Jennifer Biggs

The Commercial Appeal

Three well-known local restaurateurs have come together to create a new company that will be opening several new places in the next few months.

Roger Sapp and Craig Blondis, already partners in Central BBQ, have joined with Ryan Trimm, owner of Sweet Grass and Next Door. Each is an equal partner in Across the Board Restaurant Group, the new company that will launch its first restaurant next month with the opening of Sunrise at 670 Jefferson.

The partnership for the one restaurant was announced some months ago, but while working on it, they realized they wanted to do more.

"We'd hang out and maybe there was a little alcohol involved, but we found out we're of like minds, and we're all foodies," Sapp said.

Sunrise will be a breakfast and lunch spot that will feature house-made meats from breakfast sausage to ham, turkey, corned beef and pastrami cured on premises. Even as they're working to get it open, they're also at work on 117 Prime, a steakhouse that will open at 117 Union around Christmas or early 2018.

"It will be a traditional steakhouse," Blondis said. "Not like Ruth's Chris or something like that but like Norton's or Peter Luger."

"Ryan is our chef and he wants a locally owned, good aged-beef steakhouse," Sapp said.

The restaurant will have an oyster bar in the front that will also serve items such as crab claws and shrimp cocktail, a long marble bar for cocktails, a multi-room dining area and will open to Belle Tavern at the back.

"We'll have prime beef but it won't all be prime," Trimm said. "It's just too expensive and while I'm not going to try to pretend this will be cheap, we're going to try to keep it reasonable."

In the partnership, Blondis and Sapp have become part-owners of Sweet Grass, which Trimm opened in 2010 and Next Door, which he opened in 2011; the three Memphis Central BBQ locations remain in their hands. In May, Sapp and Blondis sold the rights to expansion to Kemmons Wilson Companies and plans are for other Central BBQ locations to open throughout the Southeast, but Across the Board will have no stake in these.

The new company owns a USDA-certified kitchen in Forrest City, Arkansas where foods, including Central BBQ, will be prepared for shipping. And they have a catering facility on Jefferson in the former Dixie Meat Company, where they'll operate Southern Table catering, run by Elizabeth Blondis with head chef David Johnson and equipped to cater from all Across the Board menus, from Central to Sweet Grass to Sunrise.

Johnny Lawrence, who worked at Sweet Grass and moved to Nashville about a year ago, will be back as director of operations of all the restaurants.

"I'm so glad to be back," he said. "Even when I left, Ryan and I knew it wasn't the end, that we'd be doing something together again."

Other places are planned.

"We've talked about all kinds of things," Blondis said. "Who knows? We might have a taco place."

What is certain is that more Sunrise locations will open. The building next to Central BBQ on Central, which opened in 2002, will eventually be another Sunrise.

"But I see these going other places too, and not just in Memphis," Sapp said.