MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - On his 49th birthday, Alex Grisanti decided he’d had enough.
He’d certainly had a lot. By the time that day rolled around last October, he’d been working in restaurants about 40 years, starting out in the kitchen with his father when he was just a child. He’d faced financial ruin, overcome an opioid dependency and had, he said, seen rock bottom.
On his birthday, he gave up the booze.
“I woke up and I told my wife ‘I’m done. I want you guys to be happy. I’m going to do my part,’ ” he said. “I’d been screwed up on drugs, alcohol or some family problem for as long as I could remember, and I was exhausted. It’s brutal, living like that. I was angry all the time, and I didn’t want that to be the way my kids remember me.
“When I leave this Earth, I want to leave them something, and I’m not getting any younger.”
He’s creating what he hopes to leave, though he’s not ready to check out just yet. Next month he plans to open Elfo Grisanti’s in Southaven, the first Grisanti restaurant in DeSoto County. He’s excited.
When he talks about it, he becomes wide-eyed and animated, his arms sweep around the room as he explains how it will look, he punctuates his sentences with his hands, he peppers his speech with salty words.
Elfo was his grandfather’s name, it’s his son’s name, and it was the name of the restaurant he and his wife Kim owned in Chickasaw Oaks Plaza and later in Germantown. He toyed with using only his surname for the restaurant, but decided against it.
“Elfo’s has a helluva brand behind it, too,” he said. “I took care of two generations of Grisantis with that restaurant and I wanted to use it again.
“And even though it’s Elfo Grisanti’s on the sign, everyone will just call it Elfo’s.”
Alex is the youngest son of Ronnie and Kay Grisanti and like his brothers Judd and Dino, he came up in his father’s kitchen.
“We’d get competitive in the kitchen to see who could make the most perfect ravioli when we were just little guys,” he said.
After high school - he has dyslexia and left Christian Brothers for Germantown High School after his freshman year - he went to Johnson & Wales University in Charleston for its culinary arts program.
“I thrived there,” he said. “I already knew about cooking and in the kitchen, I’m at home, I’m comfortable.”
He came back to Memphis and worked briefly at the Country Squire in Germantown before joining his father and his brother Judd at Ronnie Grisanti’s restaurant. They spent years there together, until he and his father opened Elfo’s in Chickasaw Oaks Plaza shopping center in 2003.
He stayed there until he and his wife opened Elfo’s in Germantown in 2008. That was his place, housed in the building that had Three Oaks Grill and is now home to Southern Social. The business boomed, then it busted.
“The building was falling apart, and we were getting killed financially,” Alex said. “I was running, gunning, drugging, and it was awful. Right now I don’t owe anyone any money for the first time since I can remember.”
The new Elfo’s will be in a spot on Getwell Road that had housed a few restaurants under the previous tenant before closing shop. The landlord offered Grisanti an attractive package to move in, and he’ll do it without going into debt and without investors, because of his pizza food truck, 9 Dough 1.
He had the truck in DeSoto County in March and noticed the space. He started nosing around and contacted landlord Jon Reeves.
“We talked and he said he’d been trying to get Grisanti’s to DeSoto County for 20 years. He said, ‘If you like it, I’ll make it work for you,’ and I said, ‘yeah, I’ve heard that before,’” Alex said. “I told him what I wanted, and he said he could make it happen and he did. It took a while because of COVID, but he did it.”
The restaurant is actually two spaces that share a kitchen. There’s a dining room that seats approximately 80 people with a bar and a few private dining rooms that are curtained off for privacy. On the other side, Grisanti will operate a takeout business that he plans to open next month.
“We’ll get that running and will hold off on the dining room for a while,” he said. “I don’t want to risk opening it right now in case COVID shuts everything down again. But I want the holiday business, so I plan to do private parties at first. You could call me and say you want to come, and I’d say ‘great, just bring your own wine,’” he said.
The lease is short - just one year, though he plans to be there much longer.
“I’m glad about that,” his wife said. “I feel good about it, but there’s COVID. When he told me about it, I looked at him like ‘We’re in the middle of a pandemic and you want to open a restaurant? You’ve lost your mind.’”
But she’s been in the business with him for years and she’ll be with him in Southaven. They met 30 years ago, just seven days after she moved to town, and have been married for 27. They have one son, who is a chef in Portland, Oregon, two daughters in college and one daughter still at home.
They met at Ronnie Grisanti’s at Poplar and Humes.
“I was meeting some work friends and opened the front door just as he opened the kitchen door,” she said. “We sat at the bar and talked until about 4 a.m. and that was it.”
She’s been through the hard times and is glad to have her husband back.
“It was rocky and scary for a while, mainly because he lost so many things right in a row. The restaurant, his mom, his dad. He had a lot of healing to do. We all did. The kids, I’m not saying they didn’t know him, but they needed to get reacquainted.”
The restaurant life they led was so hectic that she didn’t always notice the kind of shape he was in.
“When I quit pills I did it cold turkey, and I was taking a lot,” Alex said. “I was off them a day or two and it was hard. I told Kim, ‘Look, just watch out for me for the next couple of days and make sure I don’t die,’ and she said, ‘Oh, so that’s where all the money was going.’ ”
“The restaurant life can be crazy,” she said. “But by the time he decided to quit drinking, we were trying to do so many things right that we just looked at it as one more step toward healthy living.”
He’s dropped 62 pounds in the 10 months that he’s been sober, and the family is closer than ever despite the troubles they faced.
“He stayed close to (son) Elfo because they were in the kitchen together,” Kim said. “But it means everything to hear my girls say, ‘I know we’ve been struggling, but it was worth it to get my dad back.’”
And the time out of the restaurant business had an upside, too.
“We were never able to do anything because we were working,” she said. “We got to go to Levitt Shell, to the Botanic Garden shows.
“When we started the food truck, it was just what we needed. We didn’t need any one else’s opinion. It was just him and me and we made it work.”
It’s been a big success,” Alex said.
“I’ve been scared of opening a new restaurant because the food truck does great and I don’t want to give it up,” he said. “I’m not going to give it up. If you know what you’re doing and you run a food truck, it’s 80 percent profit.”
Longtime friend Chuck Cavallo owns The Cupboard.
“When we were closed for COVID, I let him set up in the parking lot and I saw the kind of business he was doing,” he said. “That’s been a real good thing for him and he’s doing well. I believe the new place is going to work out for him.”
His friend Ernie Sutherland went to look at the Southaven space a few days ago and believes it’s a good opportunity for “Little Alex.”
“That’s what I call him,” he said. “I was friends with Ronnie and Big John back since I moved to town in 1964, so that’s what he is to me.
“I’ve seen the change in him. He hasn’t taken that first drink. Now if I can just get him to stop swearing, that’ll be good. There are some words that come out of his mouth and I tell him ‘Alex, I know you’re Catholic, but I’m Baptist. When I say that, I have to ask for forgiveness.’”
His brother Judd, the chef at Ronnie Grisanti’s in Regalia, has faith in him.
“That’s my baby brother and we grew up in the kitchen together. I can only wish him the best of the best. My mom and dad would want that and I wish him that.
“I believe there’s a market down there and he’s got a great spot,” he said. “I honestly believe he’s going to do very well.”
Alex thinks the same, and he wants the glory days back.
“I want people to talk about this restaurant like they used to talk about Ronnie Grisanti’s,” he said. “We’d be in Italy or New York, and people would say ’Oh, Elvis Presley, Ronnie Grisanti’s and Platinum Plus. I want to hear people say again that they flew in just to eat my veal chop.”
He’s joking a little, but he also means it.
“I’ve never met anyone as passionate about what they do,” Kim said. “And it’s not just about his food. It’s also about the people he feeds. It’s what he’s meant to do.”
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