STARKVILLE — Ty Thames goes through 1,000 spoons a week.
As the co-owner of Restaurant Tyler in downtown Starkville, plus other restaurants in town including Bin 612, Rock Bottom Bar and Grill, and Barrister”s, Thames nearly always has a plastic spoon in his hand as he makes his rounds through the kitchen. He strolls from sauce to sauce, dish to dish, and constantly checks tastes and temperatures.
Meanwhile, his employees scurry about, fixing dishes from scratch with the freshest ingredients.
Thames, who grew up in Jackson and Clinton, is a food connoisseur of sorts, having studied the culinary arts all over the world. And over the past five years, he has become a fixture in Starkville, where his restaurants are among the most talked about in town.
So how did you get into the restaurant business?
I always worked in restaurants. I started off washing dishes when I was 15. Then I went to college at (the University of Southern Mississippi) and bar-managed a couple different places. Then from there, I went to culinary school at the New England Culinary Institute. It”s in Burlington, Vt. From that I got hooked up with a cruise ship in Parma, Italy, in the region of Emilia-Romagna. I was there, and then I came back and went to Washington, D.C., where I worked in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Georgetown. I worked there for a while and then I went to another fine dining restaurant in Bethesda, Md., and I worked there for a year or so.
Then my business partner, Brian Kelley, called me up and said, “Hey, I”ve got this really cool spot.” We had always talked about opening a restaurant. We were roommates our first semester at Southern, and we had met a couple of times before that, but when we moved in together was really our first experience together. Well, when we were in the dorms, he would always talk about restaurants and I had always wanted to do this. So he called me up and told me about the Bin 612 location.
We talked for a couple of days and worked out some of the details, and then two weeks later I basically sold everything I had, packed up my car and moved to Starkville.
How long have you been back here now?
Going on five years. Bin 612 is in its fifth year and we just passed our year mark at Restaurant Tyler on May 23. Barrister”s is the newest addition. It”s like a sports bar (directly above Restaurant Tyler) and we have a bunch of plasma TVs and projection screens and stuff like that. All the food is made from the kitchen of Restaurant Tyler, so we”re basically running two restaurants out of one kitchen.
We hand-make our burgers. Everything is fresh. Nothing is distributed, or Cisco, or pre-packed, or pre-made. Everything is made from scratch. Even for the bar upstairs. We don”t cut corners when it comes to things like that. A lot of restaurants do that for convenience, for consistency, for different aspects, but we don”t. I”m pretty hands-on, I”m always here, so I have control over it.
So you still do a lot of work in the kitchen? I can imagine it would be pretty tough to run things and fix food at the same time.
It”s a lot of work. It is. But I probably spend four or five hours a day in the kitchen actually cooking, making sure the cooks are on time and they”ve got their prep done, and it tastes properly. I taste a lot of food all day. I go down there and I always have a lot of little plastic spoons I carry around. I go through 1,000 spoons a week. It”s a lot of tasting.
Is there any type of food you prefer to fix?
I really like wild game, like boar, elk, venison. I”ve actually been working on a Mississippi cookbook where I use a lot of native ingredients from Mississippi. Growing up in Mississippi and what I cherish about Mississippi and what I cherish about food, kind of putting that into a collaboration of work.
Working in a restaurant, do you ever get sick of cooking? Do you ever just go home and say, “I don”t even want to look at my kitchen?”
At home, I”m not married or anything, so I don”t have a family to cook for. But I love to cook at home. I just really hate the cleaning part of cooking. So, here, I can make the biggest mess I want to and just throw it in the dishwasher. It”s a lot more convenient to cook here than it is to cook at home.
What would you say is the hardest part about your job?
I would say it”s managing people, because everybody has their own personality. Everybody has their own priorities. You have school and you have this and that. A lot of people don”t really consider this their real job. They figure they”re in school for their real job. So you juggle that, but as long as you”re honest with your employees, they respond to that.
I have great staff. Turnover in restaurants is like 300 percent, but I only have a 40 percent turnover. I”m really proud of our staff and I really look up to them. They really teach me a lot; more than I”ve ever thought about teaching them.
What would you say you enjoy the most about your job?
Probably the creativity. It”s definitely not a desk job. I never know what”s going to happen day to day. I might be a plumber today, fixing ice machines, or being a chef. It”s all random and sporadic. It”s definitely not monotonous.
Are you still coming with new recipes these days?
Oh yeah. All the time. I just came up with a new recipe concept. It”s barbecued lobster, where it”s not actually a saucy barbecue sauce. We actually cut the lobster while it”s still raw and then we season it with a barbecue rub and then we splash fry it, so it”s really succulent and really savory. And then we have this brown butter sauce. It”s a different kind of concept. It”s something that we”ve never done before, and that”s what I like the most about the job — the creativity.
Outside of work, what else do you do? Or does working in a restaurant take up all of your time?
For me, I kind of live my life through the restaurant. I”m here all the time. You know, Starkville”s a college town and there”s not really that many people my age who really do anything. Everybody is married and has kids. All of my friends are people in the restaurant. My managers are my best friends. We kind of live our lives together like that.
Everybody keeps talking about the worsening economy. Has it hit the restaurant business?
Being a college town, I think we”re kind of insulated in a way. You know, a college student is going to spend 100 percent of their earnings. They”re not really as worried about savings or any of the responsibilities as an older customer or somebody more responsible. So I”ve seen a difference in the clientele at Restaurant Tyler, because it”s fine dining and it appeals to an older clientele. So I”ve seen that dropping off a little. But as far as the college and the after-hours scene, the bar hours, that”s kind of stayed steady.
It”s hitting fine dining. People are saying, “OK. How can we save some money this month? Well, let”s not go eat at Restaurant Tyler because it”s really expensive.” Even though our prices are very competitive, Restaurant Tyler still kind of has this aura around it. The economy has definitely had an impact on Restaurant Tyler, but Rock Bottom and the places with lower-end prices, I haven”t seen it as much.
With all these businesses here, you”re obviously doing pretty well. What has allowed you to be successful?
To tell you the truth, I think it”s just coming to work every day and doing the best you can every day, and not faltering and not giving up. It just takes a lot of hard work. I don”t think there”s a secret.
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