Restaurant Review - Hog & Hominy in Memphis - NYTimes.com Lance Murphey for The New York Times Hog & Hominy in Memphis includes a bocce court and a back-porch bar. Across the street is Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, its "older brother." MEMPHIS - If I ate more at Hog & Hominy than was necessary from a strictly nutritional point of view, it was not my server's fault. She was kind and patient as she delivered the explanatory lecture that begins so many restaurant meals these days. The cooking, she said, reflected the Italian families and Southern childhoods of the two chefs who opened Hog & Hominy last year, Michael Hudman and Andrew Ticer. Many ingredients, including the pork whose leading role on the menu was foretold by the restaurant's name, came from farms within 200 miles of Memphis. The plates were small and meant to be shared, but one pizza plus two other dishes would be plenty for me and my guest, she said. At first we simply padded out her suggestion with two more dishes. Thirty minutes later, we augmented that with three more items. By dessert, when we each put away an entire slice of pie, it appeared that either we couldn't do simple math or didn't know how to listen. She meant no harm, but we had other ideas. If we'd taken her advice I might have missed the way plump hominy kernels rounded out the smoky bacon, smokier "nduja and the pepper vinegar in a bowl of long-cooked collard greens. I wouldn't have known that a melting scoop of extra-sharp pimento cheese could make a strangely wonderful sauce for grilled asparagus with bits of chopped preserved lemon. I wouldn't be sitting here now daydreaming about Hog & Hominy's fryer rabbit, dredged twice in buttermilk and flour and deep-fried. The meat dripped with juices that had an undercurrent of spice and a citrus bite imparted by a brine made with sour oranges and Calabrian chiles. I might have left Memphis without knowing the blissful burn of Hog & Hominy's fried sweetbreads. They were bathed in a crunchy rust-colored hot sauce made from deeply roasted peanuts puréed with balsamic and honey vinegars, lime juice, roasted garlic and a pile of chile peppers. Like Nashville's hot chicken, these sweetbreads were more fiery with every bite. Seeking relief, I turned to the white aioli splashed on the plate. It didn't cool things down at all. There was jalapeño in that aioli. It was a lowdown, sneaky move, and I admired Mr. Hudman and Mr. Ticer immensely for it. The two men bonded in sixth grade while guarding each other on the basketball court. Talking outside the gym, Mr. Hudman said, each realized for the first time that he was not the only boy in Memphis who spent "crazy Italian Sundays" at his grandmother's house eating pasta with what each was convinced had to be the world's best sauce. By the time they were out of college they were cooking together in a "turn and burn" Italian restaurant while dreaming of their own place. It would be grand. Its centerpiece would be a long, white-neon bar shaped like Italy. The pair traveled to Italy, killing and butchering a pig together and learning how to adapt their cooking to each week's new ingredients. "Our whole outlook changed immediately," Mr. Hudman said. So did their taste in restaurant design, apparently, because when they got back home, they signed a lease on a converted East Memphis ranch house and outfitted its series of dining rooms with painted-wood fireplace mantels, small wrought-iron wall sconces and curtains in natural linen. They would let the ingredients speak the way they had heard them speak in Italy, but they would also let the South get in a word or two. They called it Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen. (The house has a history. Raji Jallepalli-Reiss, who would later become the first executive chef of Tamarind on East 22nd Street in Manhattan, opened Restaurant Raji here, winning national fame for her modern and influential Indian cuisine. She died in 2002.) Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, which opened in 2008, is the dutiful and responsible first born. Hog & Hominy, which they built in another ranch house across the street four years later, is the scrappy younger sibling who stays up later, keeps rowdier company and gets away with things the older brother can't. Reservations are not taken. There is a bocce court on one side of the building and a porch out back that turns into a dive bar on weekends, serving things like boiled peanuts from a crockpot and an Oklahoma City-style cheeseburger smashed on a griddle. No doubt this assessment will make the older son furious, but Hog & Hominy is a more relevant and original restaurant. The cooking is more freewheeling, yet it also feels more focused. This may be partly due to the small-plates form, which, like Twitter, can impose discipline through arbitrary space limitations. Some main courses at Andrew Michael seemed to sprawl with garnishes as if to fill the available surface area. Certain appetizers felt slack, too, though not the AM Breakfast, a delicious refinement on a Southern morning meal with cured pork belly, a slow-cooked egg, creamy grits and fried pork skins pulled from the oil so recently, they were still popping.