Poplar Learns the Parade Step

Laurelwood, on Poplar in East Memphis, is the shopping street where the city’s professional east side has long done its errands and its lunches. In April 2026 Kelly English moved The Second Line from Midtown’s Monroe Avenue and set it next door to Restaurant Iris, his finer dining room, so that Creole joy and white-tablecloth craft could share a parking lot and a chef’s attention. The move was not an abandonment of spirit. It was a homecoming to a neighborhood that already knew how to linger at noon. Best of Memphis Cajun and Creole, two years running, followed the house to the new address as if the award had a forwarding order.

English grew up in New Orleans bars the way other children grow up in parks. He has said this room is that reference point: gulf seafood, zeal, the everyday Creole table rather than the costume version. Memphis received that inheritance and made it local. The Laurelwood dining room is brighter and more composed than a backstreet tavern, yet it still seats like a place that expects you to be glad you came. Professionals from the Poplar corridor take the lunch service as a weekly mercy. Couples split a po’boy and a gumbo and remember why noon was invented. The guest this house wants is the adult who can love a messy, excellent sandwich and a proper cocktail in the same hour.

The interior carries the parade in its name without drowning the room in decoration. Tables are set for conversation. The bar, now fully licensed in the new home, pours the house’s long drinks for anyone whose lunch is allowed to last. Service moves with the warmth of a kitchen that has been feeding this city long enough to know when to explain a plate and when to simply set it down.

Order the po’boy that matches the hour—shrimp, roast beef, whatever the board is proud of that day—and accept that napkins are part of the ceremony. Gumbo is the bowl that tells you English is serious. Red beans, crawfish when the season allows, pimento cheese fries loaded with crawfish and andouille gravy: these are the lunch signatures that made Midtown mourn the old address and East Memphis claim the new one. Bread pudding is the reason not to rush. A reservation on Resy keeps the better two-tops from disappearing into the Poplar rush.

The grace is regional cooking with a finished room. The graceful limitation is that Laurelwood is still a shopping center, and the house now lives beside its more formal sibling. Some guests will always miss Monroe. The Diamond stays here because lunch is the service this kitchen was born to give, and Poplar at midday is where that service now meets the city’s working east. Come early in the week if you want the quieter dining room. Come hungry enough for the fries.

Citywide Spotlight awards The Second Line a Lunch Diamond because Creole noon cooking, privately held and Memphis-rooted through one chef’s long fidelity, is too particular to treat as a casual afterthought. A generic Cajun chain will know the names of the dishes and miss their soul. This room still cooks as if New Orleans were a relative who comes to supper, and Memphis were the house that set the extra place. That is the amenity of choosing Laurelwood at twelve: you eat a parade that learned how to sit down.