Dory restaurant is closing. The restaurant at 716 West Brookhaven Circle is owned by executive chef David Krog and his wife, Amanda.
“June 29th. That will be our final service,” Amanda said. “We’ll have regular service up until then.”
“It’s been coming since the day we opened,” David said. They opened in 2021 during the pandemic. “We were brand new and unestablished and not on anybody’s radar, either. We didn’t get the honeymoon. These aren’t excuses. These are just what happened. There is no excuse. It was sad. The restaurant business is tough. For us, we didn’t make it.”
Amanda said, “This decision was only final just within the past days. It’s not like we were, ‘Oh, let’s just throw in the towel and just get jobs.’”
They wanted to give their staff plenty of notice. David said they wanted to “make sure we leave with the same integrity we walked in the door with.”
David and Amanda will continue with the Nine Oat One Granola business. “We have that other business that’s still operating,” Amanda said.
But, she added, “What comes next has to be the right thing.”
David is working with chef Ben Vaughn on Sow Project, a non-profit that deals with community and farming. It teaches the about health sourcing and growing healthy food so young people can take that knowledge back to their communities, David says.
“I have no idea what the universe has in store for me. I’ve had a very long career. I’ve been in the restaurant business since I was 15 years old. It is something that I’m still incredibly passionate about. I’m still passionate about local food and farmers we work with.”
David and Amanda planned to open Dory on April 2020, but the pandemic hit. In an earlier Memphis Flyer story Amanda said, “Construction and deliveries and all of that slowed down. By the time we were able to actually open the doors, capacities at restaurants were 25 percent and we couldn’t open the bar.”
A tasting menu seemed like the best idea when the restaurant opened in 2021. “There’s no tasting menu in a restaurant in Memphis,” David told the Flyer. “So, us opening one under the conditions that we did with very little research was kind of like winging it.”
Those six-course dinners included an amuse-bouche, intermezzo sorbet, entree, dessert, and mignardise. But they only saw some people on special occasions or once a month.
They decided to change to an a la carte menu, which went into effect August, 2023. They also implemented a kid’s menu, which was designed by their daughter, Doris Marie.
According to the Dory web page, “Chef Dave Krog moved to Memphis in ’92, and soon began an apprenticeship under Lynn Kennedy at La Tourelle where he later became sous chef.”
It says he “went on to be executive chef at Madidi in Clarksdale, Mississippi. This was the beginning of a career that would set him on the path to restaurant ownership and becoming a respected teacher and leader in the culinary community.”
Before opening Dory, Krog was executive chef at the old Interim Restaurant & Bar.
People will miss the atmosphere at Dory. As David told the Flyer, “As I grew older and started running kitchens in my early 20s, I understood how important it was to treat the people in our dining room literally like our guests.”
Diners were constantly telling him how warm Dory made them feel. “And that’s pretty cool.”