

Here you find an African-American female chef working side-by-side with her white business partner in a much-heralded restaurant built in a former bus station that used to have separate waiting areas and restrooms for black and white travelers.

"People walk in and they say, 'I remember when this was segregated,' " Bailey said.

John O. Morisano, who goes by Johno, was raised on Staten Island, N.Y., and runs what he describes as an early stage investment firm. He moved to Savannah, patiently negotiated the purchase of a dilapidated and abandoned Greyhound bus station, spent a few million dollars to bring back its powder-blue and stainless-steel gleam and recruited Bailey to be his business partner and executive chef. The history of the placost on him. But he stressed that more elemental concerns are the first priority.

"It really comes back to food and wine, a place where people gather and come together over that," he said. "The whole thing is about what Mashama's cooking and her point of view on food. The comment I hear more than any? 'I was born and raised in the South, and those are the best collard greens I've ever had.' "

Bailey, 41, was born in the Bronx and raised largely in Queens. For almost four years she was known as a calm and constant presence in the kitchen at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton's restaurant in the East Village.

Hamilton's cooking there is like a succulent collision of tradition and autobiography: Prune reflects her own very personal viewpoint on French country fare. It helps to look at Bailey's culinary approach at the Grey in a similar way. She is tapping into the traditions and ingredients of the South, yes, but she's interpreting the concept of Southern cuisine through the filter of her own experience and training's making what she likes to eat.

Her roast chicken arrives on a slab of sourdough toast that's soaked with pan juices. The bird is crowned with a ladle of a sauce that echoes Country Captain, a Lowcountry-meets-the-subcontinent staple that has a touch of curry and stewed currants.

Bailey also serves a "country pasta," which is like a Dixiefied carbonara with pork belly instead of pancetta, and a seafood boudin delicately stuffed with crayfish, wild shrimp and Carolina Gold rice.

There is also a spicy roasted eggplant based on a West African peanut stew. She smokes her collard greens with the wood from pecan trees, then cooks them soft with leeks, onions and shallots -- and not a smidgen of pork. ("It's, like, vegan!" she said with a laugh.)

This story was originally published August 8, 2015 at 7:02 PM.