New Eats: CCC pop-up offers ‘refined gas-station food’
Meredith and Keith Clinton run the kitchen for Black Sheep Catering at 409 South Main St., which includes the ongoing CCC pop-up. A new restaurant is slated to open at the location later this year. (Patrick Lantrip/Daily Memphian)
“I think the pop-up is really more a reflection on my past,” says Meredith Clinton, sitting at one of the colorful couches in the spacious lobby of 409 S. Main St., which on recent weekends has transformed into the pop-up restaurant CCC.
Clinton is executive chef for Black Sheep Catering, which is putting on the pop-up, and even though she’s musing on her past, the future beckons: Sometime in late summer or fall, the pop-up restaurant will be replaced in the same space — the former home of the dearly departed Puck Food Hall — by a permanent one, with a name and concept still to be revealed.
Clinton and her co-chef husband, Keith Clinton, will be running both Black Sheep and the new restaurant from the same kitchen.
But back to that past, and how it informs the present.
Meredith Clinton grew up working at family-owned gas stations in Hayti, a small town in southern Missouri.
“Right there where Tennessee and Arkansas and Missouri all kiss,” said Meredith of Hayti. “Right there in that little nowhere place. We were working at 12. Selling cigarettes out of a milk-crate situation, that’s my childhood.”
The food, of course, was gas station food.
“A lot of cheeseburgers, barbecue, barbecue bologna. The fried chicken was the staple food there. Everyone loves it. I love it. But now I’m trying to make better fried chicken,” she said.
Better fried chicken — boneless thigh sandwiches, perfectly crisp and tender, with a home-brewed kombucha-based hot sauce and celeriac coleslaw — is a fixture at the current CCC pop-up, open weekends for the past month and for the foreseeable future, or at least until an ongoing restaurant build-out needs to take hold of the building’s entry space.
Last weekend there was also a griddle-cooked double cheeseburger. There were thick, hand-cut potato “chips” adorned with corn, cheddar, chives and fermented jalapeno creme. There were corn dogs made from farmers-market-purchased Home Place Pastures franks, not slathered in yellow mustard but adorned with a mound of pickled brown mustard seeds. Meredith calls it “refined gas station food.”
There was also champagne and caviar.
“High-class low-brow,” said Meredith.
“You can get like some nice (stuff) or you can get a cheeseburger. Dress up or dress down. I think the environment plays into that. Do you want to be fancy? Do you want to be chill? You have that option here. And I think that will carry over to the restaurant, where we’ll have a bar in the middle and will have formal dining and a lounge that will be more cocktail and snack heavy.”
If some of the menu at CCC is a nod to the past, the caviar is more of a trial balloon for the future.
“We’re trying out the caviar, which I think would be a good play in the restaurant,” said Meredith. “We want to see how people receive it, because you can’t really order caviar anywhere.”
While sandwiches and craft cocktails at CCC run in the $12 range and the chips and corndogs under $10, the caviar is obviously pricier: $40 for a half-ounce, served with chips.
They’re using Kaluga.
“It’s not too expensive and we’re basically just selling it at price,” said Meredith.
Fried chicken sandwiches with kombucha hot sauce and loaded, house-made potato “chips” are among the “refined gas station” food currently on the menu at CCC, a pop-up restaurant on South Main. (Chris Herrington/The Daily Memphian)
“It’s a sturgeon hybrid,” said Keith. “It’s a medium-sized egg with an amber color. It’s not like the traditional dark black small egg that you’d see. Kaluga’s good. It’s middle of the road. It’s approachable. People who have never had caviar before are not going to be turned away by the fishiness of it.”
Meredith made the move from Missouri to Memphis for culinary school, and other than a return home for a year, has been here since, working in the kitchens at Cooper-Young’s Tsunami and, more recently, East Memphis’ Erling Jensen, as well as stints with Paradox Catering.
So she’s learned under some of Memphis’ most well-regarded chefs — Jensen, Tsunami’s Ben Smith, Paradox’s Jimmy Gentry. Along the way she also met Keith, a Memphis native who was also in the kitchen at Erling Jensen.
With 409 S. Main St. including a large event space on the third floor, the catering operation and restaurant will work out of the same kitchen, serving events upstairs and restaurant diners on the building’s first floor and mezzanine levels. Black Sheep is also catering outside events, with the CCC pop-up as much a catering calling card as it is a teaser for the future restaurant.
Local entrepreneur Jared Welch, who owns Civil Axe Throwing, among other endeavors, heads an ownership group that purchased the building. He partnered with one of the co-owners, Bill Ganus, publisher of the food magazine Edible Memphis, on restaurant operations. Ganus recruited the Clintons to head it up.
“It won’t be fine dining per se, but comfortable, elevated,” said Welch of the work-in-progress restaurant, with hints toward a high-concept approach.
“We’ll wait to announce the name and put it on a timeline,” said Welch. “But the food is going to be amazing because chefs Meredith and Keith are amazing.”
That’s still to come, but for now it’s CCC, with food partly inspired by Clinton’s Hayti past and by her Memphis present.
Chicken, corn dogs, champagne, caviar. Notice a theme?
“CCC was a concept that I started at my house before the pandemic,” said Meredith. “Me and my friends would always be off on Wednesdays, so that was our designated day to hang out. So we would just meet at my house and have casseroles and champagne and charcuterie and we’d call that the Casserole Cat Club.
“We called it that because we liked cats.”
The Clintons were lured away from Erling Jensen to start the catering and restaurant operation at 409, and when the decision was made to do a pop-up while the restaurant plans were coming together, she decided to make CCC public.
“There’s no concept really, just anything that starts with a C,” said Meredith.
What’s next? Cod? Cotton Candy? Clementines?
“I’m probably going to change it a little bit,” said Meredith. “Boozy milkshakes — cherry vanilla — kind of goes with the fried food situation.”
When the restaurant opens later this year, the rest of the alphabet can have its day.
CCC, at 409 S. Main St., has tentative hours of 5-10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and lunchtime to early dinner service on Sundays.
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CCC Black Sheep Catering Meredith Clinton Keith Clinton South Main 409 S. Main Puck Food HallChris Herrington on demand
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Chris Herrington
Chris Herrington has covered the Memphis Grizzlies, in one way or another, since the franchise’s second season in Memphis, while also writing about music, movies, food and civic life. As far as he knows, he’s the only member of the Professional Basketball Writers Association who is also a member of a film critics group and has also voted in national music critic polls for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice (RIP). He and his wife have two kids and, for reasons that sometimes elude him, three dogs.
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