Jacob Hammer and I first met while he was executive sous chef of JW Marriott’s Plant Riverside District. At the time, he and his team were cooking up an Old World Christmas Dinner at Stone & Webster Chophouse whilst he was overseeing the property’s fourteen food and beverage outlets plus its banquet operations.
About a year and a half later, the North Georgia native who grew up in Savannah took the opportunity to come back to Husk to become its executive chef, succeeding Brian Fiasconaro who had succeeded longtime main man Chris Hathcock.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Hammer said of being back at the Sean Brock-begun brand and flagship of The Neighborhood Dining Group. “There’s a lot of expectation, from guests, from employees, from past employees, from the brand as a whole, but it’s refreshing to step back into a building, a restaurant where I know that everyone shares the same honest mantra.”
On a stormy Saturday, the stately house at 12 West Oglethorpe was still packed for brunch, but I stole a few minutes to talk to the venerable restaurant’s relatively new leadership trio of Hammer, pastry chef Rebecca Elsishans, and general manager Jessica Helft.
STEPPING IN AND STEPPING UP
“It is a lot of pressure, but we have fun,” said Helft, the most recent addition to the Savannah branch’s brigade.
“It means a lot to me,” she said of her newish role. “I didn’t set out for a career in restaurants. It just kind of happened, and Husk is where I learned to love food and wine and ingredients and farms and purveyors.”
Her FOH team includes manager-sommelier Jamie Crotts and managers Jesse Navarro and Justin Stevenson.
“There’s definitely a lot of pressure, but I put a lot of pressure on myself, too,” echoed Elsishans, who just the day before had marked her two-year Husk anniversary, having come on as a pastry cook before the promotion to pastry chef this past November.
“First chef job,” beamed the Sarasota native who moved to Savannah in May of 2019 to earn her degree in Baking and Pastry Arts from Savannah Technical College and then landed at The Landings as a pastry cook.
Elsishans added, “I’m so happy to be leading the pastry team and developing that program,” which includes plated desserts, scratch-made breads and crackers, and a growing array of accompaniments featured throughout Husk’s brunch menu.
“I’m really proud of all the work that we do, and it’s been great teaching people and developing recipes,” she said. “It’s hard work, but I love it.”
Helft also grew up in the Sunshine State, but in south Florida “so it was really New York,” she said, only half-joking, but her eight years in Nashville was when she “fell in love with Southern cuisine.”
She started at Husk’s second outpost in 2018 as a server’s assistant and jumped at the chance to move from Music City to the Hostess City.
“I love Savannah so much and wanted to move here,” Helft said. “I had met the previous general manager and had spent some time with him in Nashville and here when I had come to visit, and we had a good rapport.”
“I came with the intention of being the FOH manager, but shortly after that, in January, I was promoted,” she continued. “I was not expecting it.”
All in all, a chock-full few months for Helft: Married. Moved. Promoted. Done.
“As a server, preserving that mission was something that I felt, so to be a manager here is an honor,” she said. “I always felt the mission of the restaurant was so important, and being someone who isn’t from the south, just learning about the cuisine and the ingredients we’re using, it’s beautiful and important.”
START: HAMMER TIME
All around Savannah’s food scene, cheffing is nothing if not a changeable feast with executive, sous, and de cuisine professionals relocating often and often after relatively brief stints, even at well-established eateries.
Then again, Hammer’s return to helm Husk’s culinary program makes perfect sense.
After one tour at The Grey and two stints at Noble Fare, the first of which to help owner-chef and “forever great friend” Pat McNamara open his revered resto, Hammer had “an incredible time” as part of Local 11ten’s crew.
The chef then stepped away from fine-dining culinary but admitted, “I can’t stay put. I can’t stay calm.”
His “break” was “doing everything from scratch” while running the sandwich counter” at Smith Brothers Butcher Shop.
“It was really cool,” Hammer said fondly. “Salumis, breads for muffalettas, driving myself insane, making my life too hard.”
Smith Brothers was aptly on the itinerary for a food tour, and one day, a booking had slipped everyone’s mind. They had nothing prepared, so Hammer got to work.
“The group they were bringing in was the Husk group,” he said with a smile. “That’s kind of how I met them.”
Two days prior, Husk Savannah’s first executive chef, Tyler Williams, Facebook messaged Hammer to introduce himself and to let him know that he was looking for sous chefs.
Kitchen kismet.
Hammer came onboard with Husk’s opening team in 2016 under Sean Brock and worked his way up to executive sous chef prior to departing for the PRD, where he was a sous chef on its opening team before being named chef de cuisine at Stone & Webster not three months in. After two-plus years, he became executive sous chef of the entire hospitality hub.
“It was really rewarding because I got to collaborate and help different chefs hone their skills and get where they wanted to be,” he recalled.
Back in Husk’s kitchen, Hammer has reunited with executive sous chef Mike Hanlon, who is the restaurant’s institutional knowledge, having served under Hathcock and Fiascanaro. Three additional sous chefs, Josh Miller, Nik Pribble, and Mike Blackwood, and a handful of cooks who have been in behind Husk’s scenes for as many as four years round out Hammer’s brigade.
“Initially, I didn’t intend on becoming a chef or getting into the restaurant industry,” said Hammer, who holds of a degree in psychology. “As I grew into the restaurant industry, the way that I view the responsibility of a restaurant, especially in the South, was very similar in mission to how Husk developed.”
“It’s important to me to support the community, to support local farmers, and to support people in the building doing this with me because it’s not a one-person show,” he added. “That’s what Husk is about.”
EMBRACING THE SUMMER SEASON
Under Hammer’s direction, Husk is not embarking on wholesale changing of the cartes. Instead, one or two items at a time are being swapped out or reimagined.
“We’re slowly incorporating new dishes to the menus,” he said. “I think it gives us a little bit better focus, instead of doing seven dishes at once. Doing one, doing two, it gives us time to develop and to R&D and to truly give things the attention they deserve.”
In unison, Helft and Hammer highlighted Husk’s multiple seafood options on the menu.
As summer blooms, he said, “I think our fish options will take off.”
“I was really excited to come here because Nashville is landlocked,” Helft said, “and if we do oysters in Nashville, it would be so rare and on the menu for a day and be a composed oyster.”
“Having the access to all this seafood and learning about all the local oysters is just exciting for me as far as the cuisine,” she added.
“I think that seafood is where it’s going to be really exciting because we’re at the mercy of whatever the fishmongers have,” Hammer reasoned.
If redfish is slated but is not available, he and his team “pivot’ and use tilefish, wreckfish, or something similar that will match the flavor profile. Husk’s shrimp-and-grits is not going anywhere because fantastic local shrimp are available year-round and their Anson Mills and Marsh Hen Mills grits are staples.
“When you’ve got great produce, great everything, you can’t fail,” said the chef.
In lieu of doing sides of vegetables, Hammer and Co. are going back to a plate of Southern vegetables, which he sees as an “opportunity to highlight what [they] can find in season.”
“It has nothing but potential and will be constantly rotating, but we wanted it to truly be a focal point of the menu,” he said.
Some of Elsishans’s additions have been the Farmers’ Market quiche that features tomatoes, Ancil’s chestnut mushrooms, Bradford Farms asparagus that has been house-pickled, and feta
“We sold out on Mothers’ Day, but we sold out of everything on Mothers’ Day,” she said.
Recently joining the menu mainstay White Lily biscuits were beignet biscuits, golden donut hybrids served with a chocolate coffee dipping sauce.
“We just got peaches in,” Elsishans said happily before describing her plan of a smoked peach dessert with caramel pastry cream and large crumbles of buckwheat cake.
“Everyone’s extremely excited because last year the peach season was non-existent,” Hammer added. “So long as the season’s good and you get them at the right time, you can do so much with them.”
As has been the case since it opened on West Oglethorpe more than five years ago, there is still plenty to be excited about at Husk.
Husk (2 West Oglethorpe Avenue) is open every day for dinner (5 p.m. to 10 p.m.), Saturday and Sunday for brunch (10 a.m. to 2 p.m.), and offers curbside to-go every day (5 p.m. to 9 p.m.).
