Five Generations in the Case

Laurelwood is East Memphis at its most companionable: a shopping center that still behaves like a neighborhood square, Poplar a breath away, Restaurant Iris and The Second Line next door for anyone whose chocolate errand became dinner. At 436 South Grove Park, Dinstuhl’s keeps one of its kept rooms. The story begins in 1902, when Charles Martin Dinstuhl, Sr. started making candy in Memphis. Five generations later the family still does. Pecan clusters, walnut clusters, cream drops, fudge, fruit dipped the morning you arrive. Phillip Ashley’s public shop is no longer a walk-in destination. What remains is this older promise: chocolate as a Memphis habit, sold across a counter by people who remember how the city likes its sweets.

The interior is a proper candy shop. Cases gleam. The air is cocoa and toasted nut. Service is the unhurried kind that will build a gift box with you and not make the building feel like a transaction. You may buy for tonight. You may buy for a holiday that has not arrived. The Pleasant View flagship on the other side of town is the working heart; Laurelwood is the Diamond address for the guest who wants the chocolate beside the rest of an East Memphis afternoon. Germantown, Collierville, and downtown rooms exist because the family stayed local rather than selling the name away.

Order the clusters if you want the house at its most Memphis. Fudge if the day is that kind of day. A mixed box if the gift has to speak for you. Then walk Laurelwood. Iris and The Second Line wait for evening. Clothing and home shops fill the center. Poplar takes you west toward La Baguette and east toward Germantown’s quieter streets. This is chocolate as an errand that dignifies the rest of the map.

The grace is inheritance you can taste. The graceful limitation is that Dinstuhl’s is a confectioner with several local shops, not a single atelier of designer bonbons. The room is traditional rather than newly theatrical. Come midweek if you want the counter without a holiday line. Come because you wanted chocolate the city has trusted since Roosevelt’s first term, still made here.

Citywide Spotlight awards Dinstuhl’s the Chocolate Diamond because a walk-in fine-candy house, family-held for more than a century, is the rarest sweet left after Phillip Ashley left the retail floor. A boutique imported concept will photograph younger. This case will send you home with Memphis in a box. That is the amenity of Grove Park: the errand is older than the shopping center, and sweeter for it.