It was a rainy Saturday night when we made the drive to Collierville because on Saturdays, David Grisanti cooks prime rib at his restaurant in the back of Sheffield Antiques Mall. Collierville is a good haul from East Memphis, farther still from Midtown and Downtown. Would it be worth the trip? 

The short answer is yes; the longer one will come.

There are Grisantis everywhere. Frank Grisanti’s Italian Restaurant is in Embassy Suites on Shady Grove, where it’s been for decades; Ronnie Grisanti’s is just around the corner, in Regalia. The former is run by Frank and his son Larkin. The latter was opened after Ronnie’s death, but is run by his son, Judd. Judd’s brother Alex Grisanti, who owned Elfo’s for years, now has the 9 Dough 1 food truck.

David is the youngest son of “Big John” Grisanti, uncle to Frank and Ronnie. John Grisanti was the bigger-than-life personality who for years ran the Grisanti’s restaurant on Airways. 

David’s chance to open his own place came when Judd moved the former Ronnie Grisanti’s from the antique mall to Regalia. He changed the name to David Grisanti’s Italian Restaurant and started serving his spin on the Elfo Special, a dish named after Big John’s brother and served by every Grisanti to come after him.

Confused? The easy way to remember it is that David is the Grisanti the other Grisantis actually like, because sometimes they have a little family drama and as one of them told me years ago, “We ain’t exactly kissin’ cousins.”

But we like them, Memphians love our familiar foods, and there are enough of us to keep them all going. David’s restaurant was full for Saturday night prime rib and packed for Friday lunch.

Prime rib night isn’t unusual. Restaurants all around town feature it one night of the week then offer a prime rib sandwich the next day at lunch. But all prime rib is not the same; the quality varies tremendously. Many are pre-cooked, often even individually packed slices of meat that the cook opens and heats to serve. If it’s a prime rib experience you want, avoid these. They’re texturally lacking, having been pumped full of solution, and have little flavor.

Moondance falls short of marvelous, but it holds promise

It’s not, of course, what Grisanti cooks.

Quick primer on prime rib: It’s one of the primal cuts of beef, and in this case, that’s where the word “prime” comes in. It has nothing to do with the USDA grading standard which labels top beef as prime. It’s possible to purchase prime prime rib, but it’s expensive. You’ll typically find choice or select cuts in restaurants (though standard and commercial, lower grades are also sold; below that, the meat is usually processed to ground beef or something suspicious). With the bone in, prime rib is the festive standing rib roast you see on holiday tables.

The seasoning and marinating of Grisanti’s prime rib — he uses choice beef — starts a couple of days ahead. By the time these boneless roasts hit the oven on Saturday, the flavor is ready to make a crust.

What makes it to the plate is a hunk of meat a generous inch or so thick, cut all the way through the roast. The crust is full of flavor from the rub, the inside rosy and glistening, with the meaty texture of a good beef: grain, separation, a ribbon of fat. It’s served with mashed potatoes, an intensely deep au jus and horseradish sauce on the side.

We also ordered a split dish of manicotti and Elfo Special, to me a classic Grisanti meal, one that has both red sauce and butter and garlic. The manicotti is made from scratch, as is almost everything in the restaurant. (The exceptions are spaghetti and Alfredo noodles, cannoli shells and French fries.) It’s stuffed with a mix of beef, sausage and spinach, topped with meat sauce and cheese, then baked.

Elfo Special is one of the simplest dishes around, shrimp and mushrooms quickly cooked with garlic and butter then added to spaghetti, but it’s a great dish, better at some times than others. This was a good night: the garlic wasn’t overwhelming, the shrimp were plump and tender, the buttery sauce abundant and rich.

John Grisanti, David’s older brother, is helping out in the kitchen and glad handing in the dining room these days (even handing out roses now and again, like his father did on Airways). He gave me a quick history of the dish, created by Elfo, father of Frank and Ronnie.

“Someone came into the restaurant on Main Street on a Friday and they were Catholic and couldn’t eat meat. So Uncle Elfo went to the kitchen and found some shrimp and he made this dish,” he said. “Everyone liked it and they still do today. Later on, when Grisanti’s was in Ashlar Hall, Vincent Price had it when he was in town and called Daddy and asked for the recipe, then he put it in his cookbook.”

OUR PLENTIFUL TABLE

(The actor and his wife Mary were accomplished cooks, bon vivants who loved good food; read more here.)

It’s a dish as connected to the family as Miss Mary’s salad, which brings us to lunch. My first lunch visit for this review was on a Friday and the restaurant was bustling; every table was full. We ordered David Grisanti’s pizza and chicken parmigiana, which is available at lunch or dinner. The restaurant offers several dinner entrées at lunch in smaller portions and for less money. To start, we went with fried zucchini and lobster bisque.

The zucchini is cut wrong, quartered lengthwise. The exterior was appropriately crisp, but the inside was just raw zucchini. My friend and I both have a version of fried zucchini we particularly like, and mine is cut in planks the width and length of the zucchini, about ¼-inch thick. I hope David will try it that way and see what he thinks, because he has an excellent breading for everything he fries.

The bisque was good and had big pieces of lobster in it. The chicken parmigiana was very good, crisp and tender chicken topped with mozzarella, served with spaghetti in a simple pomodoro sauce. The pizza, with pesto, chicken, artichokes, onion, crimini mushrooms and plenty of mozzarella and Parmesan, was also nice.

We were on our way out, peeking in antique booths at lacy old dresses and mounted animal heads, when I realized the salad wasn’t served with the entrée. My friend thought the soup was substituted for salad, but I felt like it was an omission, a mistake. When I checked the ticket later, he was right — there was no charge for the soup. But I also noticed for the first time that a 2.7% surcharge is added if you pay with a credit card. It says it on the receipt, but no one mentioned it to me at the table.

“Our fees keep going up and I don’t want to raise the prices on my menu,” Grisanti said. “This way people have a choice.”

This is the first restaurant I’ve reviewed that has a credit card surcharge, but it’s the third place I’ve dined in the past few months that’s charged me. It’s also the third time I’ve been surprised, because it wasn’t mentioned to me ahead of time. A note on the menu instead of one on the receipt would be considerate. It’s not much money and I understand the thin margins in the restaurant business, but the customer should know what they’re paying for. 

We went back for a final lunch to try the prime rib sandwich because, as I said earlier, if there’s a prime rib special, there’s a prime rib sandwich coming. It was a good sandwich made better by the intense au jus. The fries, as mentioned, were frozen, but Grisanti shakes on his own seasoning and punches them up a little.

The crab cakes, a special, could’ve been improved with a little sauce on the side, as the decorative squiggle wasn’t enough. But they were ordinary anyway, nothing distinctive and not as good as the regular menu items I tried. The chicken tortellini soup, also a special, was simple and excellent – meaty dumplings in a rich chicken broth that would have a following should it move to the daily menu.

All desserts are made in the kitchen. Chocolate delight is serious, a profoundly rich flourless cake that’s like eating a slice of chocolate truffle. A couple of bites was enough for me, but it was excellent and polished off by the chocolate lover at the table. It was the Italian cream cake at dinner that I’d order again; they call it Gigi’s, but it could be called Janie’s, as it tastes like my mom’s, too: tender cake, pecans, cream cheese icing.

David has a sweet little place in the back of the antique mall. It somehow seemed out of place to me when it was Ronnie’s —Ronnie had and Judd has a personality better suited to a bigger place, like the one at Regalia. This seems like home for David, something right not only for his first restaurant but for him, period. He’s got a good thing going.