Dog Friendly City Guide: Memphis, Tennessee

At eleven every morning a red carpet runs across the lobby of The Peabody Memphis and five mallards walk it from the lift to the marble fountain, led by a man whose job title is Duckmaster. At five they walk back up to their rooftop palace. The tradition began in the 1930s, when the general manager and a friend came back from a hunting trip in Arkansas, had too much Tennessee whiskey and thought it would be funny to put their live decoys in the fountain.

A city that has kept that joke going for the best part of a century runs on its own customs, and this one, built on music and barbecue, is a better place to walk a dog than most visitors expect: a footbridge across the Mississippi, a greenway along the Wolf River and an old-growth forest in the middle of town.

Arriving From Abroad

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decides which dogs enter the United States, and what it asks depends on where your dog has been. If your dog has spent the last six months only in places the CDC rates as rabies-free or low-risk, the paperwork is a single online CDC Dog Import Form, free, one receipt per dog, which you can complete on the day you fly or up to six months ahead. Your dog has to be six months or older, microchipped with a chip a universal scanner can read, and healthy on arrival, and it can come in at any airport, seaport or land crossing. Dogs from high-risk countries face a longer process.

Once you are in, Tennessee law expects every dog six months or older to be vaccinated against rabies, with a metal tag or other proof of it on its collar at all times. For everything else on the journey, read our guide to taking your dog abroad.

Where to Stay

The Peabody opened in 1869, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and calls itself the South's Grand Hotel, with 464 rooms, the Feathers Spa and Chez Philippe, which the hotel suspects is the only French restaurant in the world that does not serve duck.

A limited number of its rooms take dogs, and in one of them the dog settles in well: a bed and bowls are waiting, there are treats on the house, and room service has a menu written for dogs. If you want an evening at Chez Philippe, a settled dog may stay behind in the room, or the staff will arrange a walker or a sitter. They will also point you to a walking route and sell you dog food if you run short, and the dog is welcome with you in the lounge. The fee is $100 for the stay, place mat and water bowl included. Read the Roch Dog review of The Peabody Memphis.

Central Station Hotel is the city's 1914 railway station on South Main, and it is still a station: Amtrak's City of New Orleans and the trolley stop there. The hotel keeps 123 rooms looking out over South Main or the river, the old Grand Hall with its 33 foot ceilings and the restored arrivals board, and a bar built around a vinyl collection that the hotel calls the best-sounding music room in town.

Most of the rooms take dogs, with no weight limit, so a Great Dane checks in as easily as a terrier. Bowls and treats are waiting, there is a garden to step out into, and the dog comes with you to the terrace and the lounge, or stays behind in the room while you eat at the bar. The fee is $35 a night. Read the Roch Dog review of Central Station Hotel. Both hotels hold a Roch Rank of B.

Eat and Drink

Loflin Yard on West Carolina Avenue in downtown Memphis is the place to start: the readers of the Memphis Flyer have voted it the city's best dog friendly restaurant and bar every year from 2023 to 2026. It is two acres of decks, outdoor bars, fire pits and grass, with a creek and a waterfall, a coach house that once held downtown's carriage fleet, and a back yard where you can watch the trains go by. Dogs on a lead are welcome inside and out. Order the Old Bridge Burger, which comes loaded with cheddar, pulled pork, slaw, fried onions, pickle and barbecue sauce.

Further down South Main, Ghost River Brewing has its original taproom on the corner of E.H. Crump. It calls itself the first craft brewery in Memphis, pours twelve of its ales, and its kitchen is run by Jesse McDonald, who used to own New Wing Order. There is a dog menu too, with treats baked from the brewery's own spent grain.

Wiseacre Brewing has two taprooms, and a dog on a lead is welcome at both on the patios, in the beer garden and under the tent, though not inside, because each taproom adjoins a restaurant and the health code keeps dogs out of it. The downtown HQ taproom, at BB King Boulevard and Butler Avenue a few blocks from Beale Street, pours 30 beers and has its own pizza kitchen, Little Bettie, an easy stop before a Grizzlies game. The original taproom opened in 2013 on Broad Avenue in the Broad Arts District, with food trucks and live music.

Hammer & Ale at 921 Cooper Street is a craft beer bar with a patio and a back yard where a dog on a lead sits beside you. A dog may come inside only while you order at the bar.

Walks and Parks

Big River Crossing is the walk nobody else can offer. It runs nearly a mile along an old railway bridge from downtown Memphis to Arkansas, the longest public footbridge and cycle path across the Mississippi, with the skyline behind you and the floodplain spread out ahead. Dogs on a lead are welcome, it costs nothing, and it is open from sunrise to 10pm. On the Memphis bank, Tom Lee Park gives you 31 acres of riverside paths and a hammock grove, named for Tom Lee, who could not swim and still rescued 32 people from the river when their steamboat capsized. Memphis River Parks welcomes leashed dogs across all its riverfront parks, linked by five miles of trail.

The Wolf River Greenway begins on Mud Island with a 1.2 mile loop on the old river levee, linked to Tom Lee Park and the bridge, and follows the Wolf River east across the city. Fourteen of its planned 26 miles are open. The Hollywood section, on a levee through the Hyde Park neighbourhood, has a water fountain with a bowl set low for dogs, and at Wolf Crossing a 270 foot suspension bridge and a raised boardwalk carry the trail through the Lucius Burch State Natural Area.

Shelby Farms Park on the east side is enormous: 4,500 acres and more than 40 miles of trail. The pedestrian loop of the Promenade circles the lake at the Heart of the Park in 2.34 miles, and the Tour de Wolf loops six miles through the woods in the northeast.

The prize for a dog is The Outback, more than 100 acres of open fields, ponds and unpaved trails where dogs run off the lead from sunrise to sunset, with a fountain and dog bowl and a dog wash station before the drive home. Its gates are 11, 12 and 13, on Trinity Road and Raleigh-Lagrange Road. The 12.94 mile Shelby Farms Greenline, an old railway line, links the park back to Midtown.

In Midtown itself, Overton Park holds something rare: the Old Forest, the only urban old-growth forest in the southeastern United States, 126 acres of it protected as a Tennessee State Natural Area since 2011. A trail map takes you round the Old Forest Loop by 35 numbered markers, among more than 350 plant species and 100 kinds of bird, and when the walk is done the park's Overton Bark lets the dog off the lead.

If the trip carries on east, our Nashville guide picks it up.

Good to Know

The Peabody has only a limited number of dog friendly rooms, so book early, and bring your dog's vaccination records, which the hotel asks to see at check-in. It takes dogs up to 75 pounds. Dogs stay out of its restaurants and bars, go on a lead or in a carrier in the public areas, and, as a courtesy to the ducks, keep off the red carpet during the march and out of the lobby between 11am and 5pm. At Central Station dogs are not allowed in the bar or restaurant.

In the parks the lead stays in your hand. Shelby Farms enforces it on every trail, including the unpaved forest paths and the Greenline, allows no invisible leashes, and keeps dogs out of the Woodland Discovery Playground; in The Outback it asks for one dog per person and a dog that answers to your voice. Overton Park is leash only outside the gates of Overton Bark, and the river parks ask you to pick up after your dog.