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The Pickle Wall at SOUTH and the Decisions Nobody Notices

A wall of preserved vegetables on North Broad Street in Philadelphia began as an idea borrowed from Charleston and became a defining feature.

By Harry Hayman 7 min read
The Pickle Wall at SOUTH and the Decisions Nobody Notices

Walk into SOUTH Restaurant and Jazz Club at 600 North Broad Street and the first thing that registers is not the stage. It is a wall of glass fronted cabinets running most of the length of one side of the room, shelf after shelf of mason jars holding vegetables in every colour a vegetable comes in. Okra. Carrots. Peppers. Beans. Beets. Things that have been sitting in brine long enough to have changed their minds about what colour they are.

Nobody needed to build that. A restaurant can serve pickles out of a walk in cooler and no guest is any the worse for it. The wall exists because I decided it should, and then found out what that decision actually cost.

Where the idea came from

It started as research, in the sense restaurateurs use the word. Before we opened SOUTH we ate our way through other cities and called it work, and Charleston got a great deal of our attention. Lots and lots of attention.

Charleston in that period meant Husk, the restaurant Sean Brock opened in 2010 with a strict rule that nothing coming through the kitchen door could originate outside the American South. His approach to preservation was never decorative. Produce arrives in waves, and whatever a kitchen cannot use in the moment gets pickled, canned, smoked and shelved against the months when nothing is growing. Brock has talked about the practice for years, and about the upstairs pantry at Husk where the tomatoes and the ketchup his staff put up themselves were stored.

That habit sits inside a much larger project. He spent years working with seed savers to bring back heirloom Southern vegetables and grains the industrial food system had let go, an effort Civil Eats documented in detail. In an interview with Andrew Zimmern he described the preserving as constant, an ongoing argument with the calendar rather than a seasonal chore.

What I saw on that trip was a closet full of jars. What it represented was a kitchen that had organised itself around not wasting the good months. I remember thinking it was pretty cool, and then, almost immediately, thinking something considerably more dangerous. Let us see what we can do.

What it took to build one in Philadelphia

Sean had a pickle closet. SOUTH would have a pickle wall. Simple.

Apparently not.

We opened on North Broad in a building that had previously housed a Stephen Starr seafood restaurant. WHYY covered the transformation while the venue was being fitted out, and Philadelphia Magazine’s first look recorded the detail I still like best, that the white clapboard cabinets left behind by the previous tenant, once decorated with seashells, got filled instead with row upon row of pickle jars. The bones of the old room stayed. What went inside them was new.

Filling a wall is not the same as filling a closet. A closet is storage, and storage is allowed to look like storage. A wall at eye level, lit, in the sightline of every guest who walks through the door, is a promise. It promises the jars will always be full, that what is in them will change through the year, and that somebody is paying attention to how they look lined up together.

It also has to hold that promise in February, when nothing is growing anywhere near Philadelphia and the only things available to put in a jar are the things somebody had the foresight to put in a jar in August. That is the whole argument for preserving, and it is also why a preserving programme cannot be run casually. The work happens months before anybody sees the result.

My plan, briefly, was to do the pickles the night before we opened. I had a bunch of other things to worry about. I said so out loud, to my girlfriend Lay at the time, and she looked at me the way you look at somebody who has suffered a head injury. Did I have any idea what was involved in that?

I did not.

So we started pickling. And pickling. And pickling. Somewhere in the middle of one of those nights I arrived at an executive decision of real quality. We needed a pickler.

The interview

The young guy who came in to interview was named Kieran, and I had one small problem going into it. I knew absolutely nothing about interviewing a professional pickler, and there was no ChatGPT to ask. So I did what any highly sophisticated restaurant executive would do. I searched for the top ten questions to ask a pickler.

He sat down. I straightened myself up, looked very serious, and confidently asked question one. Tell me about your brine.

Twenty minutes later he was still talking about brine. Acidity. Salt. Sugar. Fermentation. Which vegetables want which treatment. How long is long enough and how long is far too long.

That is how the hire got made. Not off a line on a resume, but because the man in front of me turned out to have an entire worldview about a liquid most people never think about at all.

There is a version of hospitality hiring that treats every kitchen role as interchangeable and fills it off the top of a stack of applications. There is another version that goes looking for the person who cannot stop talking about the narrow thing they care about, on the theory that obsession is the only reliable predictor of the work still being good six months later when nobody is watching. The wall got the second version.

Kieran did not just fill jars. Every pickle had a point of view and every jar had its own flavour profile, rather than one house recipe repeated ninety times, and eventually we made the obvious move and put Pickles From the Wall on the menu so guests could taste the thing they had been staring at.

The room it sits in

The wall is part of a building with a specific purpose. SOUTH is run by brothers Robert and Benjamin Bynum, who have been shaping live music and hospitality in this city for decades, first at Zanzibar Blue and Warmdaddy’s and now at 600 North Broad. The restaurant’s own history page sets out that lineage. Craig LaBan reviewed the room for The Philadelphia Inquirer shortly after we opened and treated the kitchen as seriously as the bandstand, which was exactly the point.

A jazz club where the food is an afterthought is a different business from one where it is not, and the difference shows up in the build. The dining room, the bar and the sound proofed jazz parlour are separate rooms with separate jobs rather than one room asked to do everything. The pickle wall belongs to the part of the building that is about eating, and we gave it the same seriousness as the stage.

Why an irrational decision is worth making

Restaurants are made of thousands of decisions and almost none of them are ever noticed. Where the service stations go. How wide the aisle runs between the bar and the first table. Whether the light on the stage bleeds into the dining room. Guests experience the sum of all of it as atmosphere and rarely think about any single piece.

Occasionally one surfaces. It becomes the thing people photograph, the thing they describe to a friend who has not been, the shorthand for the whole room. Those decisions are almost never the efficient ones. They are the ones somebody insisted on well past the point where the cost benefit case had stopped making sense.

The pickle wall is that decision at SOUTH. It began as admiration for something I saw in another city, it turned into considerably more labour than I had budgeted for, and it required hiring a person whose entire job did not exist until the wall did. People ask me if I have kids. I say no, restaurants.

All these years later it is still full. That is the part that takes the work. Anybody can build a wall of jars once.

Sources and references

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