Over the years I have visited Sewanee: The University of the South repeatedly because my husband and three children are graduates. With our children’s births spaced four years apart, that added up to 11 parent weekends (minus one for Covid), dozens of homecomings, and three graduations.
Unlike my family, I don’t tap the roof of the car when I drive on and off the domain, but I believe in their Sewanee angel. I’ve grown to love the Cumberland Plateau’s deep beauty—panoramic vistas, morning fogs, lush forests for hiking—and the magical Gothic architecture on campus.
The food scene, however, has made Sewanee more of an outpost and less a food-centric university town. It’s no wonder parents who visit their students come armed with casseroles, vats of pimiento cheese, and caramel cakes from home. I remember Pearl’s, George Stevenson’s heralded opening of the Sewanee Inn, IvyWild, and Crossroads restaurants and how they sought to shake up the status quo.
So, I’m a little hesitant (perhaps don’t want to jinx things) to tell you that something feels different this time.
A New Day in Sewanee
Mallory Grimm Tubbs, chef-owner of Lunch restaurant, and Julia Sullivan, chef-owner of Judith, both with Nashville and Sewanee connections, are making such nice food that locals experience FOMO if they don’t visit at least weekly to see what’s on the menus.
Mallory Tubbs, Sewanee class of 2015, had been raised on New England home cooking in her mother’s and grandmother’s kitchens in South Salem, New York, before she arrived at Sewanee to study environmental arts and humanities. Her earliest summer memories were cool weather, swimming and cooking out at the lake, and baking with her mom.
Chef-owner of Lunch, Mallory Grimm Tubbs.
Credit:
Courtesy Mallory Grimm Tubbs
“My mom is a beautiful cook,” Tubbs said. “We were just on the phone last night. They have a glut of tomatoes from the garden, and she made a tomato curry that sounded so good.” (Tubbs’ parents now live in Leiper’s Fork where they own The Copper Fox Gallery.)
As Tubbs described what her mother had cooked, you could sense the wheels in motion, and I suspect a brothy tomato curry might be on the menu soon at her University Avenue restaurant, open Wednesday through Saturday from 9 until 3.
Tubbs designs her menus weekly depending on what’s in season from 15 to 20 local farmers. She not only cooks from their wares but sells them in her market inside the restaurant. And she serves dinner once a month, too. (The next dinner is August 30.)
It was after becoming disenchanted with catering in post-Covid Nashville that she and husband Trapp Tubbs, also a Sewanee grad, relocated to the mountain. “You do a big exhale when you drive into Sewanee.”
They saw the listing for a prim, storybook space that had once been the restaurant Julia’s. The landlord was the university, so the couple applied for the lease, vowing to open a lunch counter, support local farmers, employ students, and change up the menu weekly.
“Trapp and I wanted to be a part of a community and in a place where we wanted to stay. It’s so different now being a community member instead of a student,” Tubbs said.
Before opening Lunch in early 2023, Tubbs worked in restaurant kitchens across the country. Her first job as a line cook was for A Bar A Ranch along the North Platte River in Encampment, Wyoming the summer before her senior year. She returned the next summer after graduation. When the ranch hired her back in 2018 and 2019 to run the kitchen, she learned how to feed 100 guests at a time, plus 80 staff members.
Credit:
Courtesy Mallory Grimm Tubbs
“I was lucky to get that kind of experience serving a lot of people at a big resort early on.” (It’s no coincidence that Lunch recently offered posole with bison, something Tubbs was introduced to in Wyoming. Bison is available from nearby Lost Cove Farm.)
On a July family vacation to the Monteagle Assembly, we sat at Lunch’s rustic farm tables sipping homemade lemonade and tea punch and eating fat slices of tomato pie packed with tomatoes Tubbs roasts with olive oil, salt, and pepper until jammy. We shared tall fresh tomato sandwiches on house-baked bread, cold soba noodles in tomato broth, and fresh greens with shaved corn and an “herby green vinaigrette.”
By the time we arrived, the porchetta sandwich with caramelized onions was sold out. Then we couldn’t decide which cookie to buy so we bought one each of peanut butter miso, lemon curd, chocolate chip, and ginger sorghum. Cookies, said Tubbs, are never off the menu.
What she’s learned so far from opening a restaurant in Sewanee is that people here are excited to have something new. “I have a high schooler in the kitchen who said it best: ‘I think Lunch is most famous for something new every time.'”
Fresh Perspective, Legendary Roots
Just across Highway 41A on a Sunday evening I walked into Judith with my husband and daughter and not only saw old Nashville friends, but some Louisville friends staying at the Assembly and chef-owner Julia Sullivan of Nashville’s Henrietta Red fame gathered at a corner table with her family having dinner. There was a New York Times bestselling author at the bar sipping a martini, and the vast room out back (which Sullivan plans to use as event space) bubbled with conversation. Judith is open for dinner 4 to 9 Thursday through Monday.
This was once the university’s laundry and later, the restaurant IvyWild, where I took my older daughter for dinner on her 21st birthday. The transformation of the space has been remarkable. It is now an elegant, cozy homage to the first female to matriculate from Sewanee—Judith Ward Lineback, who graduated magna cum laude in 1973, then graduated from the University of Virginia law school, and is an attorney in Greenville, South Carolina.
Lineback entered Sewanee the same year—1969–that Sullivan’s father graduated, and the family’s mountain connections run deep. Her parents first met at the Monteagle Assembly, and her godfather was Southern author Andrew Lytle.
“We’d go up to Sewanee when we were little kids and do the Fourth of July,” Sullivan recalled. Before our call she had just returned from a hike to Foster Falls, a place she’s known since childhood.
Credit:
Anne Byrn
Our meal at Judith began with a tartine of lemon-scented mascarpone topped with roasted Alabama peaches and a crudo of raw marinated red snapper flavored with green apple, fennel, and mint. We shared tagliatelle with local wild mushrooms, and Sullivan’s summer take on Chicken Milanese—half a bird boned and fried then topped with an emerald-green goddess dressing soaking Little Gem lettuce and razor-thin cucumber slices. The smashburger on potato roll with fries and aioli was solid. For dessert, we split a slice of Southern chocolate cream pie elegantly piped with burnished meringue.
There is an unmistakable finesse here, a precision that Sullivan, who graduated from Tulane with a degree in finance and management, honed at the Culinary Institute of America. She has worked in the Michelin-starred kitchens of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Per Se, but long before then, she was smitten with cooking after returning from a six-week high school study abroad. The mother of her French host family cooked simply and honestly each night with ingredients in season in Burgundy.
Sullivan gushes in detail how you must roast peaches cut side up under the broiler with a gentler indirect heat and not just throw them on the grill.
“They’re so juicy face up with flesh facing the fire, and little olive oil, and salt is all they need,” she said. “We’ve been getting Alabama and Georgia peaches through small farm purveyors.”
She, too, has cultivated her own farm sources and relies on many of the same Southern purveyors used by Henrietta Red since its opening in 2017. And while seafood-focused Henrietta Red has been wildly successful and Sullivan has been nominated for a James Beard award for her work there, the Nashville restaurant market “seemed saturated to me.”
So when a friend called to tell her about the Judith space, she was curious. Henrietta Red was a partnership with Strategic Hospitality group. She had known Strategic’s co-owner Max Goldberg since kindergarten at the University School of Nashville. Judith would be her own. Its doors opened last November.
The timing might be right. Sysco trucks once sped through town, but today in this agricultural region of southern Appalachia, Franklin County bison farmers, mushroom foragers from Huntsville, Alabama, and McMinnville salad green growers are the ones dropping off ingredients at restaurant back doors and local grocer Mooney’s.
Sewanee is attracting people to live full time or buy a second home here even if they have no ties to the university. Many grads are retiring here, too, and welcoming the bright, bold, fresh cuisine, as do I.
Dining and Cooking