Arcade Restaurant, Memphis TN

I have my super-mod internet friend Mod Betty to thank for this stop on our Memphis trip. If you’ve not visited the Retro Roadmap and you enjoy the older, vintage restaurants that we like to visit and share, then you are in for an enormous treat. Just click that link and prepare to get lost in a time machine full of great old motels, drive-ins, and places to eat. The ONLY flaw in the Roadmap is that Mod Betty doesn’t make it to the southeast often enough, but she has some pretty awesome content from our neck of the woods all the same, and if we ever do make it to New England again, we can plan our itinerary around her work.

So I found the Arcade Restaurant at the Roadmap and kicked myself for not checking her site more closely before our previous trips to west Tennessee. It’s a fantastic place for breakfast. Still family-owned after 97 years in business – it moved to this location in 1923 – it’s where period movies get filmed (sort of the Memphis equivalent of Atlanta’s Silver Skillet) and people ponder just how many cups of coffee have slid across the boomerang formica tables over all these decades to dent and scar them so badly.

Incidentally, like the Skillet, this place closes after lunch. I figure that’s so they can easily handle all the film crews who want to shoot scenes in the place while there’s still sunlight outside, without losing any food orders!

The girlchild declined to join us, figuring she could instead sleep for another seven or eight hours before we came back to the hotel, so it was just Marie and our son with me. We had a hard time navigating around the downtown tourist area because of a mammoth event setup – turns out it was the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, and Georgia’s Myron Mixon came to town and kicked everybody’s rear again – and I thought about how fortunate it is that the Arcade was able to survive all these years, especially when, in the 1970s and 1980s, downtown Memphis was in the depth of economic depression and tourist money was badly dried up. Memphis remains in the doldrums, of course, but from what I’ve read, it used to be a lot worse, and we’re very lucky the Arcade survived.

Our son had sausage and fruit, and Marie ordered her more recent breakfast go-to of fried eggs and toast, and I had their country fried steak platter. I only had a little bit of the steak; as the next day promised to be full of meat, I really watched what I ate for lunch and dinner on the Thursday.

The service at the Arcade was pleasant but quite slow. Our server apologized, explaining that they were short-staffed. Looking around at other reviews, however, this appears to be a pretty common happening. So if you plan to come for a pretty good breakfast in this wonderful old building, give yourself plenty of time, expect to bump shoulders with somebody else taking photos of the awesome signage, and indulge in this lazy, unhurried atmosphere.

Other blog posts about Arcade Restaurant:

Retro Roadmap (June 22 2011)
Miss C Likes (Dec. 5 2013)
Gone Rockin’ (Aug. 21 2014)

Don’t just read the blog! Follow us on Facebook, where you can get more information about our favorite places! Give us a like, hover over that LIKED button and check “Get Notifications”and please share and tell your friends to read us!