Wood Fire at Midday

East Memphis at lunch has a particular civility. Brookhaven Circle sits off the commercial run of Poplar in a pocket that still feels like a neighborhood deciding where to eat. Hog & Hominy opened here as Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman’s wood-burning house, the freer younger sibling of Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, and it has spent more than a decade teaching the city that noon can be as considered as evening without putting on evening clothes. Michelin’s 2025 Bib Gourmand only confirmed what regulars already knew. The fire is lit. The room is ready. Lunch is Tuesday through Friday, eleven to two, and those three hours are the Diamond hours.

Ticer and Hudman are Memphis-born, trained at Johnson & Wales in Charleston and at the Italian Culinary Institute in Calabria, and they have spent their careers braiding those two inheritances. Southern roots. Italian cooking. The friendship is the founding romance: two men who grew up here, left to learn, and came home to feed the city they missed. Hog & Hominy is the house where that education becomes pizza blistered in wood, pasta cut in the back, a noon table that feels generous rather than stiff. East Memphis professionals book it for the lunch that has to impress without performing. Couples take a weekday two-top and let the meal run toward two o’clock as if the afternoon had consented.

The interior is warm wood and firelight even at midday, a dining room arranged for conversation, the oven visible enough to remind you that heat is the house’s first instrument. Service has the courtesy of people who know the difference between rushing a table and keeping a kitchen honest. Reservations through Resy save the better seats. Walk-ins are possible when the hour is early.

Order from the wood. Pizza is the signature that made the room famous, blistered and salted in the Southern-Italian key the chefs named. House pasta, a tuna Niçoise when the board is in that mood, a Friday catfish po’boy, collards and hominy for anyone who came to taste the title: these are lunch plates with evening intelligence and midday ease. A glass at the bar is permitted. The point is still the plate.

The grace is craft at a reachable hour. The graceful limitation is the clock and the parking. Lunch ends at two. Brookhaven Circle can be tight. The same kitchen is a dinner destination after four, which is why this award stays at noon—so the fire’s first service is not lost inside the later one. Come Tuesday at eleven if you want the quiet table. Come Friday if you want the special and the feeling that East Memphis still knows how to pause.

Citywide Spotlight awards Hog & Hominy a Lunch Diamond because wood fire, regional cooking, and a privately held Memphis kitchen meet here without requiring a night reservation to prove their worth. A casual pizza counter will be cheaper and faster. It will not give you Calabria and the Mid-South in the same bite, nor a room that has already been measured by Michelin and found generous. That is the amenity: lunch that respects your time and still treats your appetite as a serious guest.