Access Memphis Editorial Team

The Crosstown food hall is not a single restaurant but the ground-floor concourse of Crosstown Concourse, a redeveloped 1927 Sears, Roebuck & Co. distribution building in Memphis’s Crosstown neighborhood. Several independently run food and drink vendors operate around a shared atrium with communal seating, the standard structure of a food hall rather than one kitchen … Read more

A Memphis fried catfish plate is catfish — usually farm-raised, sometimes whole and sometimes filleted — coated in seasoned cornmeal and fried, served with a set of standard sides: hush puppies, coleslaw, white bread and often fries or baked beans. It is a Delta dish as much as a Memphis one, and the city sits … Read more

Memphis’s brewery scene is built on three things: a state alcohol code that only loosened up in the past decade, a supply of cheap old warehouse space near Downtown and Midtown, and a handful of breweries that opened between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s and simply stayed open. It is a small, young scene … Read more

The Memphis Farmers Market is a seasonal, Saturday-morning market held in a historic train shed near Central Station in the South Main Arts District, downtown. It brings together regional farmers, food producers and craftspeople selling directly to the public, and it operates as a nonprofit rather than a private vendor. Where exactly is it held? … Read more

The Cooper-Young food scene is built on three durable things: a compact strip of early-1900s storefronts that survived as a historic district rather than being demolished for parking, a pattern of independently owned restaurants rather than chains, and an annual neighborhood festival that has, for decades, put food vendors and foot traffic in the same … Read more

Soul food is a style of Southern African American cooking built around slow-cooked greens, dried beans, cornbread, smothered meats and one-pot dishes that stretched cheap cuts and garden produce into full meals. In Memphis it arrived with people leaving Mississippi Delta plantations for the city, and it took root in church halls, home kitchens and … Read more

Hot chicken is fried chicken that has been brushed or dunked, after frying, in a paste built on cayenne pepper and hot fat, then usually served on white bread with pickle slices. It is a Nashville dish, not a Memphis one. Memphis’s own food identity runs through barbecue, not fried chicken. What is hot chicken, … Read more

Memphis-style barbecue spaghetti is spaghetti noodles tossed in a sweet, tomato-based barbecue sauce and topped with chopped or pulled barbecue pork, usually finished with shredded cheese. It is a side dish and sometimes a plate on its own, built around the same sauce Memphis restaurants use on pulled pork sandwiches and ribs, not an Italian-American … Read more

The World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest is a judged pork-cooking competition held each May in Memphis as part of the Memphis in May International Festival. Hundreds of teams cook whole hog, shoulder and ribs overnight in a temporary encampment, judges score entries against a fixed set of criteria, and the public can buy tickets to … Read more

A dry rub is a mixture of spices — typically some combination of paprika, black pepper, cayenne, garlic, salt and other seasonings — applied directly to meat before and sometimes after smoking, with no sauce involved. Memphis is identified with it because dry-rubbed ribs, alongside sauced “wet” ribs, are one of the city’s two defining … Read more