Inside the inaugural Tiger Style restaurant pop-up takeover at GHST
The team of chefs, bartenders and restaurant staff gathered around the kitchen space at GHST Restaurant & Bar, 805 N Hudson Ave., for their pre-shift meeting, receiving final rundown of what to expect for the evening from Chef Caleb Stangroom.
Stangroom and Zach Hutton, the recently installed executive chef at GHST — named for the "ghost kitchens" that popped up on delivery services during COVID — have more than their friendship in common. The duo are also chefs known amongst peers in Oklahoma City for innovation and quality food, making their recent collaborations seem like common sense.
The pair brought the first iteration of Stangroom's Tiger Style pop-up to Oklahoma City residents recently with limited menu items and specialty cocktails.
Hutton knew early on that he wanted to invite other chefs in to share the kitchen with him.
"It's a way for us to showcase local chef friends and their talents and to keep the scene fresh on top of our regular daily menu," Hutton said. "Doing the first one with Caleb is great because I consider him a close friend and we just did my takeover at Bradford House, so I knew immediately knew what I was getting into."
Meanwhile, Stangroom, who has been at The Bradford House for just over two years, has been dreaming up his Tiger Style pop-up since a late night adventure through Nashville in 2022.
"The idea was simple; take the flavors, stylistic composition, and nuances of a Japanese izakaya, throw in what I like to call 'Midwest American street food' (a.k.a. stoner gas station food) add some familiarity, and lastly — a little sprinkle of East Coast hip-hop," Stangroom writes about the concept. "A mixture of eastern flavors residing in familiar dishes that ideally anyone can get behind. After all, tiger style isn't just for the kids, it's for everyone."
What was on the Tiger Style Menu?
The menu for the first Tiger Style included fried headcheese done two ways, new takes on well known dishes, desserts and much more.
Stangroom served up options like a bonito and beet salad, with chili crisp on the side to allow diners to customize their spice level, cacio e pepe ramen noodles, deconstructed crab rangoons and even burgers and a lobster roll featuring specially-made milk bread buns and hoagie rolls from local Twisted Tree Bakery.
"100% Head Cheese Bois, fried head cheese," Stangroom said Wednesday when asked his favorite dish on the pop-up menu. "It was actually a throwaway dish — it was supposed to be a scrap dish — but it's literally all the scrap from the fried head cheese burgers. It's a semi-traditional Asian dish, loosely put, but usually they serve it with fish sauce, herbs, jalapenos, sometimes stone fruit, sometimes not. That's probably the number one for me right now."
For dessert, Stangroom offered Hong Kong egg custards made with sunchoke custard and milk caramel and C.R.E.A.M dreamsicles featuring yuzu and cream.
Bartenders crafted four specialty cocktails for the night, ranging from the C.R.E.A.M, an inventive play on a grasshopper with pistachio whipped cream to the Teshima Sour, a blend of citrus, five spice, honey, green tea and Amaro di Angostura printed with the pop-up's name. Other options included the Killer Bees and the Method Man.
Stangroom looks at Tiger Style as a way to step outside of his day-to-day menu creations and embrace what he calls the "ever-changing, always growing" culinary industry and a chance to continue pushing himself and others to get better.
More: The ends of eras: Look back on restaurants and breweries that closed around OKC in 2023
The limited pop-up menu was served a la carte on a first-come, first-served basis, and Stangroom said that as the pop-up continues it will adjust according to the location to fit the kitchens at the locations that host.
During Wednesday night's event, Stangroom was pleased with what he had seen from diners dropping by the pop-up.
"The food's selling well. It's good to see that a lot of people are ordering not just one thing. I think that it's going to be good," he said.
"Because being a chef at a restaurant here in Oklahoma City, doing a feature once doesn't really showcase that enough, I think. And I wanted to do stuff that was both familiar to get sales, obviously for Tiger style, but also stuff that I really wanted to pull out of my pocketbook that I knew that people weren't going to be comfortable with, necessarily, but that they could grab catchwords with, like, arancini, or a double stack burger, or lobster roll, or whatever."
Stangroom hopes to continue the pop-up monthly, with plans already set for a February takeover of Grand Royale, 1749 NW 16 Street, and discussions happening for the March venue as well.
"The menu is going to change according to which venue we're going to go to and the capacity we can fulfill," Stangroom said.
For more information on the popup, follow @tigerstyle_okc on Instagram.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: GHST in Midtown OKC hosts Tiger Style's inaugural popup
