Night owls get hungry, too. So the Memphis Flyer once again selected a few places where those birds of a feather can savor delicious cuisine until midnight or later while the early birds concentrate on catching the worms.
We headed to three restaurants that don’t shut their doors at 10 p.m. These places accommodate people out on the town who might be hungry after a movie, a concert, or a play. Or even if they’re hungry again because their early dinner has worn off.
Madison Tavern
Madison Tavern was always supposed to be a place that could accommodate people who wanted to eat a meal later in the evening, at 10 p.m. or after.
Tim Quinn, who owns Madison Tavern (the former Local on the Square) with his wife, Tarrah, wanted the restaurant/bar at 2126 Madison Avenue to be available for people who might be hungry after they’ve seen a play or heard some music in Overton Square. It opens at 11 a.m., but people can order food until last call, which depends on how late they stay open. It could be 1:30 a.m. or later.
They feature “an America menu” with “Southern-influenced” fare, Tim says.
Previously, people could only order appetizers after 10 p.m., but Tim recently added a “late-night menu” with more items.
On our visit for this story, we tried several culinary delights, including the sausage-and-cheese board, hot wings, and, my favorite, the “Char-Grilled Fruit Board,” which includes a grilled watermelon with agave syrup and finished with sea salt. It’s now one of my top favorite things to eat in Memphis. I want to fire up my grill and make these every night.
People can order all of their appetizers late at night. These include fried green tomatoes served with horseradish, pretzel sticks served with Dijon and queso, elote queso and chips, a fried shrimp basket served with cocktail sauce and house slaw, and cheesy toast served with marinara and a choice of shrimp or crawfish.
The tamales with a choice of queso, tomatillo, or red chili sauce, are no longer on the appetizer list. They’re now on the new late-night menu, and they’ve been improved. They still come with the same sauces, but the new ones are made by their chef, Jose Reyes. They’re handmade and come from Reyes’ grandmother’s recipe.
Tim recently began Tamale Tuesday, which features the new tamales.
The tamales on the appetizer list were replaced with braised beef egg rolls. Also on the new late-night menu are tacos, a smash burger, sliders, and their famous grilled cheese sandwich, which Tim describes as “a staple in American history.”
Tim began making grilled cheese sandwiches with Adam Hall and friends with their team at the Memphis Grilled Cheese Festival. Hall came up with the sandwich, which is made with grilled chicken, buffalo sauce, white cheddar cheese, and regular white bread. He puts a mixture of butter and Miracle Whip on the bread and toasts it.
Courtnee Wall, who was with us the night we dined at Madison Tavern, tried some of my “Breakfast Plate,” which is on the entrée list. You get a choice of steak (that was my choice, and it was superb) or fried chicken breast. It’s served with a waffle, eggs, and home fries. She thought that should definitely be on the late-night menu.
The happy news is I recently learned that breakfast is available all day. And Tim tells me that the steak I liked so much is “tallow-injected rib eye.” Tallow is beef fat. “The good fat.”
“We cut those to order,” he adds.
When I ask if people can order other menu items besides appetizers and late-night items, Tim says, “Hey, you know what? If it’s not busy and we’ve got the opportunity, there’s no reason to say no.
“Most definitely if you slide in there and you’ve seen a show at Lafayette’s and didn’t have a chance to have dinner — they have great food, but should you have missed out — if we can make it, why would we say no? We’d like to stick to our menu. That’s where you find consistency. But, hopefully, we’ve got enough talent in the kitchen to knock something out for you if we’ve got the demand.” — Michael Donahue
Blues City Café
In the quest for good grub during the wilder hours of the night in Memphis, one option is too often forgotten by anyone living east of Danny Thomas. Sitting at the entrance to the heavily peopled Beale Street, this fine eatery is so obvious that you might say it’s hiding in plain sight: Blues City Café.
But if you’ve ever dined there while having a night on Beale Street, you already know that its name is synonymous with good grub; after all, it started out under the venerable name “Doe’s Eat Place,” back in the ’90s. At this café, as with all the joints on this late night eats quest, the food is dynamite.
Another draw for me is that Blues City Café is on the periphery of Beale proper, and thus amenable to a quick bite or take-out order even if you’re not feeling Beale-tastic. If Beale is raging the way that only Beale can rage, but you’ve just had one of those days, you can simply pop into the restaurant’s Second Street entrance without running the gauntlet of the cobblestone crowd. Once you’re there, however, there’s no guarantee the convivial spirit and swinging, rootsy music won’t turn “one of those days” into “one of those nights,” and you find yourself feeling very Beale-tastic indeed.
The food alone could accomplish that, of course, evoking as it does every backyard hootenanny and barbecue party of your dreams. I’ve dined at other establishments where that party could be from Anywhere, U.S.A., but it’s not for nothing that Blues City Café’s motto is “Put Some South in Your Mouth.” It’s a virtual tour through the Mid-South, with top-notch ribs, catfish, turnip greens, tamales, and a “Memphis Soul Stew,” but it also makes stops in Louisiana, for gumbo, and Kansas City, for steak.
But I usually go for the Mississippi-Arkansas-Tennessee tamales. That unforeseen hybrid of Latino and rural Southern culture that became a thing in itself, the Southern tamale is a delicious echo of Mississippi Delta culture, and it pairs well with the music that fills the air at Blues City. That, in turn, goes back to Blues City’s very origins.
“Doe’s Eat Place” is a veritable institution in Greenville, Mississippi, at one time Dominick “Big Doe” Signa’s grocery store, morphing into a restaurant that challenged segregationist conventions due to the cross-cultural appeal of their food, especially their tamales. That reputation has carried on unabated in the hands of Big Doe’s descendants, as when Doe’s was named an “American Classic” restaurant by the James Beard Foundation in 2007.
Entrepreneur George Eldridge was aiming to carry on in that tradition when he opened a new “Doe’s Eat Place” on the corner of Second and Beale in 1991. Though it was only two years before other investors joined and redubbed the place “Blues City Café,” Eldridge’s commitment to good tamales lived on.
As Blues City general manager Jason Ralph tells me, “George Eldridge started serving the tamales, and he still has the Doe’s over in Little Rock. Then he has a place called the Tamale Factory over in Gregory, Arkansas. So we circled back to him a few years ago, and since then it’s come kind of full circle and we use tamales that he produces at the Tamale Factory in Gregory. That was a pretty cool day when we went back to serving the original tamales that they used to make here.”
So there’s a credible back story behind Blues City’s claim to serve the “World’s Best Tamales.” And I guess my purchasing habits would be Exhibit A in support of that statement. When I sometimes sit in on organ with Earl “The Pearl” Banks and The People of the Blues in the Band Box room (where you can dine or not, to your preference), I’m often picturing those tamales as my reward for a hard day’s night. Not only do you get three or six fresh corn masa tamales, steamed in their wraps, stuffed with beef, pepper, and spices, but you get homemade chili on the side. Hearty fare indeed for the people of the blues!
If you follow suit, look for Edgar among the servers there. “He has been here since the beginning. He tells me stories about it,” says Ralph. Edgar can also tell you about other favorite dishes at Blues City over the years, like the café’s most popular item, the pork ribs.
“The ribs came from chef Vonnie Mack, who was with Doe’s Eat Place originally as well,” says Ralph. “He developed the sauce and our style of ribs, and we kind of stay true to that. We slow smoke them in the smoker out back until they’re so tender they fall off the bone. The ribs are by far our most famous item, that and the catfish. And then for late night, people tend to order the golden fried chicken tenders or the catfish. Or lately we’ve seen a lot of orders of the cheese fries, where we put gumbo or the barbecue on top of it.”
Like I said, Blues City Café is the hootenanny barbecue party of your dreams, and they’re open Sunday through Thursday until 1 a.m., Friday and Saturday until 3 a.m. — Alex Greene
Momma’s
The revving of motorcycle engines grumbled in the air as we moseyed into Momma’s on a balmy Wednesday night. The first, or last, bar in Memphis, depending on which way you’re headed, sits just off I-55 at 855 Kentucky Street, the site of the former Dirty Crow Inn, and close to the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge. We’d wandered in during bike night, with plenty of motorcyclists sitting in the patio corner enjoying plenty of brews. The trucker-themed bar sees lots of visitors who are just passing through (there’s plenty of space to park a semi), but the menu has something for everyone.
It was getting fairly late when we arrived, but we were in luck. For when the hunger pangs hit long after dark, Momma’s has you covered. The bar is open until 1 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 3 a.m. Friday and Saturday, and the kitchen keeps the griddle hot until an hour before closing. Anyone hanging out past their bedtime Downtown will have a much better alternative to Taco Bell.
The menu boasts plenty of easy comfort options; think all the dishes that, er, momma used to make. On Wednesdays, the chefs whip up their lasagna special, a comfortable glob that combines a warm blanket of ricotta, Parmesan, and mozzarella cheese, ably abetted by a smooth marinara sauce and a big helping of ground beef. Coupled with a small plate of deviled eggs, supported by bacon bits and a healthy sprinkling of smoked paprika, it made for a fine start to the evening.
Of course, with this being another late-night excursion, Michael Donahue requested several cups of coffee, while I deferred to the Express-O Martini for my caffeine kick, a mix of Smirnoff vanilla vodka, cream, Disaronno amaretto, and a ground espresso shot, topped with three coffee beans for good measure.
The main courses arrived to our table just as the toll of another after-hours jaunt hit our weary bones. There’s never not a good a time to order a fried chicken sandwich, but that crispy, spicy crunch just hits differently after wandering around Downtown hopped up on the buzz of a few beers. The Firebird slaps a hefty chunk of chicken between two buns and spruces it up with bacon slices, pickles, fried onions, melted Swiss and cheddar cheese, and slathers Memphis Mojo sauce atop it all. I needed another jolt to avoid a food coma, so my attention turned to the Diablo burger. Cooked medium rare, the patty provides the foundation for this “one hot momma,” mixing several different hits of spice with sauteed jalapeños and ghost pepper cheese.
For those craving the most important meal of the day while under the moonlight, the Bacon-Egg-N-Cheeseburger comes as advertised, reminiscent of nocturnal treks to CKs or other all-nighter breakfast places. By the way, if you find yourself out and about so late that night has turned to dawn, Momma’s does have a full breakfast menu from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.
A lot of truckers and bikers pass through, but weekly events have pulled back a decent group of regulars. There’s the aforementioned bike night, but Momma’s also holds Redneck Trivia (Mondays), Industry Night (Tuesdays), and Ladies Night (Thursdays), among others. And it’s safe to expect some sort of live performance most nights per week to offer late-night snacks and a show.
Momma’s fell off the radar a bit when it closed in 2021, due to a mixture of Covid and renovations. It opened back up in August of 2023 with a few improvements: namely, a much-expanded patio overlooking Kentucky Street, decked with extra tables and, crucially, a music stage. During our visit, singer-songwriter Max Kaplan took to the stage and serenaded diners with a mix of popular covers by request. It’s probably the first time I’ve heard a solo blues-tinged take on Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time.” But there was no loneliness killing us, or any diners, as we all enjoyed smooth tunes, some fried chicken sandwiches, and a fun night out under the stars. — Samuel X. Cicci