I've been back to Memphis restaurant three times since the shockingly bad meal I endured there a few months ago--an experience so dire it hastened the birth of this site. The reasons for my return visits were not born out of guilt at having thrashed the place for its cunting attitude nor out of some curiosity to see if it had improved. I had written Memphis off and was happy to never step foot in the joint again. But my friends got to me.

Those same guys who suffered side by side with me and shared in my boiling resentment had now softened in their hatred. We had all survived the same plane crash, and after sufficient recovery, they were ready to fly again, while I was content to wallow in my newfound preoccupation with Amtrak routes and bus schedules. I asked myself how I could return to a restaurant that I had so thoroughly excoriated in writing. I would be a traitor to my own self-respect. The basic tenets of customers' rights were at stake here. Treating people badly, and expecting them to pay through the nose for the privilege, is behavior that should never be rewarded. So what swayed me? Someone offered to pay for me. I don't say that flippantly; it's how I justified it to myself. As long as it wasn't my own dollars I was giving to Memphis, my integrity would survive. Turning down an invitation to be someone's guest for dinner because I didn't like the choice of restaurant seemed boorish and petty. So I gave in.

Upon seeing the place completely dead at the peak of dinner hour, I must cop to the wave of Schadenfreude that came over me on my first return visit. But when I discovered just how empty the restaurant really was, any nasty delight I felt at its misfortune turned unavoidably into pity. It was as though a school bully had received a punishment of blindness or mutilation, far more severe than was appropriate for a legacy of pantsings, noogies and swirlies. The situation at Memphis was critical. Our party of six was the only occupied table on the outside patio. There were four glum people at the bar inside. The entire upstairs dining area was dark and roped-off. This was at 8:30 on a Thursday night. At this rate, the life expectancy of the place could be counted in weeks, possibly even days.

The service was considerably more affable, though not as attentive as one would think, given the circumstances. A low customer turnout calls for a trimmed-down staff, but in this case the owners had done such a hatchet-job on the schedule that one valiant server was saddled with the entire restaurant. The leg-work alone--from bar to kitchen to patio--kept her hustling. She handled our party admirably, but it was clear the moment a party of two arrived and took up a table across the huge patio that she was stretched too thin. Expecting a lone server to cover that much real estate is asking for trouble.

The rest of the staff isn't much for taking up the slack. An irritating fact that has been confirmed with every visit to Memphis is that its busboys are useless for anything other than clearing off tables. They stare stone-faced at any request or declaration other than "finished", and are doggedly determined to refill any empty beer or cocktail glass, regardless of its shape, with either water or iced tea. This is odd in a city where, more often than not, the bussers are usually the one element of a restaurant's staff you can count on. As for the managers--there always seem to be at least two of them milling officiously about the hosting podium--they seem haughtily above assisting their servers, even in a crunch. I've got to hand it to Memphis; even when you can shoot a cannonball through the joint without hitting anybody, the snooty armor remains unchinked.



Memphis, during dinner rush.

The same group of us went back to Memphis about two weeks later. All the patio tables had been removed in favor of cushy sofas and low coffee tables. It seemed on this night that someone had chosen to emphasize the lounge quotient of the lounge-bar-restaurant triumvirate that is boasted on its website. It looked like a promising move. The patio-restaurant idea clearly wasn't working. Time to mix things up. Velvet ropes around many of the (still empty) sofas lent an air of tingling expectation. A DJ set up his board and prepared to get things bumping. It wasn't busy yet, but you could just tell that in no time it would be guest lists and exorbitant bottle-service aplenty. This left the upstairs area as the main dining room, which works out fairly well. Our large party hunkered down at a long, well-lighted table. Our server, a plucky blonde, became our new best friend and admirably escorted our first-timers through the menu.

I should mention why I never talk about the food. The reason is simple. Ragging on the food at Memphis is sort of like beating up a crippled kid; it's just too easy. While there's a much-labored aesthetic guiding the theory of Memphis, the execution of said aesthetic seems like an afterthought. The fare is Californianized Cajun. This means lots of fried stuff and shrimp-over-rice. That the city of Memphis has about as much to do with Cajun cuisine as, say, Muncie, seems to be of little consequence. My friends like the fried chicken. As an adopted South Carolinian, I find Memphis's fried chicken, its signature dish, hardly worth mentioning. First of all, fried chicken has bones. It also is made with white and dark pieces alike. But at Memphis, the dish is served as two gargantuan boneless breasts. The problem with this choice is that huge chicken breasts are hard to cook properly. Big pieces of anything need sufficient cooking time, but white meat dries out easily. So chefs really have to know what they're doing to pull it off. They also have to care about what they're doing, and at Memphis, caring about anything other than making money or looking cool doesn't appear to be a priority.

The pork ribs are good, and so is the fried calamari. But you see a pattern here. All the food at Memphis is really heavy. If I have to do an extra 20 minutes on the elliptical trainer tomorrow, those better be some damn good crab cakes. But the dishes all taste remarkably the same and uniformly unspecial. I took a Pepcid AC for this? The more daring items, like the tuna tartar appetizer, are experiments that should never have been allowed out of the laboratory. And while a good beer seems the perfect accompaniment to this type of fare, the beer list at Memphis, which no server on any of my four visits could accurately recite, is shamefully neglected. Way too much attention is put on the pricey wine list and overly-adventurous cocktails. Furthermore, I find Memphis's practice of slapping a $40 per-person minimum on parties of six or more and a 20% mandatory gratuity on parties of eight or more so out of line with the rest of the city and so egregiously rude that I am compelled to point it out once more.

As the evening wore on, the music from downstairs got progressively louder. Scattered voices became a thick, indistinct din that boiled up the stairs. My friend's companion for the evening excused himself for a restroom break. He was gone for nearly thirty minutes. Normally, a spectacularly-gay 19-year old Marine, on his first trip to LA, wandering off to make trouble on his two-day leave from his intelligence job at a Texas airbase wouldn't come as a surprise. But something seemed off here. When he finally returned, he had that glazed, shattered look common to some of his post-combat colleagues. (This kid hasn't seen real combat, thank God. Blessedly, some leatherneck brass has realized that dropping this pixie into Sadr City would be about as insane as putting that fancy 12-year old from Ugly Betty on the Colts' offensive line.)

As it turns out, all the kid had been trying to do was use the restroom. In the hour since we had arrived, the situation downstairs had become such a scrum that even the simple act of moving from point A to point B had proved arduous. The bar, entry area, and most of the patio were now a solid mass of people. The slight, unassuming Marine had been patiently waiting his turn outside one of the two unisex, single person lavatories behind the host station, when an aggressive hostess smacked two hastily scrawled "women only" signs on each of the doors and ordered him, with a vague wave, to a far-off "other men's room" somewhere outside the restaurant. Accustomed to following orders, he soldiered off to pee.

But what she neglected to tell him was that using said "other men's room", which turned out to be in the side alley, required him to re-enter the restaurant via the front steps. This meant dealing with the massive, clipboard-wielding doorman of an establishment that was well beyond capacity. Just getting up to the doorman through the crush was a chore. And once he got there, the World's Gayest Marine had no idea whose name our reservation was under and had to convince the doorman he was a member of a party already eating inside and not, all evidence to the contrary, Perez Hilton.



Waiting to use the restroom.

I sat listening to the kid's story and decided I needed to investigate. The scene downstairs was just as he had described. There was a line ten-people deep for the restrooms. It was only after waiting ten minutes that I was close enough to see the hand-written "women only" signs that hadn't been there when I arrived an hour before. This, it seems, was management's meager attempt at crowd control. I was at the head of the line when the hostess came by and announced "Women only," but without any real conviction in her voice and without seeming to address me directly. She must've sensed my resolve. With a bladder full of Pilsner Urquell, there was little chance of my starting over in a different queue.

I am all for unisex restrooms. There's something wonderfully democratic about them. But don't lose confidence in the idea just because your place gets crowded. It was illogical and unfair to ask half the customers to deal with the enormous inconvenience of trying to figure out where they are suppose to go and fighting a massive crowd the entire way just to take a leak. Women face discrimination everyday, but here it was the men who were being punished for, I don't know, being men, I guess. By the time I emerged from the lavatory, my friends were in their coats and waiting by the front door to leave.

As we walked down the promenade toward the valet stand, the thumping beat and glittery chit-chat began to fade into the night. I remember thinking that for better or for worse, Memphis may have become what it had brazenly set out to become when it opened a year ago. It was chock-full of beautiful people drinking expensive liquor and being treated rudely and even more folks clamoring to get inside to experience the same. It was, at least on this night, the cool place to be. And the quest for cool is what makes club promoters climb out of bed every afternoon.

While it was abundantly clear that this was a place I never needed to visit again, I drove away feeling that a gross imbalance had at least begun to fall back into alignment. Since day one, Memphis has made a point to remind its patrons that they are lucky to get past the front door and even luckier to get a table. And management has clung to this resolve with grandiloquent delusion, even when the whole establishment had fewer paying customers than a midnight screening of Herbie: Fully Loaded.



Leaving Memphis.

It is a distressing fact: demand destroys customer service. If yours is the place to be, if the beautiful people and those who wish to touch them are knocking on your doors night after night, then the compulsion to be gracious and accommodating goes out the window. There was a time--not decades ago, but years--when the stellar treatment a customer would receive was one of the reasons to eat out.

Amazing food has never been the driving force behind the success of Musso and Frank. It doesn't need to be. At that bullet-proof establishment, just a few blocks down the boulevard from Memphis, professional waiters--not young beauties hired from headshots that they hope will one day carry them from hell of waiting tables onto the hell of the CW network--serve cocktails carefully made-to-order, under the watchful eye of confident and dedicated management. It's a formula that has worked for 90 years. How long will Memphis, Geisha House and Sterling be around? If it's two years or five, the difference hardly matters. The investors will simply resurface in some other snatch-and-grab job endeavor designed to exploit the pop-culture zeitgeist at top-dollar prices.

All my speculation proved irrelevant, however, when our third return to Memphis a few weeks later was like re-entering a ghost town. Save for our party and a lone couple finishing their desserts in the corner, the place was completely empty at the height of dinner hour. It was as though the jam-packed cluster-fuck of a few weeks earlier had been a mirage. The sofas and velvet ropes were ephemera. Back in place were the sturdy, familiar tables and chairs of a sadly unsuccessful restaurant. Nothing had changed. Memphis is on life-support. It's possible that its steep prices manage to keep it barely above water with a minimum of customers. But what is even more likely is that its steely, unshakable belief in its own greatness will keep Memphis from pulling the plug on itself until it is long past dead.

I have a good friend who lives in the building next door to Memphis. His balcony overlooks the restaurant's patio and he swears to me that place is absolutely "going off" every week. I press him to be more specific.

"How many nights per week?" I ask.

My friend thinks. "One," he says finally.

One night a week. Sounds like it could be a great club. Why not drop everything else--the pretense, the absurd menu, the whole restaurant for that matter--and be that? Of course it's not quite that simple. There are obstacles, such as covering the lease payment with a bar that's only open a few nights per week. But the greatest obstacle, no doubt, is Memphis itself.

Memphis restaurant: Miraculously still alive on Hollywood Blvd. Free iced tea and water, strictly enforced. Visits from your server are rare, so don't squander them. Do all of your ordering in one shot--starters, desserts, drinks, everything. Warning for men only: Hold it till you get home.