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MIEL
The Ongoing Evolution of Jimmy Phillips
by Valerie S. Hart
“Food is the ultimate art. It uses all five senses and goes from the tangible to a memory in an instant.”
With that simple and elegant truth, Jimmy Phillips underscores what he accomplishes five nights a week as chef/owner of the new bistro Miel (mee-el). Appropriately named for honey, Miel seems to represent the sweet culmination of years of thorough and thoughtful preparation. Yet the way Jimmy tells it, he’s just intuitively surfed whatever reality has presented, always on the lookout to learn new skills, and always through the lens of his complete devotion to food.
The only thing Jimmy ever wanted to do was cook. At 14 the Nashville native began cooking at JC’s Jazz Club on Bandywood Drive; a young boy spending his days in the kitchen with owner Sylvia Ciccatelli and her assistant Bertha. They made everything from scratch, down to the mayonnaise. Soon high school became “irrelevant,” he says, “once I could drive and was getting regular paychecks.”
Culinary school, however, was another matter. He loved food and watched all the food television then available: Julia Child and Jeff Smith. After much research he decided to go to Johnson & Wales University’s Culinary School. But his exit from high school left Jimmy’s father pressing him to join the Army instead. This was the late 1980s when “chef” was neither a standard career option nor even in the lexicon for many Nashville diners.
Pick up a copy of Nashville Arts Magazine to read the rest of this article