Weird eats & drinks in Memphis
Weird eats and drinks in Memphis — 10 of them, from Marlowe's Ribs & Restaurant, Shelby Forest General Store and The Beauty Shop Restaurant. Themed dining rooms, improbable specialties, and restaurants built around one strange idea and committed to it completely. They spread across Memphis and Millington, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Marlowe's Ribs & Restaurant
Marlowe's has been feeding people a mile south of Graceland for decades, and it has solved the tourist-transport problem in the most Memphis way imaginable: a fleet of pink stretch limousines that run hotel pickups every night from 4 to 8 p.m., free. The partner list is short and local — the Guest House at Graceland, Days Inn Graceland, the Holiday Inn Express, even the Graceland RV Park and Campground — so this is aimed squarely at people already deep in Elvis country. Inside it is dim, red, and unapologetically themed, with ribs, catfish and a menu that does not pretend to be reinventing anything. The limo is the meal's opening act and everyone rides it knowing that. Kitchen runs to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. on weekends.
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Shelby Forest General Store
The store sits on a two-lane road between the front and back entrances of Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park, about fifteen minutes north of I-240, and it is still doing the job a general store does: canned goods, jerky, bulk candy restocked weekly, salt-water taffy, and Mennonite baked goods and jarred preserves trucked in from Backermann's Country Market in Whiteville. Behind all that is a grill, and the burgers are the reason city people make the drive out. The owners are a genuine mom-and-pop operation who will cut up with you the entire time you're ordering; the store's own line for itself is "the past is our present to you." You eat on the front porch, in one of the Adirondack gliders and rockers they also happen to be selling. It is cash-and-carry in the most literal sense — no online, no phone orders, come stand at the counter.
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The Beauty Shop Restaurant
Karen Carrier took a shuttered 1950s Cooper-Young salon — the one where Priscilla Presley sat for her hair — and left the evidence in place rather than gutting it. You eat under authentic hooded dryers, the mint-green wash basins now run as bar sinks, and the original terrazzo is still doing its job under the tables. Carrier layered her own taste on top of the bones: glass-block booths, hand-blown art-glass lighting, copper and silver-leaf walls. She trained in New York in the 1980s and came back to Memphis in 1987, and the kitchen has been written up in Gourmet, Bon Appétit and Food & Wine since. The house line is "Look Good. Eat Good," which is about as much explanation as the room needs.
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Cozy Corner BBQ
Cozy Corner's calling card is the whole smoked Cornish game hen, $12.25 as a dinner plate, which is not a thing the rest of Memphis barbecue bothers to make. Around it sits the rest of the board: a bologna sandwich at $4.55, a two-bone rib at $7.99, a pulled rib tip sandwich at $7.25, all sandwiches built with slaw and sauce unless you say otherwise. Sauce comes in five heat steps running from dry all the way up to what the menu calls Super Hot (VERY Spicy), and the escalation is not a bluff. Co-founder Desiree Robinson still frames the place as "the best BBQ that Memphis has to offer," and BusinessWeek, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Saveur and Southern Living have all filed dispatches agreeing. Finish with banana pudding or peach cobbler, $3.65 either way.
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Jerry's Sno Cones
The order is the Supreme — ice cream sunk inside the sno cone rather than perched on top, so you dig down through shaved ice and syrup and hit the cold seam partway. Jerry's has been doing it out of the Wells Station Road walk-up in Berclair long enough that the summer line down the sidewalk is a fixed feature of the neighborhood. The menu keeps going past the point of reason: dipped cones, sundaes, banana splits, milkshakes, funnel cakes, plus actual burgers and pretzels if someone in the party wants dinner disguised as an errand. There's a second, newer location on Bonnie Lane in Cordova that runs later hours, but Wells Station is the original and the one with the mythology. Closed Sundays at both.
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Coletta's Italian Restaurant
Coletta's opened in 1923 and is now run by the fifth generation of the same family, which is roughly four generations longer than most restaurants get. The claim it rests on is barbecue pizza — mounds of pork BBQ, mozzarella and sauce, listed on the menu as "The Original Barbeque Pizza" and sold in 8, 12 and 15 inch — a Memphis genre this kitchen is generally credited with inventing. The South Parkway room is the original address and its menu is the older, cheaper one: pizzas from $9.00, meatball and Italian beef sandwiches in the $6.50-$9.50 range, pasta running up to about $17.25, cannoli at the end. The Elvis-ordered-it-by-the-boxful story is house lore that South Memphis has never had reason to correct. There's a second, newer Coletta's on Appling Road out east, but it's the newer, tidier one.
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Gibson's Donuts
Gibson's opened on Mt. Moriah in 1967; Don DeWeese was a regular customer who bought it in 1996 as an investment and wound up working the kitchen himself, and the city has since renamed the stretch out front Don DeWeese Boulevard. He calls it the largest one-owner, one-location doughnut shop in the country, and told WREG he'd already turned out 700 dozen before nine in the morning. The dough rises three times and goes through a 50-year-old glazer that coats both sides, which is why a fresh glazed sags a little when you pick it up. It ran around the clock for decades — Alton Brown put it on 'The Best Thing I Ever Ate,' and there are two books about the place sold at the counter — but after a late-night security scare that spooked the kitchen staff, it now shuts at midnight and reopens at 5 a.m. When February's ice storm closed it for three days, a server said they couldn't keep the cases full once the doors opened again.
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Alcenia's
Betty Joyce Chester-Tamayo — Ms. B.J. to everyone — opened Alcenia's on North Main in 1997 after her son's death, and she is blunt that she hadn't cooked growing up; people back in Meridian told her she had no business trying. She learned her mother Alcenia's recipes with her mother's guidance, and the fried chicken, chicken and waffles, and sweet potato cobbler that came out of that turned a small room hung with beads and ribbons into a national soul-food stop. The hug at the door isn't a marketing line — it's the actual door policy, and the tagline on her own site is that you come in a stranger and leave family. The Pinch District around her has been less generous: she told WREG in January 2026 that for years the downtown trolley skipped her block, and that convention weekends barricade Main Street to cars and park food trucks where her customers would be. She's still there Tuesday through Saturday, and she is not quiet about wanting the city to notice.
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RP Tracks
Rick Johns and Peter Moon opened it in December 1987 beside the rail line a block off the University of Memphis campus, and somewhere along the way a student bar in the barbecue capital of America became famous for tofu. The BBQ tofu nachos — extra-firm tofu, fried, sauced, dumped over chips — are $12.50 on the 2025 menu and are the dish the kitchen leads with on its own website. The vegetarian column doesn't stop there: buffalo tofu slices, BBQ and marinated tofu quesadillas, chipotle hummus, and tofu subbed into most of the meat plates on request. The rest of it is honest bar food — wings, loaded fries, pitas, burgers — served until 1 a.m. six nights a week, with brunch on weekends until 2:30. Trains still go past.
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Kwik Chek
On paper it's a Midtown corner store: beer coolers, lottery tickets, a wall of chips, people in and out for a single tallboy. The deli counter at the back is the actual business, and it runs a menu that has no business fitting in a convenience store — bibimbap and bulgogi on the Korean side, Greek-leaning gyros and salads, banh mi, burgers, wraps, and an unusually deep vegetarian column. The sandwiches have names locals use without irony: The Turk, The Ninja, the Fireball of Freedom. Choose901 files the kimchi burrito under Memphis bucket-list eating, alongside the city's fried chicken and barbecue, which tells you where it sits in the local hierarchy. You order between the snack aisles and mostly take it away.
Weird eats & drinks in Memphis — FAQ
Which weird eats & drinks in Memphis are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Alcenia's, The Beauty Shop Restaurant and Cozy Corner BBQ. Alcenia's — Betty Joyce Chester-Tamayo — Ms.
Where in Memphis are they?
Across Memphis and Millington. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Is this a good weird date in Memphis?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Alcenia's, for instance: The move (a daytime one — she closes before dinner): Saturday, be at the door when it opens at 9. Order the chicken and waffles and one sweet potato cobbler with two spoons, let her hug you, then walk the two blocks over to the Bass Pro Pyramid and ride up to the observation deck to look down the Mississippi on a full stomach.
How were these weird eats & drinks chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Memphis guide.