ACRE

A House Set Down on Its Own Ground

South Perkins Road, in the residential weave of East Memphis, does not look like a restaurant row. It looks like a street of trees and lawns, and then the lawn opens, and a house sits on what the founders named honestly: an acre. Frank and Mary Stanley wanted a dining room near home that felt like home. They asked architect Doug Enoch to renovate the existing house until it seemed both extraordinary and neighborly. Mary and designer Gwen Driscoll filled it with work by local artisans. Photographer Robert Dutesco’s Sable Island horses command the main rooms. In the summer of 2011, chef Wally Joe—already a Mid-South legend for KC’s in Cleveland, Mississippi, and for his own Memphis kitchen—opened the door with executive chef Andrew Adams. The city walked in and has been reluctant to leave.

ACRE is the farm-to-table dinner of this list, not because a chalkboard says so, but because Joe and Adams buy from area producers as a habit and cook as if the plate should taste like a place. The guest is the professional or the couple who wanted East Memphis after dark without a steak house’s ceremony or a downtown warehouse’s echo. Tuesday through Saturday, five to nine, the house keeps evening hours that still respect tomorrow morning. That clock is part of the courtesy.

Inside, the rooms do the rare thing: they make fine cooking feel domestic. Communal tables exist for larger parties. Smaller tables keep a date intact. Light fixtures and ironwork were commissioned rather than ordered from a catalog. Service moves with the warmth of a house that was designed to put people at ease and still startle them a little with the plate. You are a guest in a home that happens to have a serious kitchen.

Order as if the land and the pantry were in conversation. Foie gras torchon with kumquat marmalade, fluke crudo, fava agnolotti, Piedmontese gnocchi with short rib, roasted poulet rouge with torn bread and white beans, Colorado lamb loin with field peas: these are night plates that earn the name on the lawn. A cowboy ribeye with tamarind-sorghum sauce will satisfy anyone who came for beef without leaving the farm logic of the house. Wine and the bar’s more curious pours are chosen to keep the table talking.

The grace is setting married to source. The graceful limitation is scale and clock. ACRE is not a large house. Nine o’clock arrives. Sunday and Monday the acre is dark. Come midweek if you want the quieter rooms. Come willing to drive a residential street as if you were invited to dinner, because that is the fiction the architecture tells, and on a good night the fiction becomes true.

Citywide Spotlight awards ACRE the farm-to-table Dinner Diamond because no other evening room on this list sits on its own ground and cooks as if that ground were the point. A downtown dining room will be closer to a hotel. It will not give you the trees, the horses on the wall, or the sense that Memphis still knows how to set a table in a house. That is the amenity of Perkins after five: you do not go out so much as you arrive.