SoLa: Chef-inspired creations aplenty at Oxford-based eatery
Nov. 15—OXFORD — Pinning down Erika Lipe's cooking style at SoLa is all but impossible, but the restaurant gives a hint, saying it offers "twisted cuisine and lifted spirits."
Indeed, a diner at SoLa — located near The Square at 401 S. Lamar — might enjoy a smash burger or a blue crab omelet one day, and the next it could be Jamaican jerk noodles made with smoked pork, pigeon peas, jammy eggs and Brussels sprouts, or perhaps brown butter scallops with pearl barley risotto, curried sweet potato, Thai basil, black garlic molasses and jalapeño candied bacon.
So, it's a fusion restaurant? Yes, and no. Thinking of SoLa's food as melding flavors from New Orleans, the Mediterranean and Asia gives a good snapshot of the wonders going on in its kitchen.
"I would call it chef-driven," Lipe said of SoLa, which got its start in 2014 as The Wine Bar.
Lipe is no stranger to the restaurant scene in Oxford, where she's spent 16 of the last 17 years. After taking a brief hiatus to work at a resort at Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast for a year, she returned in 2012 when a chef friend was going to help open The Wine Bar.
"At the time I was trying to get out of the restaurant business to pursue my catering career, and I was doing a lot of wedding receptions and stuff, so I got a part-time gig with them to help out in the kitchen," she said.
What's on the menu?
What's on the menu?
A sampling of what SoLa and Lipe have offered in recent weeks includes:
Glass noodle soup with spinach, chuck roast, bone broth and mushroom
Chorizo collards, rosemary sweet potato hash, jalapeño-cranberry chutney, spicy carrot
Curried roast beef and okra gumbo nood le stew with andouille and jalapeños
Beef Stroganoff made with beef tenderloin tips, campanelle, sour cream mushroom sauce and fresh dill
Grilled swordfish with Appalachian tomato gravy, panang curry, black rice, and lemony lima bean compound butter
Pork belly and fermented black bean noodle dish
Eggplant parmesan sandwiches with truffle fries and basil mayonnaise
Ham and mozzarella melt on sourdough with whipped feta, hot honey and arugula.
Lipe helped open The Wine Bar, which was owned by Dr. and Mrs. Lee Valentine of Meridian. She was and remains general manager and a partner in the restaurant, which was reimagined and rebranded to SoLa in 2019.
"We joined forces, and I told them I'd help them do this even though wine wasn't really my thing," she said. "So we did it from 2015 to 2019, when we decided it's not a wine bar — it needs to be a restaurant to do what we want it to do. I'm in food, that's what I do, so let's rebrand it into a restaurant and do my food."
There was some trepidation, of course. Rebranding is a gamble, as the uncertainty about how customers will respond always hangs over such a move. And in a culinary Mecca like Oxford, the food has to stand out.
The name, SoLa, was inspired by its location on South Lamar, with an homage to New Orleans — NOLA.
Four years later, it appears the change was indeed the right move.
"We're kind of in our groove now, and it's feeling pretty good," Lipe said. "All the hard work is paying off, and we're starting to see the fruits of our labor."
SoLa is open for dinner just four days a week — Wednesday-Saturday after 5 p.m. — plus brunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays. There is a built in higher demand when the operating hours are fewer, which suits Lipe just fine. Her staff can work the current hours; any more and a second shift of workers would have to be trained and hired.
"We kind of like it where it is," Lipe said. "We've given thought to adding lunch, but that's something down the road, maybe."
Culinary chops
Lipe worked in her mother's coffee shop in Batesville where she grew up and worked in delis and sandwich shops in high school and college. She got her first job in a professional kitchen when she was 20.
"I got a job at Caper's, which was on the square in Batesville, and just fell in love with the rhythm of the work," she said.
At the time, Lipe was an art major in college, but she wasn't really sure where her career might take her. Working at Caper's, she knew she had found her calling.
"It was a small, 60-seat restaurant with lunch five days a week and dinner three days a week," she said.
After about nine months there, she got a job in New Orleans in a creole restaurant. It was a dream come true, as she and her family spent a lot of time in the city when she was growing up.
She later returned to Batesville where she became head chef at Caper's, then came to Oxford to work at what was Waltz on the Square — now McEwen's — for a few years. Then it was Jekyll Island for the short stint before returning to Oxford.
"I just fell in love with cooking when I started working professionally, but I fell in love with food way before that," Lipe said. "I came from really big Southern families; both grandmothers were excellent cooks. We'd have big Sunday dinners, lots of entertaining at the house. So I was always around food and culture. But when I married it with the restaurant culture is where the magic happened."
Her work in New Orleans and Jekyll Island introduced her to a world of flavors, which form the basis of her cooking today. While the traditional spaghetti night (made from her grandmother's recipe using a bolognese sauce) on Wednesday at SoLa and ramen night on Thursday are big hits, the menu is an eclectic mix of themes and ingredients.
The specials Lipe and her kitchen roll out will tantalize anyone's tastebuds.
Lipe said she has a hard time describing the food she makes when asked, but said perhaps the best term is "chef-inspired."
"It's whatever we're into at the point in time," she said. "I use New Orleans as a focal point. When people think of New Orleans food, it's not necessarily what I'm talking about. It's not jambalaya and gumbo, even though you might see that from time to time, but it's a lot about the immigrants and their food you find. Like the Vietnamese. Flavors like that which are so different from what I grew up with, and I wanted to learn how to use them and why they used them. So some of the background and flavors of the ethnicities that I discovered I like to incorporate."
But Lipe doesn't just throw flavors together. She wants to know how they work, why they work and put them together only then.
For example, chicken wings with fish sauce and lemongrass. Not a typical combination to be sure; both have strong, distinct flavors that somehow complement each other nicely as the fried chicken absorbs them and produces that coveted umami.
"Fried chicken, lemongrass and fish sauce, are three of my most favorite things and it was fun to figure out how to put it all together," she said.
Perhaps SoLa's menu is a prime example of what has been called "third culture cuisine," the food of people who were raised outside of their parents' cultures. It's certainly what Lipe has incorporated.
"It's kind of a new term, but I like it," she said. "It's not appropriation but an homage and trying to do it justice."
Living and working in a town that celebrates exemplary food is both challenging and inspiring, but Lipe is perfectly fine with it all.
"I get so much inspiration from chefs in town, and we all build off each other," she said. "It's not a problem having your own identity if you're true to yourself and being organically inspired by ingredients and seasons and things. Everybody has corn and tomatoes at the same time. There's only so many versions of succotash and caprese you can do."
