Over the Counter

Every morning around 11 a.m., Rodney Shepard and the three chefs on his crew slip out from their kitchen in the Kroger Chef Shop to handpick groceries from throughout the supermarket. To make the nine entrées and 14 salads and sides that fill their display case on any given day, Shepard and his team usually pick up at least 36 pounds of chicken, 10 pounds of beef and 20 pounds of salmon, for a total grocery bill of around $300. They don’t actually pay for the food; they just credit the various supermarket departments. They are, after all, working for the same corporate team.

The Chef Shop in the Green Hills supermarket is one of 30 such counters selling gourmet food to go at Kroger stores in Nashville, Lexington and Louisville. Of the nine Chef Shops in the Nashville area—including stores in Belle Meade, Brentwood, Franklin and Bellevue—the Green Hills branch is among the largest, and it is frequently the top-selling location, sending some $5,000 worth of fresh, prepared foods home every week with its luxury-SUV-driving clientele.

With 300 recipes on hand—the majority supplied by corporate Kroger and a handful from the various local chefs—Shepard varies the menu from day to day and season to season. There’s usually a little Asian flavor, some pasta and maybe a couscous. There are almost always panini sandwiches, twice-baked potatoes, quiche and a range of desserts. In the summer, Shepard prepares gazpacho. But no matter what the season, he prepares gallons of the signature chicken salad, of which he sells about 40 pounds a day.

Make no mistake: it’s not Shepard’s signature recipe. The so-called Music City Chicken Salad, a comfortable mélange of white meat, grapes, celery and mayonnaise, comes from another Kroger chef in Kentucky, which helps explain why the computer-printed bar-code label reads, “Derby City Chicken Salad.” But Shepard does use his own recipe for the wild mushroom risotto and the Asian salmon haystacks, among other things.

The rotating menu in Green Hills, which includes everything from corn pudding to grilled salmon to lemon raspberry cake, far outstrips what might appear in the display cases of Krogers in less luxe locales. For example, while the prepared food section of the Melrose Kroger is heavy on fried chicken—livers and gizzards included—the Green Hills store runs the gamut from artichoke salad to Szechuan noodles to orzo insalata, all available in single servings or larger portions. And with Whole Foods, a national chain lauded for its prepared (and often organic) food options, slated to open in the fall in Green Hills, Kroger will have to keep its knives sharp to fight for the neighborhood’s high-dollar shoppers.

Freshness is the greatest strength of the Chef Shop, which eliminates at least one stop in the complex distribution chain of so much prepared food. The salmon comes from the Kroger fish department, the flank steak comes from the Kroger meat department, and the vegetables come from the Kroger produce section. So even if the Cincinnati headquarters dictates most of the recipes, Shepard, a culinary graduate of Sullivan University in Louisville and an alumnus of Demos’ restaurant, can select his own menu and ingredients depending on what’s fresh in his store. The young chef, whose forearm bears a tattooed quartet of knives, says he continues to fight off the request from HQ that he cook with prepared Kroger mixes, instead opting to cook from scratch. “I always have time to make fresh food for our customers,” he says. “We can make it taste better than what comes out of a pre-made kit.”

But while the Chef Shop harvests its vast supermarket inventory to deliver an impressively fresh product, the other side of the mass-market coin is that the recipes must appeal to a broad and sometimes unadventurous palate. For example, the popular Thai chicken salad, with its colorful, crisp medley of chopped vegetables and whole cashews, lacks any zing of chili or ginger, and the grilled chicken pasta salad suffers from a similar cautiousness. The chefs explain that their recipes don’t stray far from the staples of kosher salt and black pepper, a conscious culinary compromise made to appeal to some 800 customers who flow through the store on a daily basis. “We use flavorful products,” Shepard says, “but we try not to use anything real dominant or real spicy so we don’t narrow our market.” In other words, on the way from the Chef Shop to the beer section, it’s a good idea to make a pass down the spice aisle.

But for people who prefer a light touch—especially families with picky kids—Kroger offers an appealing range of convenient and well-priced foods that can easily feed a family of four for $20. Some of the best items we tried were pork with wild rice stuffing, vegetable lasagna, Italian-style steamed green beans, stuffed baked potatoes with cheese and bacon, roasted vegetable stuffing, potato galette, gumbo and an array of desserts. The pumpkin cheesecake with gingersnap crust—made from a Shepard family recipe—and the vanilla bean panna cotta could easily pass for homemade if plated well with a fresh garnish.