Restaurant Iris, which recently marked 13 years in its small home on Monroe, is getting big new digs in East Memphis.

“Through this whole pandemic we’ve realized that we’ve got to do things to put our employees in a better position. We need room for them to grow, and there’s just nowhere for them to do that in a 12-table restaurant,” owner/chef Kelly English said.

“And it’s no secret there’s a parking problem around there.”

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The restaurant will move from a Midtown space that accommodates about 40 diners to the former Grove Grill site at Laurelwood, which will comfortably hold four times that number. Further, it has a large kitchen space that English will be able to use for catering.

“The dining room at Grove Grill is probably bigger than the entire Restaurant Iris property,” says English, who signed a 10-year lease on June 8.

English trained under John Besh in New Orleans and was the chef at the long-closed N’Awlins in Tunica. He opened Restaurant Iris in 2008, when the Grove Grill was in its 10th year.

That restaurant, owned by Jeff Dunham and Chip Apperson, opened in 1997. Apperson later left and opened restaurants in New Orleans; Dunham kept Grove Grill until he closed it shortly after COVID began in 2020. He now helps out at Magnolia & May, which is owned by his son and daughter-in-law, Chip and Amanda Dunham.

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English opened Restaurant Iris with New Orleans-inspired Southern fare and switched, after a remodel for the 10th anniversary, to Middle Eastern cuisine under executive chef Camron Razavi for about a year. When Razavi moved out of town, English returned the kitchen to its roots.

During the pandemic, he shifted to a robust takeout and delivery menu for Iris and its casual sister restaurant, The Second Line. When he reopened the dining rooms at both restaurants in 2020, it was under a combined menu and with expanded patios in the front, pop-ups on Sunday nights, and a special Catalan menu at Iris that ran for a couple of months.

The existing Iris space at 2146 Monroe will continue to operate, but the name and the concept will change.

“That building is very important to me and we are by no means abandoning Midtown,” English said. “Nothing is changing about The Second Line, and it will share a kitchen with the new concept that we put where Iris is now.”

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“At the new place we’ll have lunch and dinner, and we’ll have a raw bar. We’ll be able to have a lot more on the menu, to satisfy a lot more people,” English said.

When the East Memphis restaurant opens at 4550 Poplar, English says to expect a seasonal menu of Iris favorites and a robust bar program in the large bar.

The opening date has not been set for either place.

“We hope it will be this year. But shipping delays are real; costs are greater. This is a different world than we’ve operated in before. We’ll know more as we go.”