Chip Dunham may be the only chef inspired by SpongeBob SquarePants.
Dunham, 31, who owns Magnolia & May along with his wife Amanda, was 14 when he began working at a restaurant. “My parents told me I needed to get a job if I wanted to go to the movies or any sort of extracurricular activity with my friends,” he says. “I needed a job to pay for that.”
His mother wanted him to bus tables at The Grove Grill, which was owned by his dad, chef Jeffrey Dunham. “My dad said cool people cook in the kitchen.”
Thanks to an animated TV series, Chip became a pantry cook, making cold salads and appetizers. “At the time I was really into SpongeBob SquarePants. He was a fry cook.”
Working at the restaurant was “a really positive experience. We had a good bunch of people back there. When I first started, Ryan Trimm was the chef de cuisine.
“I wouldn’t be doing it to this day if I didn’t love it. It was a lot of fun. It gave you a creative outlet.”
Chip, who could “work every station in the kitchen,” enrolled in The Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, New York. “There’s a distillery on campus, a brewery, a culinary science program. If anyone is going into the culinary arts field, that is the place to go.”
Chip, who met Amanda at school, worked at Slightly North of Broad Restaurant, Butcher & Bee, and The Glass Onion in Charleston, South Carolina, before moving back to Memphis.
In 2017, his parents were thinking about adding a second location of The Grove Grill but couldn’t find the right location. They decided to convert Chip’s grandfather’s insurance company into a restaurant.
The Grove Grill closed in March 2020 during the pandemic. “We ended up just putting all our efforts into Magnolia & May,” Chip says.
They opened the restaurant in May 2020, with Chip as executive chef and Amanda as general manager. “We were ready to go and our employees were ready to go. There was no sense in waiting anymore.
“We had online orders, did curbside, and you could dine in. It was all about doing what we could to stay afloat. We did those chef boxes and instructions on how to make a dinner for two.”
As for the concept, Chip says, “We call ourselves a country brasserie. We present ourselves in a rustic way, but while we’re a restaurant based in the American South, we don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves as that.”
Influences include Asian and Middle Eastern, but everything is “rooted in that classic French technique,” Chip says. And they change the menu daily. “That could be as simple as one change or we could basically overhaul the whole menu.”
Core items include sautéed trout with fried green tomatoes and jumbo lump crab meat and hollandaise. “We’re doing it with sockeye salmon right now. The only reason we switched out trout is salmon is in season.”
Sandwiches include a fried chicken and collard greens melt and a double cheeseburger with melted cheddar.
They still serve the pimento cheese from The Grove Grill. “We don’t have the ability to do the flatbread like we did at The Grove. We just serve it with crackers, pickles, and bacon marmalade.”
They include some “exclusive items” for the recently reinstated lunch. One is pastrami made with Home Place Pastures beef brisket served on marble rye bread. “And then I put some house-made barbecue chips on it and jalapeño cheddar cheese sauce.”
As for desserts, Chip says. “My kids really like ice cream cones, so one of our desserts is chocolate-dipped cones with sprinkles.”
Dunham family children are responsible for the restaurant’s name. “Our family has a silly tradition where before you know the gender of the baby, you give it a little nickname. At the time, Amanda was pregnant with our daughter, who we called Baby Magnolia. And my sister was pregnant, and we called my niece Baby May.”
Magnolia & May is at 718 Mt. Moriah Road; (901) 676-8100.
