Welcome to Table Talk, where The Daily Memphian writers and editors send the latest food news — along with a dash of this and that — directly to your inbox every Wednesday. Jennifer Chandler is off this week. 

Here’s a true Memphis food story of a sort.

This summer, my wife and I were eating at a pakora bar in Edinburgh, Scotland, when our server, getting the “American” vibe, asked what part of the States we were from.

Pakora is an Indian vegetbale fritter. (Shubham Kumbhar/Getty Images)

My wife said “Minnesota,” and he returned a blank look.

I said, “and Memphis,” and he got animated in a hurry. It turned out he was planning a food tour of the U.S. next year and had been researching different kinds of regional barbecue. He asked us about that, and when he realized we were, um, very conversant on the topic, he pulled up a chair and sat down. 

For the record, and with apologies to the enchiladas of New Mexico, my ultimate recommendation was he start in New York and work his way down the southeast through Memphis and New Orleans, concluding in Texas. Or vice versa.

Memphis culture travels, something I was reminded of on the same trip when — more true stories — I heard the Al Green obscurity “Driving Wheel” playing in a hotel lobby in Inveraray, also in Scotland, and Wendy Rene’s Stax soul gem “After Laughter (Comes Tears)” at an Indian street-food restaurant in Glasgow.

That vacation happened amid the longest period, roughly two and a half months, I’ve spent away from Memphis since returning to the city in the late 1990s. 

Chris Herrington recently moved to St. Paul, Minn. (Pabradyphoto/Getty Images)

As hopefully doesn’t warrant much more explanation now, I moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, this summer as a result of a job change for my wife and am still writing for The Daily Memphian partly remote and partly in town with a little bit of back-and-forth. 

On the eve of that move during a recording for our weekly “Sound Bites” food podcast, producer Natalie Van Gundy asked me what Memphis foods I would miss. I punted the question by saying, “I guess I’ll find out.”

It turns out that “missing” isn’t quite the right frame. I’m still going to be in Memphis frequently enough I won’t have to wait long to get what I really want. But moving north has underscored how Southern, even more than Memphian, I am. And in the recent weeks I’ve been back in town, I have been drawn to reconnecting with Southern staples. 

So I’ve already had my favorite Southern food (fried catfish, in this case from Soul Fish Cafe) and the Memphis export that hasn’t yet found its way to my new ’hood (Closed circuit to Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken: Please open a St. Paul location). I’ve visited a couple of my barbecue sure shots (chopped pork on toast at the Bar-B-Q Shop, #2ribs2wings at Cozy Corner). 

And I’ve had what’s been the best Southern home cooking/soul food I’ve found in town in recent years at Ms. Girlee’s on Chelsea Avenue where I ate my fried pork chops and yams while gazing out at the Family Dollar store where American Sound Studios once stood — a Memphis experience, for better and worse.

Tops employee Anthony Hawkins assembles barbecue sandwiches during the lunch rush at the Tops Bar-B-Q on Winchester Road on Feb. 25, 2020. (Jim Weber/The Daily Memphian file)

All that is traditional — yes, I’ve had a Tops Bar-B-Q burger too — but I also value keeping our food traditions alive and thriving by tweaking them and “elevating” them, by mixing them up and pushing them forward.

Along those lines, when I dipped down to Arkansas for a weekend family visit, I had lunch at Little Rock’s Root Cafe, a place I wrote about in a day-trip feature a few years ago. This funky little farm-to-table diner is dedicated to using independent, small-scale Arkansas providers, and I don’t think I’ve had many more satisfying meals this year than the simple ham sandwich and blackberry lemonade there. 

And I’ve dropped in on Kinfolk, the newish, down-home breakfast-oriented restaurant in Harbor Town that I wrote about when it opened this spring. As it happens, Kinfolk was closed for most of my recent absence, the product of a water leak in its building that required major repairs. It’s open again, and while the menu was still slightly scaled down when I visited this week, chef/owner Cole Jeanes said he expected to be ramping it back up this weekend. Better reopening timing than for my Memphis return: Kinfolk is featured in the October/November issue of the Southern culture magazine Garden & Gun, with a review from Oxford, Mississippi, writer John T. Edge. 

I’m still planning to check in on another place I wrote about this year, and which has also added something new and worthwhile to the Memphis take on Southern food: the West African barbecue shop Mande Dibi from Chef Bala Tounkara, whom I was happy to see highlighted recently on the Southern Foodways’ “Gravy” podcast by frequent Daily Memphian contributor Joshua Carlucci.

While further good options remain plentiful, I have plans to polish off my “indulging in Southern food” experience this month with dinner at The Lobbyist on South Main Street, home of my favorite Memphis meal in the past couple years. This produce-forward fine-dining restaurant honors the ethos of the Southern vegetable plate even if the ingredients and approaches extend far beyond that.

The Lobbyist is the restaurant in The Chisca. (Brad Vest/Special to The Daily Memphian)

Like the dining scene in any city worth its salt, Memphis food is about more than explicitly or traditionally Southern culture, of course. When you live here, you can bristle at being thought of only in terms of barbecue, wings and fried chicken. But you can indeed have it all. A city can have just about anything but shouldn’t lose sight of the things that make it fully itself.

These Southern urges indulged, I’ll probably focus more of my Memphis trip eating, now and going forward, on exploring the new. Hey, y’all: What have I missed?

The week on Memphis’ food and dining scene

One new place I have visited since I’ve been back is The Overland, the new restaurant in Germantown’s Thornwood development, which has a Western theme. I think this might have been the first time I had elk, which was my favorite dish on this first visit. 

At the other end of town, The Archives Bar & Bistro is opening this week at Downtown’s Hotel Napoleon. The restaurant is a new venture from local chef Phillip Dewayne who owns the Park + Cherry cafe at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens.

Bartholomew Jones (left) and Renata Henderson (right) cofounded of Cxffeeblack. (Brad Vest/Sepcial to The Daily Memphian)

Speaking of new stuff at Downtown hotels, local coffee-culture fixture Cxffeeblack, which has its own Anti-Gentrification Coffee Club in the Heights neighborhood, is the new coffee supplier for the Hyatt Centric. The hotel is also sponsoring and lodging Cxffeeblack’s barista-exchange program. 

Some other new stuff on deck includes the Houston-based chain Salata Salad Kitchen and a Chipotle location coming to Bartlett. 

In some sad Memphis food news this week, the city lost Dino Grisanti, a chef, restaurateur (Dino’s Grill, Farm & Fig) and part of the well-known Grisanti restaurant family. He was 48.

Jody Callahan profiled teen baker Alannah Williams and her business Dance Like a Cupcake. The aforementiond Joshua Carlucci digs into birria tacos and a California burrito at a Summer Avenue food truck, as one does. And if you’re looking to throw down in your own kitchen, we’ve got the recipe for blue cheese and jalapeno slaw at Elwood’s Shack.

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