Savannah was named the 4th best food destination in the U.S. — are you kidding me?

This is a opinion column by arts and culture editor Zach Dennis

Stop the presses. Close the polls. Everyone can go home.

Savannah has been named the fourth best food destination in the United States.

In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, I don’t know how official any of these rankings really are. This latest declaration hails from TripAdvisor, a travel aggregate website built on user reviews of destinations with an emphasis on rating hotels, restaurants and things to do in a given city.

Skimming through the site’s methodology, it explains that these rankings are determined by the ratings and reviews of its users in a variety of categories with their “Best of the Best” categories, in which Savannah found itself listed, coming from among the top 1% of their listings.

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I’m sorry to tell you, but the reviewers got it wrong — very wrong.

Savannah is nowhere near the fourth best food destination in the country, much less a top-10 or even top-25 option. To help visualize, Savannah is Harry Styles standing up front and accepting the Album of the Year award at the Grammys with cities such as Nashville, Houston, Chicago and Miami looking on like Beyoncé and Bad Bunny.

I could go on, but punching TripAdvisor is about the same as attacking an A.I. bot. But the ranking does beg the question…

What does it really mean to be a food destination?

Building a local roster

In what is a Savannah staple, we have to look at our sister, Charleston.

For The Food Section founder, regular contributor to the Southern Foodway Alliance and James Beard award-winning food writer Hanna Raskin, it isn’t so easy to just compare the Hostess City of the South with the Holy City.

Raskin came to the Charleston Post & Courier in 2013 after stints writing about food in Dallas and Seattle, and said early on, Charleston began to make a name for itself through its annual Wine and Food Festival. Savannah featured a similar event, but the annual food celebration was shuttered in 2020 and never returned.

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“It really was tourism dollars put in the right place,” she said. “Bringing in influential people, bringing in other chefs and really selling them on the Charleston story. That was hugely helpful in terms of media attention, (but) that’s kind of tricky because you can’t really do that (now). The food world has changed tremendously.”

With that opportunity gone, Raskin said a city like Savannah could follow two other Charleston paths to food prominence. The first, a chef-to-restaurant pipeline.

“You need decent restaurants that are good enough for up-and-coming chefs to get trained in, but not so good that they want to stay there. Charleston had a number of those back in the day like Perdita’s Restaurant and Carolina’s. I don’t know what the analogs are in Savannah, but that’s kind of what you need… a place that’s going to foster more careers.”

Staples such as The Olde Pink House and Elizabeth on 37th could qualify, but for the future, a perfect pipeline builder could be the incoming Savannah Culinary Institute restaurant that is set to open on West Bay Street later this year. The building will feature four floors intended to expand and develop the culinary workforce as a full-service restaurant space for the students.

Savannah Tech's culinary arts program is a two-year program. With the completion of the institute, second-year students will move into the expanded campus building along with baking and pastry arts students and some hotel, restaurant and tourism management students.

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The campus could prove to be a supercharged runway for filtering talent into the Savannah scene and keep "stunting" from occurring.

“I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Zingerman’s (Delicatessen) is,” Raskin said, “and the problem with Zingerman’s is nobody ever leaves… (As the deli grew) they created all of the enterprises any of their employees could ever want and so because of that, Ann Arbor has this really stunted food scene because people aren’t going off on their own.”

True farm-to-table

Another path to food prominence? A creative collaboration between local farmers and chefs.

“If you get excitement on both sides where farmers are growing what the chefs need, and the chefs are excited to showcase what farmers are growing, that seems to be a good place for a food scene to start,” Raskin said.

In Charleston, it was easy for restaurants to latch onto the seafood options in the Lowcountry, and a stable of auxiliary professionals, like local bread makers, cheese makers, etc., to funnel into the restaurants, elevated the overall product at restaurants across town. “It really is like the old it-takes-a-village thing,” Raskin said.

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“I think that’s super helpful in establishing yourself as a food city because as you grow. It’s not one baker but it’s five bakers, but you really need that supply chain in place.”

Vendors such as Auspicious Bakery Company provide bread around town and Russo’s has supplied seafood for generations in Savannah. Folks such as Chef Rob Newton with Fleeting saw an opportunity to expand the portfolio with ventures such as Stevedore Bakery at the Thompson Savannah hotel.

From his background in food destinations such as New York City and Nashville, Newton said he wanted to make available some of the options he grew accustomed to in those places.

“We tried to make the kind of bread that I have in New York or Brooklyn, and globally, these really good sourdoughs, really good laminated doughs,” he said. “That’s not to say that the bakeries here are not awesome. I’m not saying that the same kind of stuff that I wanted and the kind of stuff that I experienced or the places that I thought Savannah would enjoy. I wanted to help have a hand in bringing that here, and I think we did that at Stevedore.”

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Newton agrees with Raskin’s point that a true collaboration between farmers and chefs is key, adding that those types of collaborations are already happening. He’s a regular on Saturdays at the Forsyth Farmers Market and has done collaborations, such as last year’s Knead to Know series, with other chefs and farmers.

“Those are culinary, foodie moments that helped make a culinary destination.”

One distinguishing factor that lists such as TripAdvisor’s tend to leave out is the eclectic mix of hole-in-the-wall or off-the-beaten-path options that probably don’t get the attention of national or international publications. These middle- to lower-price tiered restaurants expand the food palette of the city without breaking people's pocket books. These affordable options are what help line other prominent food destinations such as New York City, New Orleans and Los Angeles, and make food not only quality but also accessible.

“I wrote a book about Southern food, and I’m very interested in immigration patterns and who goes where,” Newton said. “I was in Berlin and I was very interested in Turkish food and recent Syrian immigrants and what they’re doing. So, I go to those places and check out their food. I learn a lot in that regard and…that helps make something a culinary destination.”

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Places such as E-TANG off Oglethorpe Avenue is a “very, very legit Chinese restaurant,” Newton said. In Garden City, Pupeseria Jireh has some of “the best pupusas I’ve ever had.”

“Little things like that for people that are interested in (food),” he said. “There’s a lot of fun stuff you can do like that and all these little things add up.”

Is an actual top-5 finish on the horizon?

Sure, Savannah isn’t a top-5 food city in the U.S. now, but that doesn’t etch the ruling in stone in the years ahead.

The city has the infrastructure in place to rise in the food destination rankings over the years and it’s pretty clear: build on what has already been established, develop a deep roster of cooks who then can spread out into individual ventures after cutting their teeth in established restaurants, and continue to cultivate and diversify the food palette both in the restaurants we frequent. Do we need another fried chicken place? Another pizza joint? Or do we need options that go beyond what we already have?

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But it also demands some sort of assistance from local officials to help cultivate this culture. If the food scene is so important to tourism, how can we better assist future restaurateurs to launch their enterprises? What systems do we need to establish to better equip restaurants to have the freedom to fail and learn from mistakes, leading to prosperity, rather than immediately closing?

How do we protect farm lands so that we can grow the goods that we are seeking out in our kitchens rather than turning over those lands to developers for more warehouses?

These are questions being asked across the country, but they’re also solutions that can better foster and stabilize a scene that is clearly directing a lot of dollars into the pockets of tourism. But the answers start with living the lifestyle of a food city rather than plastering an accommodation on it and calling it a day.

If we're going to develop talent, not just on the chef level but also across the board, we have to offer livable wages so we keep our most talented waiters, sous chefs, hostesses, managers and prep staff. We have to invest in our lands, both in the ground and in the water, and work to protect these lands where the delicious resources are cultivated.

And we have to hold chefs and restaurants accountable for consistency, quality, and service, either in the pages of this newspaper or in other outlets around town. Whether in the kitchen or in City Hall, it takes a village to make a good food city — and Savannah has the opportunity to actually earn its latest title.

Zach Dennis is the editor of the arts and culture section, and weekly Do Savannah alt-weekly publication at the Savannah Morning News. He can be reached at zdennis@savannahnow.com or 912-239-7706.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah GA food destination TripAdvisor: The ranking is false