When husband and wife restaurateurs PJ and Lindsey Edwards opened Meadow Neighborhood Eatery + Bar at the Alley on Bitters in 2018, they already knew the space really well.
In fact, they met there in 2010 when both of them worked for San Antonio chef Jason Dady at his Spanish tapas spot Bin 555. From there, they moved to Charleston, South Carolina, for restaurant work, then to Austin and back to San Antonio.
“Truth be told, it’s always been our plan,” Lindsey Edwards said of opening their own restaurant. “We both always wanted that individually. It was just when and where, and what does the space dictate?”
PJ is the chef, and Lindsey runs the front of the house, she said.
For them, the space dictates Southern cooking with a seasonal flair.
“Seasonality is probably the most important thing, not just because of what it tastes like,” Edwards said.
They partner with area farms for the freshest of in-season ingredients, Edwards said. The menu is updated often with small changes almost daily and bigger changes seasonally.
Customers have their favorites, such as the grilled broccoli served with a bearnaise sauce, crispy shallots and Texas pecans; or the okra with pickled green tomatoes.
“Everyone loves the okra, and they keep asking when it’s coming back,” Edwards said. “Last year we had it from summer through November, which isn’t normal for this area.”
Seasonal ingredients add something different to the dishes, for instance, a simple salad has arugula from three Texas farms, she said.
Grandma’s Garden in Bebe offers the spiciest arugula, Edwards said. But arugula from Braune Farms in Geronimo and a third farm sourced by food distributor Farm-to-Table adds variety.
“It’s fun to see all three of those in a salad,” Edwards said. “It’s fun to see how the flavors shine through from each of those farmers, and they may only be 50 miles apart.”
Some of the farms are very small and some are very large and you get some nice variety in that.”
Edwards said her team is small but close. There are about 12 people who work the front end and another seven in the back of the house, or the kitchen. The restaurant had only been open about 18 months when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“It was hard to navigate that,” she said. “You don’t know what to do, you’ve got no one to follow.”
She said they wanted to keep people safe and didn’t want their staff to get sick but ultimately decided to stay open. They gave their staff the choice to go or stay.
“The entire kitchen was like ‘we’re doing this, we’re staying,’” she said. “Everyday was different, everyday was new, everyday we tried something new and different.”
They offered curbside pick-up and delivery. Edwards said they also got lucky in building relationships with new guests who previously didn’t know they existed.
“We had people who ordered from us for six to nine months who never stepped foot in the restaurant,” Edwards said. “Now they come in for the whole experience.”
