There’s a bumper sticker you sometimes see around town that proclaims “Summer Ave. is My Poplar.” 

While neither of us adorns our car with one of these, we sort of feel that way and are both frequent travelers along this street, which starts, on the west end, like a Lou Reed song and continues colorfully before finally fading off into Four-Way, where it reunites with U.S. Highway 70 and is crossed by Stage Road as it changes to Highway 64.

So to celebrate the first day of summer — the season — we begin our tour of Summer Avenue, re-engaging with Memphis’ most interesting street for eaters, which offers more than 70 independently owned restaurants, food trucks, bakeries, ghost kitchens, cooking stores and more. 

New Eats: Former Pancho’s space now home to new Mexican restaurant

Gone now are such former landmarks as the world’s first Holiday Inn and Memphis’ last adult theater. No more are the Corondelet department store, Pop Tunes, Imperial Lanes or Leahy Trailer Park, where James Jones wrote National Book Award-winner “From Here to Eternity.” Just last year, the last Memphis Pancho’s closed its doors for good, just off Summer and White Station Road. 

In their place are some less romantic new additions. Fast-food franchises on Summer are nothing new. But the recent arrival of Chick-Fil-A and the quickening specter of Chipotle and Starbucks suggests a more provocative step in the mainstreaming of the street. 

And, yet, the spirit of Summer Avenue is tenacious. It retains the city’s only drive-in movie theater and some of Memphis’ best antique- and thrift-store shopping. On Summer, “old” is an asset. 

Rough around the edges also means cheaper, with a lower barrier of entry for immigrants and other often marginalized communities, and that makes for a richer cultural tapestry.

It’s one long, rolling unofficial international food market, with Yemeni, Somali, Chinese, Japanese, Ethiopian, Honduran, Colombian and other cultures and cuisines each having their moment in the Summer sun. 

Tops Bar-B-Q has new local owners

It’s where Tops Bar-B-Q has two stalwart locations and where it gets the beef for its beloved burgers, ground fresh at Summer neighbor Charlie’s Meat Market. It’s where much of Memphis goes to find authentic Mexican food, from taquerias and taco trucks to panaderias, ice cream shops and grocers. 

The Summer Avenue Extended Universe also includes rewarding detours such as the hip, growing Broad Avenue Arts District and Mexican-food-rich Macon Road. (Could it even reach all the way up to claim Jerry’s Sno Cones? Let’s table that debate.) 

But for this series, we’re sticking to Summer Avenue proper and businesses on cross streets less than a block from the main drag. 

For a lot of people, we suspect, the notion of “Summer Avenue” begins at Highland Street. But for the first installment of this four-week west-to-east journey, with sequels coming on each of the next three Tuesdays, we’re going to end there. There’s plenty to eat on what one mural along the way proclaims as “Lower Summer Avenue.”

What the Somali truckers know 

A confession: We drove past Luula Halal Somali Restaurant (2439 Summer Ave., 901-363-4540) several times before realizing quite what it was. A nondescript brown building. A small, fenced-off parking lot. Signage that’s dark, with a cursive script difficult to read through a passing car window. 

A restaurant of some kind, probably. An interesting one? One even still open? That seemed uncertain. 

It turns out, it’s a quite interesting one, and very much open. 

Owners Mohamed Abubakar and his wife Saido Jama opened Luula Halal on Summer Avenue in 2016 as a market only, after previously owning a small grocery store near Mendenhall and Winchester roads. 

The store added a restaurant component in 2019, even though Abubakar and Jama had not previously been in the restaurant business.

Why?

“There was demand for it,” said Abubakar, who explained that there are a lot of Somali truck drivers who pass through Memphis, many of them from states such as Minnesota and Ohio. These drivers search for Somali restaurants along their travels, and while there were Ethiopian options in Memphis, there was not previously a Somali one.

New Eats: Horn of Africa brings Ethiopia to Summer corridor

Now, at Luula Halal, there are a row of four-top tables just inside the door and a counter that opens to the kitchen, where Jama knocks out delicious rice and pasta plates for dine-in or takeout. The rest of the building is a small shop where you can buy various flours and grains, coffees and teas, dried dates and other items. 

Meals at Luula Halal begin with sweet, spiced hot tea and end with a whole banana, which seems more than a treat. It feels like an encouragement. 

Main plates offer a choice of chicken, beef, goat, lamb, salmon or tilapia over either yellow rice or a thin, dry, spiced, pleasantly surprising spaghetti. 

While even the dine-in meals on a recent visit were served in clam-shell Styrofoam containers, this isn’t fast food. But it was worth the 20-minute wait, which left time to poke around the market.

Jama said that the goat and rice plate and the appetizer sambusas are the most popular items, and we can attest to both. The goat, slow-roasted on the bone, was tender, flavorful and plentiful, served with the rice, a lightly dressed salad and a bright green sauce of chopped jalapeno, cilantro, garlic and lemon that brought serious heat. The flaky, freshly fried sambusas were stuffed with spiced ground beef, onion and peppers. For bread, we sampled the malawah, a crepe-like, mildly sweet pancake. But there’s also canjeelo, a flatbread similar to Ethiopian injera, but less fermented. 

Down the street

The first food you’ll encounter as Summer Avenue begins to the west is Clay’s Smoked Tuna (2347 Summer Ave., 901-848-5640), a truck you can usually find parked at an otherwise vacant lot at the southeast corner of Summer and East Parkway. 

Even if you’re a skeptic — and one of us is — don’t dodge the smoked tuna at the truck because owner Abrian Clay’s signature item — his handcrafted smoked tuna dip, sold in pint-sized containers at $13 a pop — might be one of the city’s tastiest snacks. 

The smokiness leads the way without overwhelming the natural taste of the tuna. It’s just moist enough without swimming in mayonnaise. And just salty enough, too. We have no notes. Just pass the crackers. 

“Smoked” is the common denominator at Clay’s. Smoked salmon and lamb plates are the priciest things on the menu. Wing and catfish plates less so. All are adorned with a generous pile of tasty stewed cabbage. Beyond the tuna dip (there’s also a buffalo chicken dip that intrigues), we like the catfish plate, with two smoked fillets, which puts a novel spin on one of Memphis’ most familiar favorites. 

New Eats: Alcenia’s reopens with new look and familiar favorites

It takes about half a mile for the Summer food scene to pick up again, but there is a kind of unwitting sibling restaurant to Luula Halal, where more delicious home-style cooking is served up in another humble setting. 

What’s more Memphis than a soul food restaurant? Simple, slow-cooked and well-spiced, prepared and served by somebody’s mother or grandmother, even if it’s not your mother or grandmother. 

One possible answer: A Mexican restaurant on Summer Avenue.

So maybe La Llamarada (2877 Summer Ave., 901-262-4132), which is nothing if not a kind of Mexican soul food restaurant, is the most Memphis food experience of all. 

Here, through the door of this unassuming cinder-block storefront tucked amid body shops and car lots, you’ll find a smiling Maria Ahedo behind the serving counter each day, piling her own Mexican fare onto Styrofoam plates that can barely handle it.

Chipotle an unexpected addition to Summer Ave.

The window of La Llamarada declares “Homestyle Mexican food, different meals everyday,” and that’s truth in advertising. 

Ahedo, who owns the restaurant with her son, Jose, cooks whatever’s on hand or strikes her mood each day. At lunch, that might mean whole chicken pieces swimming in a dark mole. Or pork ribs in salsa verde. Or a spicy stew of beef and potatoes. Crisp empanadas stuffed with cheese or chicken or beef. Large pork tamales. 

Pretty much all of the meat is cooked on the bone in some rich, piquant sauce, yielding the most tender, deeply flavorful result possible. On a recent visit, even the pork inside a tamale was still barely hanging to a rib bone buried in the masa. 

Here, you grab your drink of choice from a cold case just inside the door and look up to see Maria Ahedo awaiting you at the counter, where you can survey what’s available each day, gesture to what you want and let her cheerfully guide you if you show a hint of hesitation. A lunch plate is two main dishes, with beans and rice, adorned by a little pile of coleslaw and a foil-wrapped stack of thick, house-made corn tortillas. 

Is it the best Mexican restaurant on Summer, much less in all of Memphis? Hard to say. Is it the most distinctive? The most wondrous and elevating if you’re the kind of diner who goes for something this personal and pure? We think it must be. 

Memphians compare hot wing places, react to Ole Miss vs UT and more

At what might be Memphis’ first “ghost kitchen,” Summer Avenue Food Hub (3237 Summer Ave.), you can get takeout wings from Wing Guru, jerk pasta and more from Happy Belly Kitchen and perhaps most interestingly, some very Memphis fusion food from chef Karen Barrett’s Bougie Noodle 901. 

The latter includes “Bougie Bowls” such as “Mane Junt” (teriyaki chicken), “Fresh Junt” (vegetarian with udon noodles), “Happy Belly Junt” (ramen in smoked turkey broth, with collard greens and pork belly) and other Memphis-centric spins on Japanese comfort food. 

You’ll almost certainly be surprised by Kim Chai (3307 Summer Ave., 901-454-7004), which you might’ve been reluctant to enter because we all, let’s face it, judge a book by its cover sometimes. But go! You are strongly encouraged.

Of all the secrets hidden on this gem of a street, this could be the best-kept one. Tired of the high price of wings? Go get a half dozen with an order of fried rice for $6.95. What do you say to a 32-ounce container of wonton soup for $4.50? And how about this — the stock for the soup is made from scratch every morning.

Pro tip: Order steamed fried rice — not regular fried rice — with shrimp and vegetables, and step back to your childhood fried rice. It’s not on the menu, but they’ll know what you want. It’s about $7 for the small, which is enough for three or four meals. (That pro tip, by the way, comes to you from someone who’s been there exactly twice but is a fast learner.) Cash only.

Final public meeting on proposed Summer Avenue improvements held

The Highland Super Submarine Sandwich Shop (3316 Summer Ave., 901-324-3728) was actually on Highland for years and was called the Chinese Sub Shop by everyone because you could get a sub sandwich or a big plate of Chinese-American food.

It moved to Summer about 10 years ago when its former location was torn down, setting up in a former Captain D’s. Things have changed with COVID; you can’t dine in, and there’s no Chinese food being prepared for now. But what hasn’t changed is the sandwiches. You can still get a 12-inch, big fat sub for about $8, and it comes with a bag of chips. One bag, as it clearly says on the menu board. And it’s almost certainly the only place in town with a sign that reads “Where a Foot is a Feast.” Please let that be the case. Cash only.

This section of Summer also includes the first of two Tops Bar-B-Q (3353 Summer Ave., 901-452-9616) locations — among the 16 total in the Memphis area — you’ll encounter on the street. 

Tops, of course, makes a more than solid chopped-pork sandwich and what’s widely considered — including by us — the best fast-food-style burger in town: Fresh, griddle-fried and perfectly salted-and-peppered. But Tops has been experimenting with their menu more of late. The latest item to get a promotional push is their smoked barbecue bologna, but don’t miss the addition of now-Memphis-standard barbecue nachos, more rare barbecue cheese fries and, as far as we know, the world’s only barbecue nachos served on Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. 

At the end of this opening stretch, in the lot of a Valero station at Summer and Highland, Taqueria Palenke Express (629 N. Highland) is a kind of no-frills archetype of a taco truck, where the solid-across-the-board tacos are nicely adorned with pickled carrots and punch-packing avocado-based hot sauce. 

New to the menu since Palenke was written up in our Summer Avenue Taco Tour a few years ago: A “tacos de birria” plate, stepping up to the fried, cheesy beef tacos with consommé trend that nearby TacoNGanas brought to Memphis. This version is good, but we’ll note that the consommé at Palenke Express is a thinner dipping liquid than the dense, spicier soup you’ll find at TacoNGanas. Cash only.

Summer Avenue taco truck tour: TacoNGanas stands out in a rich array of mobile Mexican street food

And don’t miss

As good as the smoked catfish at Clay’s Smoked Tuna is, if you want to stick to fried, you won’t have to go far. How about right across the street? 

Best Wings of Memphis (2390 Summer Ave., 901-458-7711) is a strong claim to make, but we’ve both preferred their fried catfish on separate past visits. 

Another local fast-food chain also checks in here with the first of two Summer Avenue locations. This Dixie Queen (2442 Summer Ave., 901-567-4701) just reopened with a fresh paint job, matching the glow-up at next door’s Luciann Theater. 

At Lit. Jr. (2965 Summer Ave., 901-452-8445), the discount cooking supply warehouse just a couple of doors down from La Llamarada, you can shop like the pros, i.e., in bulk. (Have we contemplated the home utility of a gallon jug of Crystal hot sauce? Yes, we have.)

You’ll find a real treasure just one block south of Summer on Tillman. Hampline Brewing (584 Tillman, 901-509-2646), home to the bear on a bike, is a favorite brewery in a city where the number of local beers continues to rise. You can eat there — there are sandwiches, pasta and charcuterie from Franco’s Italian — but this is a brewery. It’s about the beer. Good beer.

That’s a good place to stop, settle in with a Lord Binghampton British IPA and ponder this fun and funky avenue.

We’ll be back next week for another stretch of Summer, this one with our favorite Mexican restaurants (different places), a breakfast institution, cool sweet treats and a retro Japanese steak house.