In the end, Chip and Amanda Dunham moved back to Memphis because of a table at the Grove Grill — not an ordinary table from Macy’s or Pottery Barn, but a splendid sculpture of sorts from Ben Homolka, a local craftsman.
Chefs Chip and Amanda Dunham. Photographs by Justin Fox Burks
The couple saw the table — a thick varnished slice of magnolia atop abstract wrought-iron legs — on a visit to Memphis from Charleston, one of several trips to weigh the pros and cons of joining Chip’s parents, Jeff and Tracey Dunham, at their restaurant in East Memphis. “We weren’t super into it at first,” Chip recalls. “But then we saw one of the tables and put a place setting down. We thought, ‘Hmmm. This could be a cool thing to do.’”
Family ties pulled the couple back, as well, but the tables in the restaurant sparked a vision, something fresh and unexpected, Amanda explains: “They inspired us, about what we wanted to do, and how we wanted to change things up.”
About a year has passed since the couple left Charleston, a city they moved to after both graduated from New York’s Culinary Institute of America. Like the decision to come to Memphis, the move to Charleston was intentional. They wanted a medium-size city with a thriving restaurant scene and a location with easy access to New York, where Amanda grew up on Staten Island. A licensed sommelier, Amanda worked in Charleston as a head server at Mike Lata’s restaurant, Fig. Chip cooked his way around the city, working at Frank Lee’s Slightly North of Broad, the original Butcher and Bee, and Edmund’s Oast, both a restaurant and a brewery.
Family ties pulled the couple back to Memphis, as well, but the tables in the restaurant sparked a vision, something fresh and unexpected, Amanda explains: “They inspired us, about what we wanted to do, and how we wanted to change things up.”
At the Grove Grill, the couple play to similar strengths. Chip is in the kitchen, while Amanda oversees the front of the house with an expanded bar program and ever-changing wine list. The physical updates to the restaurant are subtle but pleasing, with lighter walls and soft gray table linens for a less formal feel.
Changes to the menus are more profound but still comfortable, building on the Southern roots and new American cooking championed by Jeff Dunham when he opened Grove Grill more than two decades ago. “Chip brings a new vision to the menu and a youthful way to look at cuisine,” Jeff explains.
For Chip, the vision includes cooking he describes as more country brassiere, rooted in rustic cooking and local ingredients. “I’m not big on tweezers,” he says, referencing the artful plating of garnishes so popular in the 1990s. “I’m more like, ‘Here’s some good food. Enjoy it.’”
Chip’s ties to the Grill are, of course, long-standing. Now 27, he started busing tables at the restaurant in the seventh grade and followed his father’s advice to study cooking. (“He said cool people cook, and that stuck with me,” Chip recalls.) One of the first dishes Chip added to the menu — a wonderful sautéed Carolina trout with fried green tomatoes and lump crab — pays homage to the ingredients in Crab Napoleon, an appetizer he remembers from high school. “When I first got back, it struck me to bring back one of my dad’s old dishes, but to make it my own.”
As a longtime customer, I couldn’t be more pleased with the Grove’s new menus for lunch, brunch, and dinner. To be fair, I am an informed, but biased, judge. I’ve eaten at the Grove Grill more than any other restaurant in Memphis, and the restaurant’s neighborhood bar and dependably good food have encouraged family dinners, drinks with friends, and countless meetings for work. On the other hand, my familiarity with the Grove gives me unabashed authority to write this: The Grove Grill is not your parents' restaurant any more, despite its longevity and an East Memphis landscape crowded with restaurant newcomers.
Grove Grill entrees include locally sourced pork chops with goat milk gouda mac ‘n cheese, above, and sautéed Carolina trout plated with lump crab, fried green tomatoes, and Hollandaise sauce.
Consider happy hour Monday through Saturday, when a panoply of affordable snacks can easily fill in for dinner. Try truffle fries, a pair of oysters grilled with Pecorino and lemon garlic butter, or foie gras mousse topped with peach preserves. Order a second round of drinks and the house-made charcuterie is a must-do. Sourced from local farms, the charcuterie board is an exuberant celebration of grainy mustard, foie gras, pickled okra, andouille sausages, thick-cut pancetta curled into new moons, and slices of ham edged with fat (heavenly!) made from Mangalitsa pigs, an heirloom breed often called the Kobe beef of pork.
Like many dishes on the menu, the restaurant’s charcuterie will change. Menus update weekly, sometimes more, with dishes moving in and out so often I stop trying to keep up. Creamy tomato gazpacho garnished with cucumber mint sorbet? Gone. Smoked and confit rabbit with red-eye gravy? Gone. Okonomikyaki, a Japanese pancake made with cabbage and green onions? That’s gone, too.
Chip’s restlessness in the kitchen (“I get bored,” he says with an easy shrug), his allegiance to local producers, and his commitment to seasonal food steer the menu updates, which also include flavor shifts to popular dishes. The Duroc pork chop, for instance, is a thick, luscious loin, Frenched on the rib bone, cold smoked, and grilled with a touch of honey. When we try the dish, mustard barbecue sauce adorns the chop plated with grits and greens. A few weeks later, the chop glistens with demi-glace in a bowl of mac and cheese made with goat milk gouda.
Another favorite we discover served across the menu is fried chicken breast, brined in salt, sugar, and fresh herbs for a day, dunked in buttermilk with a little hot sauce, and fried to order. At brunch, there’s the fried chicken and waffles with pecan butter and bacon marmalade, and at lunch, the chicken comes with slaw and tater tots, a decadent redo of the cafeteria classic with bacon, scallions, and a drizzle of blue cheese dressing.
While most of the menu is tweaked or new, some much-loved dishes remain, like fig bruschetta, smoked salmon, the restaurant’s exceptionally good Grove Burger, and Louisiana oysters, fried, grilled, or raw. And here’s more good news: Don’t fret if, like my husband, you love the Grove’s shrimp ’n grits with Tasso ham gravy. The dish remains on the menu and is exactly the same. “Why change it?” Chip says. “It’s perfect as is.”
Fried Chicken Sandwich: Snuggled inside a bun, buttered and lightly grilled, the fried chicken slider with sweet pickles and chips is the star of the Grove Grill’s happy hour menu. ($3)
Plum and Heirloom Tomato Salad: The fruit in the Grove’s salad changes regularly, but not the creamy whipped feta that swirls around the tomatoes like a white-tipped Hokusai wave. ($9)
Lemon Ice Box Pie: For me, lemon icebox pie easily trumps its key lime cousin, and at the Grove, where Sous Chef Erin Koski handles desserts, the icebox with plum coulis is top-notch. ($5)
The Grove Grill
4550 Poplar Ave.
901.818.9951
★★★★
Food: Dishes have a rustic sociability that is flavorful and satisfying. Think butter bean succotash with smoked chicken, cornmeal fried catfish with jalapeño hushpuppies, and super fresh salads colored by the seasons.
Drinks: Sommelier Amanda Dunham compares her wine list changes to a game of chess: She mindfully considers each move. Up next: Kitschy cocktails made with house-made liqueurs like orangecello.
Extras: On the third Thursdays of the month, Chef Chip Dunham builds plates around three or four different beverages for a $45 tasting. “It’s the exact opposite of traditional wine dinners, where the wine is matched with the food,” he explains.
Prices: Lunch and brunch: soup, salad and sandwiches ($7-$14); entrees ($13-20). Dinner: appetizers and salads ($6 to $16); entrees ($14-$26); sides ($6.50); desserts ($3-7).
Open: Lunch and brunch: Daily 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Dinner: Monday-Thursday, 3-9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 3-10 p.m. Closed Sunday night.
★★★★ Exceptional
★★★ Very good
★★ Satisfactory
★ Skip it!
