by Benjamin Nunnally
It’s Monday at Hubbard’s Off
Main, a new Oxford restaurant
that opened only a week before. The
staff is closing down shop for the day, making sure every
table is clean, every corner mopped, that the restaurant is
going to be perfect for the next day. Before they wrap up,
though, the crew does something that might be an unusual sight in most eateries: they sit down to eat together.
“The place has class.”
“That’s how I know we’re doing a good job with the menu,”
says Brett Jenkins, head chef at the restaurant. The crew
usually sticks around after the end of their shifts to grab
a bite to eat, something that Jenkins, a restaurant veteran,
affirms isn’t typical.
The food is part of the draw; the special of the day is a hamburger steak, macaroni, cornbread and loaded mashed
potatoes. The macaroni is thick and sticky, not soppy, the
cornbread is just a little sweet and the hamburger steak is
country gold.
One of the regular server staff comes in on her day off to
join the rest of the team at the sit-down. It’s more like a
family than a group of hired hands.
That the restaurant has developed the way it has might
be surprising, given the way it sprung up from seemingly
nowhere. Jenkins came onto the project with the mission
of creating a menu, hiring and training the staff, all within
the space of 20 days.
“The average restaurant takes about 60 days to train staff
and open,” he offers for comparison.
The place has class. The brick walls and cozy lighting,
along with the real fireplace,
give Hubbard’s Off Main a homey atmosphere, the sense that it’s a place
where you’d want to spend a little time chatting over dinner and drinks.
If the dining area is like home, then the kitchen is a space
station. Jenkins and Jeremy Minton, the sous chef of Hubbard’s, show off a high-tech oven that has something like
an iPhone screen where they can punch in temperatures,
cook times and program presets for different foods. Each
of six racks inside the oven can cook different foods at different temperatures — steaks on top, chicken in the middle and anything you please in the bottom — it’ll all come
out just the way it’s meant to.
The rest of the kitchen operates without fryers or the
hood systems that would be required to pump out the
hot air and put out fryer fires. Ask Jenkins what his secret
weapon is, though, and he’ll point away from the stove
and at Minton.
“He’s got one of the most amazing palettes I’ve ever
worked with,” says Jenkins. Minton, he says, can pick out
individual flavors in a recipe and point them out, sometimes beating Jenkins to the punch when it comes to finding the perfect ingredient for a dish.
“A guy like him makes my life really easy,” said Jenkins.
As the restaurant continues to grow within the community, Jenkins plans to expand their menu to include new,
health-conscious options and carry on developing new
dishes to build onto the current selection — but don’t
think they won’t keep offering the upscale country taste
that’s already making waves