It’s a story that shows dreams come true, redemption is real, persistence is rewarded. It’s also a reminder that your life can change in a single moment, but you have to recognize grace when it comes to you.

Mostly, it’s a love story.

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On March 4, Dave and Amanda Krog officially open Dory. They’ve been hosting private dinners for a couple of months, but now you can make reservations, have a drink at the bar, a visit in the lounge, and order a six-course tasting menu. The menu alone makes the restaurant different; there’s nothing available a la carte.

But that’s the ‘now’ of their story, the happy ending. The start was an alcohol-fueled frenzy, and there were plenty of highs and lows in the middle.

They met in a divey little place in 2013, late at night, when Dave was working at Erling Jensen: The Restaurant and Amanda worked at the dive, a short-lived pizza and beer joint in Cooper-Young called Skunx. That night she was there to drink, and that’s why Dave showed up too.

“He walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, little girl, can I use your phone?’ For some reason I just gave it to him and he placed his fish order for Erling’s,” she said. “We sat and talked for hours then parted ways. We didn’t get each other’s phone numbers or anything.

“A few nights later he came back, and after that we’ve never left each other’s sides except when we went in treatment about a year later.”

Both are recovering alcoholics, and they both say they embraced alcohol with all the devotion and passion they now bestow on their family and their business.

They are two people meant for each other, something obvious to anyone who is around them today. And they were just as compatible at their worst as they are at their best.

“It was a total alcoholic storm,” said Amanda, who’s 36. “We had a good time, and we ran each other into the ground. Luckily. We wouldn’t have the life we have now if we hadn’t.”

They weren’t allowed in each other’s parents’ homes. Friends didn’t want to be around them. But they had to be with each other.

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“We spent a lot of time sitting in parking lots and drinking,” Amanda said.

Dave’s alcohol dependence was so severe that if he went for a few hours without a drink, he’d have seizures. He had one on Thanksgiving, when they tried to get through a family meal without alcohol. He had one in the kitchen at Erling’s.

“I clearly remember being on the floor, waiting for the ambulance, and (fellow chef) Keith Clinton having to step over me to plate a dinner,” he said.

Amanda had been through rehab several times, starting when she was 16 years old. Dave, now 46, had overcome a heroin addiction yet continued to drink.

Things were going to change.

Dave was caught drinking in the kitchen at Erling’s one night, something he’d promised not to do when Jensen hired him away from Chickasaw Country Club, where he’d landed after a series of jobs that started in Memphis at La Tourelle. He soared to the executive chef position at Madidi, the upscale restaurant owned by Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett in Clarksdale, then meandered through Memphis after he left there in 2003, addicted to opioids.

“(Erling) asked me if I was doing drugs and I said no, which was true because I’d stopped using heroin,” Dave said. “Then he asked me if I was drinking, and I said ‘On my own time,’ but that wasn’t true.”

“He considered it all his time,” Amanda said.

He worked there 3½ years, moving up and down through the ranks.

“I did whatever I was able, depending on what kind of condition I was in at the time,” he said.

But Jensen fired him when he caught him drinking.

“That was the beginning of me changing,” he said. “He was so angry, and I’ve never seen such disappointment on someone’s face. I felt bad. I felt ashamed. I wanted to be better.”

“Erling was a man I looked up to. That I badly wanted to have some kind of relationship with (him) — though I didn’t even know what that really meant — was the jumping-off point.”

Jensen is a friend now.

“I remember that night like it was yesterday,” Jensen said. “I told him to pack up his (stuff) and get out. There was nothing else to do.”

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The couple started rationing drinks, measuring, making sure not to add sugar — playing a game to try to control their drinking without having to stop. It didn’t work, and Amanda was the first to go to rehab. She came out clean, fresh, the shine of new sobriety on her, and Dave wanted the same for himself.

“I’d gotten to the point that if I got up in the night, I had to have a shot to be sure I wouldn’t have a seizure,” he said. “It was bad.”

“Not everyone has to get to gutter-trash level to hit bottom, but we did,” she said.

“Yes we did,” Dave agreed.

She took him to rehab and they both lived for a short time in different halfway houses, then they were back together.

That was 2014, and they’ve been sober since.

“I hadn’t been sober ever. Ever. I’m a one and done,” Dave said.

Jensen agrees.

“We don’t have to worry about Dave Krog anymore. He knows his responsibility and he is doing the right things,” he said.

Dave did other jobs, scared to go back to a kitchen in those early days of sobriety. Then Mac Edwards, who owned The Farmer at the time, convinced him he could work for him and remain sober. He did, and things started moving fast. He went to Interim, to work under chef Jason Dallas.

Amanda got pregnant; they were over the moon to find out they were expecting a little girl. Life was good. Then it wasn’t.

When Amanda was seven months’ pregnant, they went to the doctor for a regular checkup.

“The doctor was doing an exam and said ‘I can’t find a heartbeat,’ ” Amanda said. “They did an ultrasound and confirmed that the baby was dead and scheduled a C-section for the next day.”

“On the way home from finding out she was dead, I knew that I couldn’t handle this on my own,” she said. “I had to turn it over to God.”

The Krogs had been working a 12-step recovery program since getting sober. When the baby died, Amanda was stuck on step 3, which reads: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.”

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“When I look back on that little girl’s life and her death, I know that she brought me to God,” she said. “It was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel alone. I was in pain, but I was going to be OK and I mean spiritually OK. This tragic event was enough to make it click.

“I have a friend who believes that grace is a moment. It’s up to you whether you accept it,” Amanda said. “Losing Waylon Lee was how I stayed sober. There was no God-reliance in my life before that. ... I was running on nothing but me, which is the case for a lot of people who struggle with drugs and alcohol. When I say I found God through Waylon, I meant I found out I didn’t have to rely just on myself.”

Dave was affected similarly.

“What happened was that when she died, it forced us to either find comfort in bad places or open the window to accept comfort in God, however you want to look at it,” he said.

Jensen was at the funeral.

“It was the first time we’d spoken since he fired me,” Dave said. “He came up to me and said, ‘You should be damn proud of yourself.’ ”

Over the next couple of years they stayed sober, got married in 2016, and after genetic testing, got pregnant with Doris, their daughter who now is almost 4. Dave had left Interim, but returned as chef when Dallas left.

Life was good again. Dave was working a lot as the restaurant was going through management and eventually ownership changes, but they were happy. They were sober.

“I had Doris and was staying home with her. I had dinner on the table every night, then Doris started walking, and Dave quit his job,” Amanda said.

He left because of a dispute with the new owners, a disagreement that has long since been resolved, but the Krogs see it as fate.

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“If you don’t go the way that you’re supposed to go, God will make you so uncomfortable in your current position that you’ll eventually end up doing it anyway,” Amanda said.

And while Dave was at Interim, something happened that would make all the difference down the line.

A server came to the kitchen to tell him that a diner needed a special dinner because of his daughter’s food allergies. Instead of just accommodating the request, Dave went out to the table to talk about it.

“I found out what the restrictions were and said, ‘I got you.’ It was the middle of the summer, and we had everything you could possibly need, so I made a dish and they were super happy.

“We ended up going to their home the week after to cook, and a relationship started,” he said of the diner with the special request, who does not want to be identified. “About a year later is when there was talk that Interim might be going up for sale, so we had a conversation about maybe buying it.”

But another sale was already in the works.

The concept for Dory had nonetheless been born, and after he left Interim, Dave went to talk to the potential investor.

“I put on my suit jacket and I take this pretty flimsy business plan we had and went to his house,” he said. “This guy was kind enough to let me come to his home and pitch him.

“I was done in 15 minutes. I was dead in the water.” His host wished him luck.

But the Krogs were holding a series of popup dinners called Gallery at the time that had two good effects: The project gave them a chance to try out the tasting concept they have at Dory, and it was rewarding to them in virtually every way except financially.

“These were enormously expensive to produce,” Dave said. “The tickets were $150 a head to come to a place with a port-a-potty and in the end, we’d make about $300.”

But it got buzz. They started looking for a permanent place so they could open Dory, and Amanda launched her business, Nine Oat One, selling artisan granola.

With help, they’d refined their business plan and in October 2018, a real estate agent called and told them a doctors’ office on Brookhaven Circle, next door to Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, was for sale.

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They viewed it, put in an offer, but were turned down for the loan.

“We basically didn’t have jobs, but that didn’t stop us,” Dave said.

Benjamin Orgel purchased the place, and they asked him if they could lease it. They had nothing more than a vision — no investors and no means — but Orgel took a chance.

“Our plan then was to piece together investors,” Amanda said. “David goes back to this guy he’d already talked to, and this time he just has on a T-shirt and britches.”

They went over the plan.

“When I left, he said he’d be in touch,” Dave said. “Not long after that we were doing a dinner at someone’s house and during that, the guy texted me with a dollar amount he was in for.

“We couldn’t believe it. That was it. That was all we would need. We didn’t have to worry about going out and piecing together money here and there.”

There were construction delays, some COVID delays. But the Krogs served the first meal at Dory on Thanksgiving, to Amanda’s grandparents.

“They aren’t seeing anyone, so this was really special. There’s plenty of room here, so it was just them and us and Doris,” Amanda said.

They’ve been hosting private and invitation-only dinners, but they’ll be officially open next week, aware of how unlikely their story is.

“There are so many of these people along the way who have been there to make this happen,” Amanda said. “We knew we were going to rack up some credit card debt, but this city and the people in it kept us paying our bills, kept our mortgage paid, and things would happen when we needed them.

“At one point we had no idea how we would make it, and the mortgage company sends us a check for an escrow overpayment that was enough to make our mortgage payment.”

And they have nothing but gratitude for their anonymous investor. And his wife. Dave believes she’s a big reason for the generous investment, and believes it’s because she sees a spark, a “twinkle” in Amanda.

“When we met them at the lawyer’s office to sign things, Amanda looked at her and said, ‘You know that you are changing our lives. Our lives and our daughter’s life.’

“The whole room felt that. There were tears.”

Next week: Inside Dory, the restaurant