Chez Philippe at The Peabody

The Restaurant

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.

The kitchen project is classical French executed with deliberate formal discipline — the kind of cooking that has largely disappeared from American hotel dining rooms over the past two decades but that Chez Philippe has carefully preserved. The menu is built around a multi-course French tasting format with optional wine pairings, supplemented by an a-la-carte selection of French classical anchors: a foie gras terrine, sole meunière, duck a l'orange, beef Wellington for two carved tableside, a careful cheese course, and Grand Marnier soufflé prepared in-house. The wine programme runs roughly five hundred references with serious Burgundy and Bordeaux depth and one of the South's better French regional whites collections.

The Peabody Hotel is a National Historic Landmark and one of the South's most-considered historic luxury properties — the building's famous ducks march from the rooftop to the lobby fountain twice daily, a ritual that has run continuously since 1933. Chez Philippe's location inside this property gives the dining room a structural cultural register that no other Memphis restaurant approaches: a meal here begins with a doorman opening a brass door, continues through a marble lobby past the duck fountain, and ends inside a French dining room that has hosted U.S. presidents, Mid-South governors, and the city's senior wedding-rehearsal and milestone celebrations for over four decades. For a proposal, a sixtieth birthday, or a once-a-decade Memphis dinner, Chez Philippe is the structurally inevitable address.