The Southern Foodways Alliance is bringing its annual fall symposium to Memphis next month, and the honoree at the center of it all is B.J. Chester-Tamayo, longtime owner of the Pinch District soul food institution Alcenia's. The two-day gathering, called Memphis Movements, runs October 10-11 at the Halloran Centre for Performing Arts, marking only the third time in nearly 30 years that the symposium has left its home base of Oxford, Mississippi.
The symposium's Memphis stop has been covered by The Daily Memphian. According to the Southern Foodways Alliance, this year's programming is built around how transportation, music, and civil rights movements shaped the city's food culture, a theme that finds its most personal expression in Chester-Tamayo's own story.
A Restaurant Born Out of Loss
Chester-Tamayo opened Alcenia's in 1997 in the Pinch District after the 1996 death of her son, Will “Go-Go” Tamayo III, in a motorcycle accident, turning the restaurant into what the LEE Initiative describes as a personal sanctuary and place of healing. She had no commercial cooking or restaurant experience before launching it. Per the Memphis Flyer, she learned her menu of classic soul food dishes over the telephone, following step-by-step instructions from her late mother, Alcenia Clark-Chester, for whom the restaurant is named.
That homegrown recipe box has carried Alcenia's a long way. The restaurant has drawn national attention over the years, and Chester-Tamayo has appeared in numerous television and print works. In 2020, Chester-Tamayo purchased her North Main Street building with grant support, a move that made her one of the few Black business owners to hold real estate in downtown Memphis, according to LocalMemphis.com.
Why Memphis, and Why Now
Hosting the symposium away from Oxford is unusual for the Southern Foodways Alliance; this year's Memphis gathering marks only the third time in nearly 30 years that the symposium has left its home base. The program also includes the People's Grocery and the I AM A MAN campaign.
The Southern Foodways Alliance's journal, Gravy, has a storytelling mission and reached its 100th issue in 2026. Its companion podcast has produced more than 250 episodes since launching in 2014 and earned a James Beard Foundation Award in 2015, according to the University of Mississippi.
A Fitting Backdrop in the Pinch District
Alcenia's sits in a stretch of the Pinch District near North Main Street. That backdrop adds context to Chester-Tamayo's ownership of her building in downtown Memphis.
For a symposium built around the idea that movements — of people, of music, of protest — shape what ends up on a plate, honoring a restaurant born from personal grief and sustained through decades of hands-on perseverance fits squarely within the theme organizers set out to explore.
