We first heard of TAE earlier this year after The Southern Gourmasian closed up shop in February. Justin Patterson and Cetera (C.C.) Key decided to switch things up and open up a new restaurant venture called TAE inside The Hotel Frederica. TAE, which stands for True Arkansas Eatery, was an idea Key had way before the restaurant was a concrete idea.
“I just took that name and made it an acronym because I honestly just liked ‘eat’ backwards,” she says. “Tae. I thought it was adorable.”
When coming up with the idea behind TAE, Key says she thought a lot about what dishes were authentically Arkansan. She asked around and couldn’t get an answer. Most might think of cheese dip or barbecue, but Key knew there was more to it than that. So Patterson and Key opened TAE, a place where out-of-towners can go for a bit of Arkansas history through food.
The menu itself is strictly Southern cuisine, but Key likes to call it “fun Southern” cuisine. She says that The Southern Gourmasian was outside of a lot of people’s comfort zones, so with TAE they wanted a more accessible menu for every palate. TAE’s menu includes a wide variety of Southern staples like fried green tomatoes, fried chicken, boiled shrimp, purple hull peas and meatloaf.
“[The menu is] homey, but at the same time, with Justin being an incredible chef, we also wanted to elevate it,” she says. “Just a little so it still feels really relatable. And it’s the food that I like to eat. There was really nowhere, and this sounds crazy, there was nowhere I could go in the city if I wanted some candied yams. I wanted to do commonplace food very well.”
Key and Patterson designed the restaurant in The Hotel Frederica to match the menu’s welcoming Southern attitude. The kitchen in the Hotel Frederica underwent a major renovation from its days as a restaurant in the Sam Peck Hotel. Key says the hotel had already painted, fixed the bar and put in new flooring, but the rest of the design process was a blank canvas.
“I pretty much just wanted an extremely intimate and cozy feel without it feeling like you were walking into a Cracker Barrel,” she says. “It’s Cracker Barrel in a modern, fun way. The decor is extremely Southern. We played a lot on the word ‘eat,’ since that’s where the name came from.”
Key and Patterson carefully planned each and every menu item at TAE. The dishes all have ties back to Arkansas foods, flavors and produce. For example, the Arkansas Tamale Bowl — one of the most popular dishes — was one of the last menu items Key came up with. She wanted to pay tribute to the hot tamales you can find in the Delta, but Patterson warned her that tamales are very time-consuming. So instead, she deconstructed a tamale into a bowl of cornbread, pinto beans and the same shredded pork recipe from The Southern Gourmasian all drizzled with a house-made cheese dip.
“The fried chicken gyro is popular, too,” Key says. “It’s kind of playing into the Greek Food Festival. From what I’ve heard, [it’s] one of the largest of its kind and I wanted to play homage to that. There are so many things that we do in Little Rock and central Arkansas and the state that we just don’t show any love to. I really wanted to show love to where we’re from.”
Right now, TAE is open only for lunch from 11 a.m.-2 p.m., but on July 14-15 they’ll be open from 9 a.m.-9 p.m. for “brunch to brinner.”
For more info on TAE, head to their website or follow along on Facebook or Instagram.