The Restaurant
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.
The cooking is modern Creole built on classical French technique. The menu rotates seasonally with deliberate Louisiana-larder anchors — Gulf shrimp, soft-shell crab, Creole tomatoes, andouille — applied through a Per Se-trained discipline. Signature plates have included a foie gras and biscuit course, the Iris seafood tower, a duck confit with field pea cassoulet, and a slow-roasted lamb shoulder that has remained on the menu in some form since opening. English runs occasional six-course tasting menus that draw on the kitchen's roots in New Orleans Creole tradition. The dessert programme — beignets, bread pudding, sweet potato pie — closes most meals on a Mid-South grace note.
Kelly English is a multi-year James Beard Foundation semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast, an Iron Chef America competitor, and one of the most senior figures in the Memphis chef-driven dining scene. The wine programme runs roughly three hundred references with serious Burgundy and Rhone depth and a careful by-the-glass programme. The cocktail list is one of the city's better French 75 / Sazerac / Vieux Carre programmes. For a chef-driven Memphis dinner that needs the room to register as a deliberate East Memphis business or anniversary choice rather than a default downtown reservation, Restaurant Iris is the senior answer.
Why This Is Memphis’s Close a Deal Pick
For closing a deal in Memphis, Restaurant Iris is the East Memphis chef-driven room that has handled the city's careful business dinners for nearly two decades. The Laurelwood plaza address sits a fifteen-minute drive from downtown and a five-minute drive from the East Memphis corporate corridor — the location reads as deliberately convenient for a Memphis-based partner rather than a tourist reservation. The dining room's smart but unstuffy register, the banquette tables that handle four-tops comfortably, and the chef-driven Creole menu that supplies continuous conversation prompts all combine to make a business dinner here feel both substantial and warm. Chef Kelly English's multi-year Beard semifinalist standing gives the table a real cultural signal, and the careful Burgundy/Rhone wine programme rewards the host who can confidently call for a Volnay or a Cornas without surprising the sommelier — a level of wine grammar any Memphis-aware client will register as a deliberate choice.
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