Dan Conaway
Conaway: Dan’s Tasteful List 2024
Eating out in Memphis is a reward for living here. You deserve it.
Columnist
Dan Conaway is a lifelong Memphian, fascinated and frustrated with his city, but still in love. A columnist since 2010, his distinguished advertising career has branded ribs in the Rendezvous and ducks in The Peabody, pandas in the zoo and Grizzlies in the NBA. Stories in Memphis tend to write themselves. He’s helped a few along. Two book collections of his columns have been published.
There are 317 articles by Dan Conaway :
Eating out in Memphis is a reward for living here. You deserve it.
“The City of Memphis buying a hotel to protect its interests — our interests — is not a bad idea. But, the city running a hotel is a terrible idea.”
“Can a city stand against laws that disproportionately and negatively affect their entire population, daily threatening their safety, their livelihoods and their very lives?”
“In one of the reddest states in the nation, where Trump will likely win by more votes than Tennessee-based Cracker Barrel has biscuits, Trump couldn’t vote.”
This is about effort against odds, the measure being the effort itself, never accepting that there’s no sense in trying, never giving anything less than your best, knowing the measure of you is you.
After my oldest brother died, my other brother and I began really talking and laughing.
Let’s rename Crump Park, a lovely little spot, Crews Park. Crump already has plenty of things named after him.
Watching them play, even if you’ve never pulled a club back, is watching the beauty of those swings and this sport, of individual achievement.
Memphis and its people are real — as real as the lives they face, as warm as a needed hug and as uniquely colorful as the palette of their own making.
If we’re lucky — very lucky — life will afford us a few very good friends — friends who expect nothing from us but us, friends whose simple presence in a room makes the room better and the day improved.
Through all of that wretched year — a presidential resignation, two assassinations, an open convention, rioting, an election — America stood.
I had no idea my car had that many scratches. Then I remembered the mounting and unmounting of the luggage carrier for trips to the beach and trips here and there.
“I took the chimp’s hand. He walked me to the men’s suits, and stepped back as if to say, ‘You look like a 38 regular.’”
In this election, you can save this country from four years of chaos, from power used for revenge and from power used to pardon the guilty and convict the innocent.
If the world’s richest man was going to build his “gigafactory of compute” in Atlanta or Nashville, they’d be blowing so hard, there’d be tornado watches.
Opinion: This school board is dangerously close to looking like the boards before it, playing to the people in the room during meetings rather than the 110,000 students and their families they were elected to serve.
The occasion was an Alpha Tau Omega fraternity reunion of the members and Little Sisters from, oh, 1967 to 1976 at UT. Ancient Greeks.
“If you didn’t like my proposal for starting the state of West Tennessee a couple of weeks ago, there’s this possibility: The City-state of Memphis.”
The Sunset Symphony at the Overton Park Shell was testimony that people, thousands of them, will rise above the claims and clamor of crime to gather in Overton Park at night for the reality of a shared and celebratory experience.
Announcing the birth of our nation’s 51st state:
The State of West Tennessee.
“Here are just three Memphis medical miracles, three that have touched my life, brought about by people who have touched the lives of literally millions. Nowhere do we recognize all of our medical professionals, but there could be a way — and a place — to do so.”
Like us, Memphis barbecue doesn’t need fancy; it abhors pretense and imitation; it stands on its own; it’s one of a kind and we’re happy to share.
“In a world either on fire or simmering, in a country dangerously divided, in a challenged city, perspective returns in an ambulance.”
“We were out in the country, the middle of nowhere yet right here, two old friends and a couple dogs among old barns on a new morning, and we were having a business meeting.”
We’ve become physically and intellectually lazy. We’ve made our goals easy, and we’ve made the first answer we like good enough, true or not.