OVER THE OPEN FLAME
When she cooks over an open pit of fire, she looks unassuming and natural, too busy laying halved squash and spatchcocked chickens on the grill to notice the crowd behind her clinking their glasses, ducking from the stream of grill smoke, salivating, remarking to one another or themselves that 20 feet from them is a woman redefining their concept of cool. But Mallory couldn’t care less—she’s there to redefine their concept of eating local, and any compliment or adoring remark dribbles off her like grill sweat.
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Within the first four minutes of meeting her, I get the sense I’d call Mallory if I hit a deer, if my car was smoking, if I was trying to drill something, if I couldn’t recall the temperature chicken is supposed to be before you take it from the oven, if anything at all was broken, if I was in Home Depot.
She looks like someone you’d see in a yellow-toned photo of a Vietnam War protest, or a Crosby, Stills, & Nash concert. She wears torn Carhartts, oversized canvas jackets, Blundstones, thick, silver, handmade jewelry. She leaves her bracelets on while she chops leeks. She cuts her own bangs, dyes her own clothes. She makes her Caesar salad with swiss chard. When we are talking she emanates goodwill, athleticism, and the sort of humble confidence you see only in people who are good at their craft. A main character who has almost no idea why she’s been cast as the lead.
Her dogs, Magpie and Trudy, crawl around her while she tells me about her foray into food.
Mallory is from South Salem in Westchester County, a couple hours north of New York City. It’s a small town, family-oriented, surrounded by either thick green or thick snow depending on its pronounced seasons, and ornamented with colonial homes. A quick Google search of the town brings up South Salem High School’s sports calendar and images of third grade girls hugging at soccer practice (it also brags the residency of Keith Richards for a time on its sparse Wikipedia page).
Mallory setting the table for a staff dinner at Lunch.
Mallory’s sister, who attended Sewanee before her, brought Tennessee onto the map for her college search. Sewanee, with its infinitesimal community, its ferality, and all its avenues for creativity felt like the right choice to Mallory—“I think it’s obvious when you come here, you either get it or you don’t. But if you get it, you want to be here.” She majored in Environmental Arts & Humanities, and says “Every class I took here reinforced what I cared about and opened my horizon to things about sustainability, community, about mixing mediums, about different things coming together.” In between reading chapters of Desert Solitaire and The Quotidian Mysteries, she cooked in her dorm rooms, in the cramped kitchens of Hoffman, for herself and friends and her sports teams.
Summers were also spent cooking—Mallory worked as a line cook with 10 other college students along the North Platte River in the very remote Encampment, Wyoming. After college, and a brief stint in D.C., where, she says, “I wasn’t my best person,” she returned to A Bar A Ranch to work as the kitchen manager. She revamped the ranch’s menu and its approach to food—“They weren’t using anything local or really reflecting where we were at all. So I worked with a lot of farmers, I worked with a couple ranchers, and we started using beef from the ranch.” The menu started to blossom: salad greens, radishes, carrots, and hakurei from a local farm, the charcuterie board featured bison sausage from a nearby ranch. “Using local food from a place with a super short growing season while also feeding over 100 people per night was hard,” Mallory says, “so the local stuff we could get was cherished and highlighted as much as possible.”
Mallory's cook book shelf at her home in Sewanee.
Mallory picking leeks at Sequatchie Cove Farm before a farm dinner.
After the two-year mark, Mallory began to reflect: “I just was thinking: I’m growing, that’s great, but do I want to keep growing here? Is this where I want to be forever?” Nashville’s population was exploding, many areas were being bulldozed and built out, and simply, she says, “It was getting to be a lot.” The city began to feel stressful to Mallory, on top of balancing two already stressful industries: food and self-employment. She began to think again of Sewanee, recalling she “always knew I wanted to be in a smaller environment—it’s where I feel more creative and generative.”
Mallory grilling chicken and carrots at a farm dinner.
She grew up in what she calls “admittedly idyllic” circumstances: her family gathered around the table every evening for a home-cooked meal, creating a deliberate time for togetherness. That’s how she came to love food, “its sharing aspect, how it brings people together.” She was always in the kitchen, always interested in cooking. She recalls making cakes in her childhood kitchen, experimenting with ingredients on weekends, putting the triple-dog-dare mayonnaise smoothies of everyone else’s childhood to shame with a fourth-grade lemon meringue. She continued cooking into high school, beginning her journey in business management with a snack bar. A 16-year-old Mallory sweated behind the grill, tangled bangs swept up, making grilled cheeses, hot dogs, and stuffing the loose, sticky cash of her peers into her apron to buy ingredients for a more advanced grilled cheese, a more elevated hot dog.
A young Mallory icing something teal.
Summers at A Bar A Ranch were interspersed with winters in Nashville, where Mallory began to date her boyfriend, a Sewanee grad. The ranch was incredibly remote, and working 16 hours a day made anything long-distance challenging. Mallory confesses, “Being with someone makes you want to be in one place. And I’m a homebody—as lame as that is, I like to be cozy.” She left A Bar A and moved into a one-bedroom in East Nashville with a thimble-size kitchen and no dishwasher. She was working in Leiper’s Fork until just after Valentine’s Day 2020, saying she “had to get out,” with the intention of finding another restaurant job.
Two weeks later, where she was living in East Nashville, Five Points, was devastated by a tornado. And then a week later: the pandemic arrived. Panic surrounded her immediate community as they tried frantically to rebuild their neighborhood, and concurrently, the world began to close: stores, schools, and most unfortunately for Mallory, restaurants. “I needed money and didn’t know what I was doing. But no restaurants were going to hire, no restaurants were open or knew what to do,” which left her with one option: “I just started cooking.”
“I decided to post on my Instagram: this is my menu of the week, and I’ll deliver.” From her tiny kitchen came caramel chicken, crab cakes, smoked trout dip, derby pie. Looking back, she says, “It was psychotic—I was doing a different menu every day, and delivering all over Nashville every day.” Her friends were the first to send in orders, then their friends, her sister’s friends, then the interest of her neighborhood was piqued, “It kept growing and growing.” She started getting booked for events, dinner gigs, parties, and “was figuring it out as I went.” She formed her LLC, Hen of the Woods, in August of 2020, and the work increasingly became a full-time gig for her— “I was running around, getting as much stuff as I could from the farmers markets, working with people I knew.”
The following year, in 2021, she applied for the East Nashville farmers market, where she was obtaining many of her ingredients in the previous year for her menus. She received her permit quickly, and said the farmer’s market began to change her perspective and enliven her focus: “it was huge for me in terms of exposure, but also for finding community during COVID, for meeting people that were doing the same thing I was, or farming, or making kombucha, or whatever, but kinda hustling like me. That really changed everything for me, I think.” The interaction of the farmers market brought Mallory close to many local vendors, whose ingredients she began and continued to use, especially as she found herself engaging in conversation with many of her own customers about her ingredient sources and her local focus. “Part of the reason that I started Hen of the Woods is so many people say ‘we use local’ and they just aren’t walking the walk. It was really my goal to be like: every single thing on this plate I got from here.”
Those conversations led to the beginning of Mallory’s farm dinners, and open-fire cooking, which she says “became a little niche for me. I would host outside and use whatever the farm had, and make a grill out of whatever was around—I’d just find a way to make it work.”
Mallory tops tacos with leeks.
Mallory in front of Lunch the day before opening in February 2023.
The building that many Sewanee alums remember as “Julia’s,”—a small cafe run out of Sewanee’s “village” from 2010-2016—had been left vacant since the namesake Julia moved on to manage the University’s coffee shop, Stirling’s. The building was then bought by the University as an investment to build up Sewanee’s downtown. “When I’d come up from Nashville on the weekends,” Mallory says, “I would think—that’s such a good building, it’s so cute. Why isn’t anyone doing something with that?” In 2021, it was finally on the market for lease. “I made a proposal, sent it, and didn’t hear back for months. It was sort of a dream … lofty goal, fun thing to think about.” She’d all but forgotten about it when she received the tenancy. She recalls feeling more frightened than excited, but ultimately deciding, “It was a growth point where I had to say: I can do this, I know I can do it. I’m young and probably inexperienced to a lot of people, but I’ll do it and see if it works. So that’s what we’re doing now.” And so began Lunch.
The building was essentially a roofed box, or, as Mallory explains it, “a rectangle. With great light.” It needed restored ventilation, the installation of an entire kitchen, lengthy repairs, painting, woodworking, decoration. Mallory’s team was sparse: mostly herself and Isabel Butler (yes, this Isabel Butler), a Sewanee graduate C’20, with a long and modge-podged résumé of food experience. Mallory’s boyfriend and family members also helped out—her brother built the bar inside of Lunch, her sister helped paint the “LUNCH” sign. Mallory reached out to a Sewanee grad, a potter and founder of High Country Pottery, to make the dishware for Lunch, and local artists to decorate the inside walls with their work. The Sewanee community responded to a community-wide ask from Mallory for materials, and they offered up their unused tables and chairs. Mallory said the community’s enthusiasm for use of the downtown space was obvious, so many expressed their excitement and wanted to contribute—“It’s a cozy feeling to know that I moved here, I took this leap, and there was a net there.”
Lunch's back-of-house blueprint drawn by Mallory.
This speaks to the intention of Lunch, which goes far beyond offering a spot for gourmet sandwiches, and extends to the idea of building community around the “Mountain,” that is, this section of the Cumberland Plateau: Sewanee into Cowan, Winchester, Manchester, Tullahoma. Mallory explains: “A big reason why I wanted to come back to Sewanee is that: when we were here—and if you visit Sewanee, or even if you live here—we were not really aware of what was going on elsewhere on the mountain, or down the mountain, or anything locally, really.” The recipes at Lunch intend to change that by using as many local ingredients as possible: their mushroom toast (with kale pesto, ricotta, and buttermilk spelt) features oyster mushrooms from Midway Mushrooms, a farm begun in 2021 by primarily Sewanee grads just a few miles north of Lunch on I-24. The lamb gyros use local lamb from Lost Cove Farm, hearth bread made in-house with flour from Deep Roots Milling in Southern Virginia, and herbs from the University’s farm. Lunch’s “big green salad” stars radicchio from Halycon Farm just on the fringe of campus, on Breakfield Road. The meat for their osso bucco came from Baker Family Farms in McMinville, TN, and the pasture-raised, organic eggs from Sequatchie Cove Farm in Sequatchie, TN are the base of everything Lunch, Mallory tells me, “it makes our enriched doughs super yellow and beautiful, cakes rich, delicious quiches.”
Lunch before opening.
A five-pound variety box from Midway Mushrooms.
Swiss chard from the University of the South Farm.
The market shelf in Lunch.
“I think there’s always the divide of the ‘Mountain’ and not, or the University and not, and I really want to bridge that gap. I want to show people that all around them people are growing stuff, that this part of the country is beautiful, that this community is special,” she says. “I think doing that through food is pretty easy.”
The fridge at Lunch is also stocked with local goods: Walden cheese from Sequatchie Cove Creamery, eggs from Sequatchie Cove Farm, cold smoked trout from Sunburst Farms, sprouts from Bloomsbury Farm to start. On the shelves at Lunch, you can buy teas from High Garden Tea in Nashville, tinctures from Wooden Spoon Herbs and coffee from Velo Coffee, both based in Chattanooga, sorghum from Mallory’s friend’s farm, candles made by more of Mallory’s friends at the Cumberland Folk School, collages made by a Lunch staff member, indigo-dyed linens made by Mallory and Isabel.
The list goes on.
Mallory dying cloth napkins with indigo for the Lunch market.
Mallory feels both shy and grateful for the attention of the University and Sewanee community, those already singing the praises of Lunch’s menu. She tells me, “When I was doing Hen of the Woods, talking about the farmers and food was a really good way to separate Hen of the Woods from being about ‘me’ and being ‘my project,’” Mallory explains. “That’s really uncomfortable for me.” Lunch, and she reiterates this many times in our conversation, is about building out a community. “Uplifting other people, talking about their produce, what they’re growing, and then talking to consumers about what’s happening around them—which they often don’t know about, even when it’s right under their nose—is really the most important to me.”
Mallory setting a table in Lunch.
Lunch—and this is what Mallory hopes is the greatest takeaway—is for everyone. It’s a manifestation of what a community means, what it looks like to eat from your local farms at the same table with your local farmers. The walls are a calm jade green, the tables are old and speckled with paint. Student employees gather the ceramic plates, spattered with leftover microgreens, and restock the fridge with Sequatchie Cove cheese, Sunrise Dairy milk, Maypop, tidying in their neutrals and their smock aprons.
Her idea of community-building goes beyond the business model of Lunch and into its logistics—the restaurant has no chain of command: “All of my staff is going to do everything. There aren’t any positions, there's no hierarchy. You’re working every different post in the restaurant from dishwashing to register to pouring coffee to catering to working in the garden we’re going to build, helping customers—all of it is everyone’s job.” She calls a hierarchy of staff an “unsustainable way to work,” which I find brilliant, to consider sustainability in not only the obvious ways we think of it, but also to consider it as a way to relate thoughtfully to all your surroundings. “Sustainability is so much about local people, local knowledge, teaching other people skills,” she says, and a week later I see an advertisement for a Mallory-taught quiche-making class at Cumberland Folk School in Sewanee. In the photo, Mallory is floured and braided and smiling, surrounded by 10 or so people with thick, doughy pie crusts crushed around their pie tins.
Mallory talking to friend and farmer Lizzie Motlow. Mallory sources lamb from Lizzie and her husband, Emmett's, farm, Lost Cove Farm.
Mallory reveals to me that Lunch is the first part of her much larger plan to engage Sewanee with food sustainability and accessibility—“Okay so we’ve done the cool ‘eat local’ chic restaurant, but how do we take that a step further and actually involve people that live here? People that don’t have access to any local food or aren’t able to shop at the farmers market? It’s a multi-level approach—you hook people with having a fun, cool place to hang out and eat, but what’s the next step after that?”
Mine is to order a beer and whatever braised beef masterpiece is on the menu, and read the poem she’s suggested to me, “To be of use,” which is so … Mallory.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
Braised greens toast.
Mallory fixes the final touches of a set table.
In the spirit of sharing, Mallory scribbled down for us a recipe to bring Lunch magic to our, say, 6-square foot and nearly non-functioning kitchens in the non-Tennessee parts of the world. Below is her buttermilk pie. And if the dough-making proves too difficult, book the flight, rent the car—a slice of pie in the Sewanee spring, while a warm wind blows your hair into your mouth and sheds cherry blossom petals across your picnic table, and just above the chatter of a dozen vocal fries, you hear the incantations of a certain professor proselytizing ecotheology with a corgi at her ankles—it's worth the impulsive $900 to be there.
Lunch customers at the communal table in Lunch.
