Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen

Two Names, One Kitchen, the Long Way Home

Brookhaven Circle at night is East Memphis in its domestic register: a pocket off Poplar where houses and restaurants share the same trees. At 712, Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman opened their first restaurant in 2008 and named it for themselves, which is a younger kind of vow than naming a house for a saint or a folly. They had grown up in this city, trained at Johnson & Wales in Charleston and at the Italian Culinary Institute in Calabria, and they came home carrying both inheritances. Southern roots. Italian cooking. The friendship is the founding story. The kitchen is the proof.

Brookhaven Circle at night is East Memphis in its domestic register: a pocket off Poplar where houses and restaurants share the same trees. At 712, Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman opened their first restaurant in 2008 and named it for themselves, which is a younger kind of vow than naming a house for a saint or a folly. They had grown up in this city, trained at Johnson & Wales in Charleston and at the Italian Culinary Institute in Calabria, and they came home carrying both inheritances. Southern roots. Italian cooking. The friendship is the founding story. The kitchen is the proof.

The interior is a house taught to receive guests. Rooms unfold rather than announce themselves. Light is kind. The service has the courtesy of a kitchen that has practiced hospitality long enough to know when a table wants explanation and when it wants peace. You are not hurried toward a tasting theater. You are fed course by course as if Calabria and Memphis had agreed to share a grandmother.

Order the pasta that carries the family name. Maw Maw’s ravioli is the plate that tells you this kitchen was not invented in a test kitchen. Carbonara, house-milled cornbread with whipped ricotta and honey butter, salumi with benne crackers, Buttonwood Farms chicken, duck with cranberry marsala jus: these are night plates with Mid-South blood and Italian grammar. A sticky toffee pudding or a pot de crème will close the argument if you let it. Wine is treated as a companion, not a lecture.

The grace is craft at the flagship level. The graceful limitation is demand and kinship. The same chefs own other beloved rooms; this award stays here so dinner is not confused with Hog & Hominy’s noon fire. Parking on Brookhaven can tighten; valet eases the bother. Come early in the week if you want the quieter rooms. Come when you can linger, because this kitchen deserves the second hour.

Citywide Spotlight awards Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen a Dinner Diamond because it is the most complete chef-driven night table the city grew from its own sons. A generic Italian dining room will give you the words. This house gives you the grandmothers, the training, and the long decision to stay. That is the amenity of Brookhaven after dark: you eat a homecoming that never stopped being ambitious.