Food and Dining Editor
49 recent articles by Jennifer Biggs:
Inspire Community Café in Binghampton Gateway Center serves affordable meals and provides a nice spot for folks to gather for coffee and companionship. A percentage of profits go to nonprofit organizations each month.
P.O. Press in Collierville is possibly the best restaurant around here at present and well worth the 20- or 30-mile drive for folks from Downtown, Midtown and East Memphis.
At Strano by Chef Josh, The Promised Land flows with milk and honey – and more: Dried honeycomb from chef Josh Steiner's beehives makes for an unusual garnish.
Local bakers compete for bragging rights and an insert in the official cookbook of the show "Waitress," coming to the Orpheum Jan. 15.
2019 will bring new restaurants from familiar folks and opens with the question: What’s going in Shelby Farms?
Ronnie Grisanti’s bar at Regalia is hopping old school, thanks in large part to the drinks that bartender Chris Backey pours behind the long bar.
Restaurants opened, moved, changed hands and closed in 2018, and we said goodbye to beloved restaurateurs, too.
Last year Kelly English fed New Year’s Day breakfast to about 300 people in need and provided them with warm wear before they left the restaurant. This year he’s doing it again, and you can help.
In the South, we eat lunch every day except Sunday, when our midday meal is dinner. At my grandmother’s table, Sunday dinner was fried chicken or pot roast, both served with an assortment of vegetables, biscuits or cornbread to go with it all.
Two local colleges are hosting sessions this week for students who found themselves without a school when L'Ecole Culinaire and two local Vatterott Career Colleges campuses closed abruptly on Monday.
Students and instructors at L’Ecole Culinaire on Germantown Parkway were taken aback Monday when they were told the school is closing, effectively immediately.
Looking to let someone else do the work on Christmas Day? Start right here. The following restaurants are open; if you know of others, please add them in the comments or email me at jbiggs@dailymemphian.com and I'll add them to the list.
After Gary Williams’ funeral on Saturday, the band he helped create will honor him in a second line parade.
Sometimes the little insider facts I’ve learned about food over the years have surprised me. One is that Thanksgiving is a huge day for brunch at restaurants, and another is that Christmas leads Valentine’s Day in chocolate sales.
Have you had enough Elwood’s? Is there such a thing? Well, I’d rather risk inundating you than let December get by without you knowing this is the month Tim Bednarski offers “Tres Amigos,” his tamale special.
Most every family has a traditional Christmas sweet. Maybe it’s cookies at your house, maybe a red velvet cake at your mother’s, quite possibly a fruit cake somewhere.
Can’t decide between bourbon and rye? You don’t have to if you pick up a bottle of Doc.52; it’s half each.
Flight Restaurant and Wine Bar in Downtown Memphis has been named to TripAdvisor’s “Best Fine Dining Restaurants in the United States” list.
The big restaurant space inside Chickasaw Oaks Village has a new tenant and they’re serving up a large selection of food that’s a little bit upscale, a little bit soul food.
Daniel Masters took over Pontotoc Cafe, revamped it and opened it as Pontotoc Lounge in August (despite the fact that you'll hear it called by its old name in the video).
It’s the end of an era at the corner of Madison and Belvedere. Zinnie’s, called Old Zinnie’s since Zinnie’s East opened a few doors east of the original in the 1980s, has closed.
In April, Restaurant Iris turned 10 and in June, owner Kelly English shut it down for a complete re-do, the kind where walls get knocked down and menus tossed out. It was a gamble, a throw of the dice. Iris was beloved as it was and after my first visit, I wondered if the coin was going to land heads up.
'Tis the season for a festive drink, but that doesn't mean you have to whip up pumpkin in a latte. At Babalu, where seasonal cocktails rotate through the menu, they're riffing on a holiday cake this year.
Elemento Neapolitan Pizza in Crosstown opens Nov. 14 for lunch, and Ronnie Grisanti's Italian Restaurant opens for lunch Nov. 19 in Regalia.
When Raymond Jackson started interviewing for the chef position at Today & Always in Crosstown Arts, he started eating a vegan diet for the first time in his life.
Belle Tavern owner/bartender Chris Ferri has a nice list of cocktails at the ready, but when I walked in last week and saw cherries marinating, bottles of syrups on one counter, a nice collection of bitters on another and a wall full of spirits, I was moved to request an on-the-spot cocktail.
Sakura has been serving big fat sushi rolls for about 30 years, and we all love 'em. From the crunchies on top of Pickwick to the Big Mac extravagance of the Joyce roll, we can’t stay away. I’m there about once a week and I know that many of you are too, because we say hello.
I took a peek inside the soon-to-open Elwood’s Shells last week and was surprised to see how much owner Tim Bednarski has accomplished in the last month or so.
Open Flame Bar and Grill opened last month in the former Rock ‘n Dough at Poplar and Highland, but don’t get too excited about the first part just yet. The bar is still there but so far the only alcohol sold is beer.
The drinks list at Char has always been divided by spirits and when the restaurant opened, this was simply the whiskey cocktail.
Mark Travis is a Facebook friend who posted a photo of a plate of barely-seared tuna a few weeks ago. He seared it frozen, he said, then sliced and refrigerated it until it thawed. It sounded too easy, so I contacted him for step-by-step instructions and, well, that was pretty much all there was to it.
Asian Eatery is the restaurant that started life as Tao Too and has changed its name a time or two. But it’s the same place with mostly the same menu it had when I ate my first bowl of Devil’s Nest Soup in 2010.
Relax. Elemento Neapolitan Pizza is open in Crosstown Concourse and despite more than a few hiccups, you should be able to get pizza today and every day except Sundays henceforth.
Nabbing a $10 deal at a Mexican restaurant for lunch doesn’t take much effort – go to just about any place in town. But Steak Monterrey at Las Margaritas in Cordova is heads above your typical tacos and tamales with rice and beans.
Rebecca Hartman almost threw her golden ticket away because she didn’t know what it was, then almost gave it away when she found out. But in the end, she kept it and on Thursday afternoon created a chocolate known as The Hartman at Phillip Ashley Chocolates in Cooper-Young.
I hate to push Christmas on you when Halloween isn't even here, but we all know I'm not the first to do that. And this is for a good reason.
Gary Williams can cook and Memphians know it: We’ve been eating his mashup menu of Creole, soul and vegan food for 10 years now. But there have been some ups and downs – including a complete shutdown – in that time.
Jonathan Cole is the founder of the blog placeatthetable.net and the Memphis Cooks Facebook group. The Midtown resident (and native Memphian) is a social worker by day and a home cook who likes to cook for sustenance and for fun (noodle around on his blog and check out his upscale adaptation of the bologna cake with Ranch dressing that periodically makes the Facebook rounds). We recently caught up with him to make a batch of soup.
P.O. Press Public House and Provisions opened in Collierville on Monday and it’s fair to say that owners Jimmy Gentry and Chris Thorn have pulled together an excellent team and created a top-notch fine-dining restaurant with reasonable prices.
Harold Cook, the head bartender at Sweet Grass and Next Door in Cooper Young, turns to gin and muddled aromatics when asked to pair a cocktail with the oysters at Sweet Grass' oyster bar. This one holds up to the brininess of the oysters, but is light and has a bit of a kick from the chile pepper, too.
About two years ago, Sear Shack showed us how good simple can be. The restaurant opened in Collierville with three items: Burgers, fries and shakes. Sure, you could customize a little—a single or a double, add bacon, put cheese sauce on your fries—but the core menu was limited.
Debating the best gyro in town doesn’t inspire the passion of defending your favorite barbecue, but the Greek sandwich wrapped in a pita makes my list of one of the world’s iconic sandwiches, and we’re lucky to have several good versions in town.
Cooper-Young is getting a new restaurant and it’s one Memphians have been waiting on so long they might’ve forgotten about it: Elwood’s Shells will open at 916 Cooper in the former Jasmine Thai & Vegetarian Restaurant by the end of the year.
My friend Peggy Burch frequently makes the stovetop version of Melissa Clark’s Moroccan stew, and one bowlful of it was all it took to convert me to soaking and cooking dried garbanzo beans. Then Clark’s cookbook “Dinner in an Instant” came out, and I switched to this version, close but not exactly the same, that I make in my Instant Pot (I’ve used pressure cookers for years and cannot recommend them enough).
Pete & Sam’s celebrates its 70th anniversary this year in a spiffed up restaurant, thanks to the Bomarito brothers taking on local investor partners and a late 2017 fire that caused the place to close for almost five months for cleaning and updating.
P.O. Press Public House and Provisions, a new restaurant from chef Jimmy Gentry and sommelier Chris Thorn, will open this month on the Collierville Town Square. Gentry also owns Paradox Catering and Paradox Underground. We recently caught up with him to see what led the local chef to where he is today. We found out he does a spot-on impression of his former employer Erling Jensen and shares a love of big – and many – dogs with Jensen.
Some folks can whip up a cake on a whim, but I don’t have a baker’s touch. It’s a production for me, something that requires following a recipe, hauling out a mixer and cleaning up a mess.
After years of hopeful rumors followed by a confirmation then speculation and delay, Trader Joe’s is here, it’s near and you need to get over there. Anyone who was making the 400-mile round trip to the closest Trader Joe’s in Nashville can’t really complain too much about driving from Midtown or East Memphis when now we can travel a few miles out Poplar instead of hauling down I-40. It seems to have caught on already.
Restaurant Iris quietly celebrated its 10th anniversary in April, shut the door in June and did a complete do-over, from the menu to the décor. The tiny two-top bar is gone (repurposed as the vanity counter in the ladies’ room) and the west side of the restaurant is now a bar. There are 12 bar stools, a few two-tops for drinks or walk-in diners, a round banquet in the turret and a new bar menu with signature cocktails and food. Dishes include calas tout chaud with squash soubise (hot savory calas, or rice balls), “unreasonably large seared” foie gras, and a mirliton, shrimp and crabmeat casserole. You can also order from the dinner menu at the bar.
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