Chefs Josh Habiger and Mathew Meeker Team Up for Special Meals at Bastion

Chef Mathew Meeker is finally ready for his closeup. Meeker started out in the kitchen at Butcher & Bee before stints working at Husk and Peninsula, and he has spent the past year working with Sean Brock on new projects while planning his own future restaurant venture. The native West Tennessean was inspired by Ferran Adrià’s book A Day at El Bulli as a youth and decided he wanted to enter the world of cooking.

Meeker has taken a little something from each restaurant he’s cooked at: work ethic and professionalism from Bryan Lee Weaver at Butcher & Bee, an emphasis on seasonality and fascination with fermentation from Husk, and a sense of expressing his own sensibilities on a plate from Jake Howell at Peninsula. He plans to synthesize all these attributes in the upcoming restaurant pop-up he has titled hester. (Yes, that's with a lower-case “h.”)

On Wednesday, Jan. 27, and Thursday, Jan. 28, Chef Meeker will serve his delicious and creative dishes, working with the talented Bastion team to create a multicourse prix fixe menu. Habiger and his kitchen crew have been very successful in the past at inviting guest chefs into their kitchen, showcasing a variety of collaborative small plates that are both beautiful and delicious.

This will be Meeker’s third pop-up, following a two-night collaboration with Byron Stithem of Proper Sake Co. — that 14-course dinner was met with an overwhelmingly positive reception. His first pop-up as hester took place at Hathorne and and also received raves. If you’d like to catch an up-and-coming chef early in his career and get an idea of where his culinary sensibilities might eventually take hester, sign up on TOCK to grab a reservation for the dinner, which will be served in the main dining room at Bastion. Maximum party size is four diners with prepaid reservations sold for two or four patrons. To ensure safer social distancing, seatings will be limited and spread out over the course of the two evenings, so jump on it early to get your desired time slot.