In late October, East Nashville got a Halloween treat when Jon Yeager of Pour Taste opened his latest restaurant project with Turmeric & Co. in the former home of The Picnic Tap in Hunters Station at 975 Main St. Known for his cocktail programs at restaurants across Middle Tennessee, Yeager has long had a passion for exotic flavors in the food and drink programs where he's worked, and Turmeric & Co. is a bold expression of his love for the spices of India. Partnering with PJ and Manish Patel, Yeager reached out to former L.A. chef Angel Postalakis to bring his culinary vision to life.
The eclectic kitchen team includes people with backgrounds of various nationalities who share a common bond of enjoying cooking and eating food from South Asia. Given concerns about cultural appropriation, they are very clear about the fact that they are cooking with flavors and ingredients from outside their own cultures, but they strive to do this reverentially as they create new dishes without claims of “authenticity.” As long as diners go in with this same sort of mindset, I’m hopeful that they’ll be as surprised and delighted as I was with the menu on my first early visit to the restaurant.
As expected with a Yeager property, the layout and decor of the restaurant are dramatic and attractive, taking advantage of both indoor and outdoor space in hopes of becoming a neighborhood hang for drinks and small bites even after the other options at Hunters close for the evening. Shelves behind the long bar display an impressive selection of top-shelf spirits, many of which are rare in local back bars. Yeager and the mixology team employ these rare spirits in an interesting menu of custom cocktails that, unfortunately, I didn’t get to sample during my midday visit. But the selection sure looks intriguing.
Turmeric & Co.'s Nashville Chicken 615
I was there to eat, though. Turmeric offers a hybrid of counter service and wait service, so patrons can grab and go, sit at the bar or grab a table for full service. Lunch is a great time to drop in, if for no other reason than to sample a rotating selection of deeply flavorful soups that the kitchen always has percolating. Ben, the sous chef at Turmeric, made sure that I sampled the dal makhani, a lentil soup that has ruined any future iterations of vegetarian chili for me going forward.
The rest of the menu reaches out to many cultures for a mash-up fusion style of food that is still based in Indian flavors. This makes sense, because many of the world’s favorite “Indian” foods aren’t really common to South Asia anyway. After the first few weeks of opening, Yeager told me that the runaway favorite dish among diners was the Butter Chicken Tostada, a combination of British-Indian and Mexican influences that would never make the menu in Delhi. But if you think of it as a transcendent version of nachos, I think you’ll see where they’re coming from.
Turmeric & Co.'s Cashew Korma Mac & Cheese
Other highlights I sampled were the nod to hot chicken, the redundantly named Nashville Chicken 615, a dish of nicely fried chicken tenders with hot and sweet Kashmiri spice. Smoked paprika added a little campfire aroma to the chicken, and the delicious pickled vegetable accompaniments cut through the heat quite well. The dish is also offered as a vegan cauliflower alternative.
As a side dish to the chicken, the Cashew Korma Mac & Cheese was a standout. The pasta was perfectly al dente, offering a little chewy textural contrast to the gooey cheese. In my ultimate compliment, I think you could get an 8-year-old to eat this exotic mac with no complaints.
Turmeric & Co.'s Lamb Meatballs
Other successful dishes I got to try were the Bullet Naan flavored with green chilis, butter and cilantro, along with some dense and flavorful Lamb Meatballs. I didn’t get to sample any of Turmeric's pasta offerings, but they are apparently quite popular, especially at lunch. The marriage of various pasta shapes with deeply spiced sauces sounds like a no-brainer to me.
Turmeric & Co. is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. until midnight with hopes of drawing a late-night crowd in addition to lunch and dinner patrons. While the restaurant isn’t open on Mondays, that’s “sauce day” in the kitchen — when the team needs time to create all the flavorful raw ingredients that serve as the spice background to the dishes on the food menu. I’d say that is time well spent!
