Mel – a North Carolina native – learned his cooking and got well into his music in Louisiana. He’s been a professional chef for over 30 years, working his art in kitchens from Austin to Chicago to Durham. He can pretty much cook-up whatever needs cooking, but his forte is Cajun cuisine.
Mel has also pursued his other great passion – music – for decades. He started the band Bayou Rhythm with guitar wiz Sonny Landreth in the early 1980s. Zydeco artist C.J. Chenier was also a member of the band, which enjoyed a good deal of success through the mid-‘80s.
When Mel returned to North Carolina on a permanent basis in 1990, he continued cooking onstage and in the kitchen. He has fronted Mel Melton & the Wicked Mojos for a decade, releasing several albums along the way, including the outstanding 2005 album Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse.Mel and I recently sat down in his restaurant, which celebrated its one-year anniversary last month, to talk about two of our favorite topics – food and music.
Mel explained that Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse actually got its start via a music video.
“About five years ago I was approached by the director of the film school at Piedmont Community College,” he recalled. “He lived up in Yanceyville and so did I. He’d heard my band a few times, and he offered to do a music video with the band for a summer project for his class.”
As it happened, Mel was working on a song about Papa Mojo, a figure from New Orleans voodoo lore. The song, “Papa Mojo,” became the subject of the music video.
“A couple years down the road I’d been in touch with Antonio Elmaleh, one of my old friends from college, and we decided to partner up on an idea of a cooking-music show,” Mel said. “He had had a production company in L.A., and he’d worked for the BBC for about seven years, and he thought a music-cooking show would be a good idea. We decided to call it Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse. That was the theme: You go in this roadhouse every week and I’d have a guest band or guest musician. We’d do some cooking and then play some music.
“We went out to Hollywood with it and pitched it around, and it just got more and more out of hand,” Mel laughed. “We ended up doing a pilot, however. We rented an old building in the woods around Yanceyville and we staged this thing there. We still have the video. We never sold it.”
Mel went on to explain that Antonio and he had contemplated the idea of an actual restaurant. They thought that perhaps once they’d sold their cooking-music show idea, the next logical step would be to create a real Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse. Of course, they never sold the show idea.
“Meanwhile, I decided to cut a record,” Mel continued. “I had an offer to do an album with Louisiana Red Hot Records down in New Orleans. We went down there and cut the record, and that was th
e album Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse.“We’d sort of built up this whole mythical roadhouse theme with Papa Mojo attached to it over the years, but there were no longer any plans to build the restaurant. I had the idea on ice, you might say. I had the menu, I knew what I wanted to do with the place.”
The restaurant idea may have been on ice, but it thawed out pretty quickly when Mel learned that Fowler’s, a gourmet grocery store in Durham’s Brightleaf Square area, had closed.
“ I got in touch in with the man who owned the building and I called Antonio,” Mel said. “I told him it might be a good place for us to do the restaurant.
“We got into the place and it was about 6,000 square feet. It was really just too big. At that point we’d been turned on to everybody in Durham who was doing downtown development, so we continued looking around in downtown Durham, but I never really could find a place that I was convinced would work.”
The restaurant was, at this point, an idea without a landing zone, until an acquaintance who owned a restaurant brokerage business in Raleigh put Mel onto a space in Greenwood Commons – an Asian restaurant that wasn’t doing too well.
“I went out and shopped the place for about a month,” Mel explained. “I talked to the owners and drove all through the area, because I didn’t know much about southeast Durham. I thought if we did it right it might work. I figured we could do well at lunch because of the RTP folks, and we could do some catering as well. I also thought if we would start doing some stuff at night out here, we just might catch fire, and that’s what has happened – and it happened immediately.”
Most restaurants that do live music don’t do both convincingly, and beyond that, most club-sized music venues struggle initially, and many fail. Mel was quite aware of these dynamics.
“I’d assumed that we were going to have to coax the music out here at night,” he said. “In fact, the live music was the first thing that became popular and profitable right off the bat. Since then it’s done nothing but help the restaurant and enhance what we’re doing out here.
“I told my business partner that I’ve seen a lot of night clubs open, and if we want to do live music, we’re gonna have to stick with it until it works. We can’t go in there for eight or nine weeks, not draw the crowds, and pull the plug. We have to be one-hundred percent committed for six months.”
Mel has done well with his roadhouse thus far. The quality music has drawn crowds at night, and the food is straight from Cajun heaven.
“We’re getting Bob Margolin and Will McFarlane out here; we’ve had Sonny Landreth in here twice in a year,” Mel noted. “Cool John Ferguson has been in here and tore up the place, and John Dee Holeman opened for him. We’ve got Johnny Sansone coming in February. We’re also bringing in some indie-type bands.
“The deal here is that the menu is real and the music is real,” he observed. “Whether it’s rockabilly or blues or Zydeco, I’m trying to get authentic music, and I ‘m booking people who’ve put in the years learning how to play their form of music. It’s a lot like our menu. We work hard at it and I’m proud of our food.”
All the Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse information is online at papamojosroadhouse.com.
Discology
Eliane Elias: Bossa Nova Stories (Blue Note)
Brazil’s bossa nova celebrated a 50th birthday in 2008 – yet another measure of how quickly 50 years can fly by when one is having fun. Eliane Elias, an extraordinary jazz pianist and vocalist, and a notable daughter of Brazil, released an album in January of ’09 that is a most excellent tribute to the gifted founders of bossa nova. Elias collaborated with a stellar collection of musicians – Paulo Braga (drums), Oscar Castro-Neves (guitar), Ricardo Vogt (guitar), and Marc Johnson (bass) – as well as tracking several songs with an orchestra. The first song on the record should be first, given Elias’ subject matter – “The Girl From Ipanema.” She sings this classic in English and Portuguese, and her treatment is gorgeous. She also covers Tom Jobim’s “Desafinado” in memorable fashion. Elias takes on Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and Johnny Mercer’s “Too Marvelous For Words,” recasting them very effectively in a bossa nova mood. She does the same with Stevie Wonder’s “Superwoman,” achieving a bossa nova vibe so convincing that one might easily assume the song was originally written in this style. Elias was an accomplished pianist before she began singing, but it’s clear from this album and her 2008 release, Something for You, that her vocal work has become quite polished.
Quick Fix
Guy Davis: Sweetheart Like You (Red House)
Davis delivered a superb blues disc in ’06 with Skunkmello, and he’s done it again with Sweetheart Like You. Davis’ feel for country blues, and his ability to write in this style, is unique among today’s blues artists. This album is a sweetheart.
