Memphis’s Greatest Tables
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The Top 5 Memphis Restaurants
Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen
Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen opened in 2008 inside a converted bungalow at 712 W. Brookhaven Circle, a tucked-away East Memphis residential pocket that you would not stumble across — you have to know the address. Chef-owner brothers Andrew Ticer and Michael Hudman, both Memphis-born and Italy-trained, named the restaurant after each other's first names rather than a more obvious surname combination, which tells you something about how the kitchen sees itself. The dining room seats just over forty across a single warm bungalow space: hardwood floors, white walls, candlelit tables of four and two, a curved bar at the back where solo diners are welcomed onto the chef's counter view.
Restaurant Iris
Restaurant Iris opened in 2008 in a converted Cooper-Young bungalow before relocating to a larger Laurelwood plaza dining room at 4550 Poplar Avenue in 2022 — a more polished setting that better matches chef-owner Kelly English's mature cooking. English, a New Orleans native and Le Cordon Bleu graduate who staged at Per Se before opening Iris in his early thirties, has carried the restaurant for nearly two decades as Memphis's senior chef-driven dining room. The current space seats roughly sixty across a warm contemporary room: hardwood floors, banquettes along one wall, deep gold lighting, a curved bar that doubles as a chef's counter, and a careful Memphis-art collection on the walls.
Folk's Folly Prime Steak House
Folk's Folly opened in 1977 when Humphrey Folk Jr. — a Memphis cattleman with no restaurant experience — bought a Mendenhall Road bungalow and converted it into the city's first dedicated prime steakhouse. The name was a tongue-in-cheek nod to local skepticism that a Memphis steakhouse could survive in a barbecue town. Nearly fifty years later, Folk's Folly is the city's institutional special-occasion dinner, run by the founding family's second generation and still occupying the same East Memphis bungalow with thoughtful expansions over the years. The main floor seats roughly one hundred and forty across multiple intimate rooms: wood-panelled walls, white tablecloths, brass fixtures, candlelit tables, leather banquettes, and a careful collection of Memphis-cattle history on the walls.
Chez Philippe at The Peabody
Chez Philippe opened in 1981 inside the Peabody Hotel at 149 Union Avenue, occupying a soaring two-story ballroom space that the hotel had previously used for ceremonial dinners. The room is one of the most architecturally significant restaurant settings in the American South: grand Corinthian columns rising to a coffered ceiling, deep banquettes in burgundy velvet, white-linen tables set at generous spacing, soft gold lighting from chandeliers, a careful collection of nineteenth-century French art, and a string quartet alcove that runs live music on weekend evenings. The dining room seats roughly seventy across two levels — a more intimate upper mezzanine and the grand main floor where most reservations are placed.
Charlie Vergos' Rendezvous
Charlie Vergos opened the Rendezvous in 1948 in the basement of a downtown Memphis building at 52 S. 2nd Street, accessible only through an unmarked alley entrance off General Washburn Alley between Union and Monroe. The kitchen still operates from the same basement, the dining room still seats roughly two hundred and fifty across the original brick-walled, sawdust-floored, ceiling-low room, and the founder's grandchildren still run the front of the house. No restaurant in Memphis has earned more national barbecue-tourism column-inches than the Rendezvous — the room is the structural cultural anchor of the American dry-rub barbecue tradition and the address every visiting food writer, sports team, and inbound business traveller is sent to within their first forty-eight hours in town.