Quick look: Savour Restaurant takes over Azure’s space in Fort Myers
Chef/owner Matt Geiger’s intimate and upscale restaurant on McGregor Boulevard has global cuisine with a French foundation
Chef Matt Geiger purchased the Fort Myers restaurant Azure and has renamed it Savour Restaurant.The new menu focuses on global cuisine with a French foundation, featuring small plates meant for sharing.Geiger aims to provide an upscale, relaxed dining experience rather than a quick meal.
It checked all the right boxes.
Azure, the decade-old gem of a restaurant on McGregor Boulevard in south Fort Myers, was just what Matt Geiger was looking for.
“It has the perfect amount of seats, very manageable,” he said. “It has an open kitchen that I like. I knew I could handle it.”
Not to mention it was a favorite of News-Press food critic Jean Le Boeuf (aka Annabelle Tometich), earning 4 stars and glowing reviews for years.
Oh, it was also for sale “with a price point where it needed to be.”
“It was perfect,” Geiger said.
So perfect, in fact, that he bought it on March 6.
“And we never closed a day,” he said. “I began working the floor, served tables for a couple of weeks. Then I started coming back to the kitchen.”
Which really is why Geiger — who previously worked at Blu Sushi, Brahma, Artichoke and Company and Tokyo Bay, among others — decided to buy a restaurant in the first place.
For the last several years, he’s been focused on his two Island Park-based businesses — Savour Catering and Savour Coffee (which we love!).
“I just wasn’t in the kitchen as much,” he said. “It’s been five years, and I needed to see if my system was working. It was, and I got really lazy after last season. I told my wife I needed something to do.”
That something turned out to be Azure, owned by Eddie Garces and Lee Riley for the last eight years.
“I don’t want people to be discouraged that those guys are gone,” Geiger said. “They had several offers, and they chose me.”
And it’s a great opportunity for Geiger, who had “been looking to grow the Savour brand and this was a chance to do it.”
He planned to keep the Azure name and let customers get used to him, his style and his menu changes.
“But I got blowback,” he said. “I kept getting comments online saying how it wasn’t the same because of the new owner. But they hadn’t even eaten here. It just prompted me to change the name sooner.”
And just like that, Azure became Savour Restaurant.
Name and menu changes
Before Geiger took over, “less than half of the menu was true French.”
“I’m still trying to keep the French foundation,” he said, “but I’ve done a lot of stuff, have a lot of experience. I don’t want to be a generic French restaurant.
“I want it to be an upscale restaurant with global cuisine and a French foundation. The fundamentals are there, but I want it to be me.”
So the coq au vin is not your typical red wine-based brown stew. It’s a vibrant and flavorful dish with white wine braised chicken, pancetta instead of bacon, creamy, dreamy violet-hued potatoes and a colorful scattering of seasonal vegetables.
“When four people order four dishes, every dish will look unique and vibrant,” Geiger said.
Our beet salad — frisee soothed with goat cheese, petite cubes of marinated beets, pickled onions, cashews and a lemon poppy vinaigrette — was a lovely work of art beaming in a glossy white bowl.
It’s one of eight starters (from Spanish olives and crispy yellowtail to escargot and French onion soup) on the menu, along with five starters (steak frites, Yuzu salmon, paella, pork tomahawk and the we’d-get-it-again-and-again coq au vin blanc).
Smaller plates meant for sharing
Then there’s the tapas.
“The new menu focuses on small plates,” Geiger said. “Order three or four things, share them with the table.”
Those 10 artfully arranged plates, which serve one to three people, include beef bone, summer gazpacho, warm brie, Nueske’s bacon, a rich pasta with roasted garlic, and five spice short rib (a Geiger favorite), plus mussels, shrimp, grilled octopus and clam dishes.
“I care about what I’m doing,” Geiger said. “We don’t rush plates out. We’re not looking for a bunch of table turns. We’re happy with one table turn.”
From the first sip of wine to the last bite of dessert (don’t sleep on the crème brulee with Corn Flakes and Fruity Pebbles — trust me), Savour is a place to, well, savor it all. Just grab a seat along the bar or at an intimate table in the cozy dining room and …
“Relax and enjoy your time here,” said Geiger, who makes it a point to visit each table when he’s not too busy. “This isn’t fast food. You don’t come in and out in an hour. You can see what we’re doing here, what goes on (in the open kitchen). This is real food, cooked with care.”
Savour Restaurant, 15301 McGregor Blvd., Unit 1, Fort Myers; reservations preferred; open 5-9 p.m Wednesday through Saturday; (239) 288-4296; savourrestaurant.com or on Facebook
Robyn George is a food and dining reporter for The News-Press. Connect at rhgeorge@fortmyer.gannett.com
Dining and Cooking