Three Glasses, One Evening

Main Street at Monroe is downtown in its dressed hour. The trolley still runs. The Brodnax Building holds its brick. At 39 South Main, Flight made a name by taking the word seriously: three small pours, three small plates, an evening built so a guest might learn a wine without surrendering the night to a single bottle. Wine Spectator noticed. OpenTable regulars booked it into a downtown habit. Professionals close a week here. Couples mark an anniversary here. Complimentary valet seven nights removes the last excuse. Smart casual is the request, which is another way of saying the room still believes the glass deserves a little ceremony.

The interior is posh in the kept sense: a dining room arranged for conversation, light low enough for faces, a cellar treated as the house’s first instrument. Service is the other half of the Diamond. Reviews return to it with a consistency rare in a tourist city—attentive, informed, glad you came. You are not hurried toward a club’s last call. Dinner hours hold the evening; the flight is the point even when you stay for a full glass after. American cooking with an international reach gives the wine something to answer. The concept sounds clever until you sit inside it and realize it is simply hospitality broken into tasting-size kindnesses.

Order a wine flight first, because that is the sentence the house was built to finish. Let the server steer if the list is a country you have not visited. A reserve bottle if the night has already decided. Plates in concert with the pours, then the trolley and the street. The Peabody is a short walk. South Main’s shops and galleries continue south. AutoZone Park sits east. You can make an evening of Main without ever needing a second reservation.

The grace is a complete wine night in a finished room. The graceful limitation is that Flight is also a restaurant. This award is for the cellar and the flight, not for a stand-alone tasting chapel Memphis does not possess. Hours are dinner hours. Come early in the week if you want the quieter two-top. Come because you wanted wine treated as the reason to dress, not as an accessory to a louder bar.

Citywide Spotlight awards Flight the Wine Diamond because it is the most popular and most visually assured wine room left after the dedicated bars that failed the brief. A neighborhood wine-and-snack house will be easier. It will not give you this cellar, this service, or this sense that downtown still knows how to pour with intention. That is the amenity of 39 South Main: three glasses, one evening, the city looking after both.