A cybersecurity tech named Peter, down from Philadelphia on vacation, dines solo at the horseshoe bar in the main dining room at the Grey, the Savannah restaurant with a gleaming art deco vibe that chef Mashama Bailey and entrepreneur Johno Morisano opened downtown in December 2014. To Peter’s left, glass doors lead to the bays where, beginning in 1938, Atlantic Greyhound Lines buses picked up and dropped off passengers. To his right, a server beelines from the kitchen, headed for a Saturday-night birthday party in the private dining room upstairs.
Moving by the worn spot in the terrazzo floor where customers once stood to purchase tickets, toward the sign on the back wall that marks where Black passengers waited, the server weaves past silver statues of greyhound dogs beneath a ceiling pierced by skylights, holding aloft a platter of vinegar-marinated fried chicken. Peter and I turn our heads to follow. More than tracking the progress of a rick of deep-brown thighs and drumsticks, we are witnessing a now-decade-old restaurant revel in the story it tells of a more equitable and delicious South.
Peter has just finished lamb chops glossed with harissa, a red pepper paste with North African roots. I’ve eaten charred okra, the vegetable that points the way back to West Africa, smothered in peanut-eggplant sauce. And pickled shrimp with a sidecar of saltines, a traditional Southern cocktail-party dish that Bailey has updated with dots of anchovy mayo.
Now comes Peter’s intermezzo, which Bailey calls a “thrill.” He picks up a peach lemonade–flavored ice pop delivered on a white plate. “Back home we call this water ice,” he says, leaning across the bar, his voice softening with the recollection.
Bailey, a Black woman, was born in the Bronx, but she has Georgia roots. As a child, she lived for a time in Savannah and would often visit her maternal grandmother in Waynesboro during the summer. Bailey’s “thrills” in Georgia were born of everyday life, eating figs from neighborhood trees and slurping homemade ice pops.
Nostalgia is frequently a driver of restaurants. But many dishes at the Grey owe their origins to Bailey’s experience and her research into the cooking done across centuries by Black Southerners of African descent. That work began in earnest after managing partner Morisano, a white man from Staten Island, bought this old bus station and recruited her to move south from New York City. Bailey was then cooking at Prune in the East Village, famous for unfussy food served in a small room that turned every dinner into a dinner party. That respect for unadorned pleasures shows in dishes like her smoked green olives.
Her Country Captain, a dish long associated with Savannah and inspired by the trade routes that brought Indian spices here, is telling. While most versions are curry-scented chicken stews, Bailey has worked to rethink the standard. Instead of chunks of breast meat, common in community-cookbook recipes, she uses a spatchcocked half chicken and makes a double-reduced chicken stock, which she pours on top like a gravy. Beneath, a trencher of toasted sourdough soaks up the goodness. A scatter of slivered almonds, parsley, and ruby-toned currants follows. Dessert of a sort comes when I cut into the trencher, which, thanks to that soak, has transformed into a plush and savory bread pudding.
The next morning, I meet Bailey and Morisano at the restaurant. Daisy and Duke, her greyhounds, wander the dining room. A rescue, Daisy claims the room’s biggest booth. Duke, the younger, heads for the host stand, hoping to snag one of the Tootsie Rolls that servers present with checks.
We talk about Bailey’s initial resistance to serving fried chicken, based on her desire to sidestep Southern food stereotypes. Having proved her point, she now takes pride in what that server paraded through the dining room. “Everything I do expresses my Blackness,” she says. Edna Lewis, the revered Virginia cook, gets a shout-out on the nightly menu. On the stereo this morning, Brittany Howard, of Alabama Shakes, sings.
As we talk, a sculpture crafted from white neon tubes and wires looms, suspended below the skylights. When the Grey is open, that artwork by Marcus Kenney lights up once every hour for two minutes and twenty-three seconds. February 23 was the date Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, was murdered by white men in 2020 while he was jogging not far south in Brunswick. “When you notice it,” Morisano says, “the art disrupts the conversation. And you start another one on the other side.”
For a decade now, the Grey, owned by a Black chef and a white entrepreneur, has worked the same tack, starting new conversations about who cooks in restaurants and who profits from that work and who belongs in this place we call the South. To mark the anniversary, the pair are doing everyday and extraordinary things, like hosting oyster roasts with Ernest McIntosh, who farms his oysters fifty miles down the coast, and planning for a new restaurant in Paris, which Bailey calls an “outpost of the Black South.” “To live that Blackness out loud in France,” she says, “would be a dream.”
Plus: A Savannah Day Stop
An omelet stuffed with deviled crab, biscuits drenched in sausage gravy, fried whiting in a white-bread envelope: Breakfasts and lunches at Narobia’s Grits and Gravy, just south of downtown Savannah, restore faith in excellence on the near side of the ten-dollar-a-plate barrier. Best of all is chef Renee Reid’s smothered shrimp, laced with onions and green peppers. Served atop a puddle of grits, that brown gravy is as honest and acute as a Kevin Young poem.
