By Jim Beaugez
A familiar face will close Catfish Row Museum’s 2025 Summer Chef Series, Vicksburg’s annual tasting and storytelling series featuring live cooking demonstrations and engaging conversations with noted chefs.
On Sat., Aug. 9, longtime Vicksburg chef and restaurateur Jay Parmegiani, owner of 10 South Rooftop Bar and Grill, will lead a demonstration on how to prepare a milk chocolate tiramisu with marsala zabaglione — a specialty dessert that fans of his from his decade running Roca may remember.
“Right out of the gate, I knew what dish I was going to prepare at the museum, and it goes back to probably about 2006 or 2007,” he says.
The recipe came together through a collaborative process when the younger Parmegiani and his father, Jacques, worked in the same kitchen at Jacques’ Café, which his father founded after running Tuminello’s for several years.
In search of a new way to prepare tiramisu, the duo pushed the boundaries of the dessert’s traditional ingredients. Instead of relying solely on mascarpone, they brought in chocolate ganache with Philadelphia cream cheese for tang, then added heavy cream to the egg yolks for more stability. “To my knowledge, no one was putting straight-up cream cheese in tiramisu in those days,” he recalls.
The idea to build a sabayon-style topping — specifically, the Italian zabaglione — came from his father. “He’s a brilliant chef,” Jay says. Traditionally made with marsala wine, sugar and egg yolks whisked gently over heat, zabaglione has a pourable consistency. “It’s a loose sauce that just oozes and pours.”
To give the tirmisu structure for layering, he incorporated whipped cream, and eventually, gelatin. “I distinctly remember when my dad suggested that it was that nailed,” he says. “It was adding gelatin to the zabaglione to get it to hold.” All told, the two worked through “probably 20 or 30 variations” before landing on the final version.
The younger Parmegiani took to the restaurant life early. “It’s almost like I was destined to do this,” he says. “I ended up being somewhat good at it as a teenager, and I’ve stuck with it.”
After growing up and working in his father’s kitchens, as well as at regional hot spots like Bravo in Jackson, Jay struck out on his own. Still in his late teens, he landed cooking jobs at restaurants on Miami Beach and gained experience in a variety of settings before coming home and joining the kitchen crew at Jacques’ Café in 1999.
In 2009, Jay started his own restaurant, Roca, which served Italian cuisine at the Vicksburg Country Club. After a move downtown, he wrapped up operations at Roca to focus on 10 South, overlooking the Mississippi River from the city’s highest vantage point atop the First National Building.
For his Catfish Row Summer Chef session, he’ll prepare the milk chocolate tiramisu step by step. The dessert brings back fond memories of working with his father in the kitchen at Jacques’ Café and his other restaurants. And the goal is to leave his guests with some memories of their own.
“You want to create memorable moments, and ultimately you’re there to nurture people and take care of them,” he says. “At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.”
The Summer Chef Series is held at Catfish Row Museum, 913 Washington Street in Vicksburg.
