The day before we opened The Downtowner in Gulfport, the leadership team and I sat around a table and just talked. Sports. The weather. Who has the best shrimp po-boy on the coast.
That has never happened to me before.
Forty-five years in this business have put me through 27 restaurant openings. The day before the doors swing is usually a fire drill. Somebody is racing across town for a forgotten case of to-go boxes. A cooler quits. The card reader won’t talk to the printer. The punch list grows faster than anybody can punch it.
This time there was nothing for me to do.
It would be nice to tell you that’s because after 45 years I finally have the whole thing figured out. That’s not the case. The credit belongs to other people: the leadership team that runs our restaurant company, the team that runs The Downtowner, and the folks who were hired right and trained right. Even our builder, Dan Hensarling Construction, finished a month early, handed over the keys, and then hung around to make sure we didn’t need anything. That was a first, too.
I’ve thought about that team every day this week. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d think about the building.
The Downtowner sits in the old Triplett Day Pharmacy space, which anchored the heart of downtown Gulfport for more than 75 years, back when downtown Gulfport was the thriving center of the community. Like most drugstores of its era, Triplett Day had a lunch counter, and that counter fed the town. Three shifts of men came in for coffee every morning. The first crew showed up around seven. Another bunch wandered in a little later, and a third before the morning was through. Every one of them was the same-stool, same-order, every-single-day type, and they sat there and argued sports and politics until somebody had to get to work.
A place like that becomes part of the fabric of a community.
Then COVID came. Triplett Day closed, the building was mothballed, and what was left inside eventually got gutted. The space has sat empty ever since.
My eye had been on downtown Gulfport for six years, and Mayor Billy Hewes kept after me about it the entire time. He brought it up whenever our paths crossed and never once let it go. Two years ago we finally pulled the trigger and committed to opening a community cafe in the old pharmacy spot.
Community cafe is a deliberate choice of words. Some folks want to tag us as a diner, and we’re not one. A diner is fast and loud, gum-smacking, order-at-the-counter, usually dressed up in a 1950s theme. We are a community cafe.
There was a time in this country when that’s nearly all there was. Most towns had two restaurants: a community cafe where everybody ate, and a fine dining room, usually run by a French chef serving a French menu, because nobody back then believed American food was worthy of fine dining. Thankfully, that changed. But the cafe was where the town actually gathered. It was the backbone of the place.
That belief has stuck with me my whole career. Anytime travel takes me somewhere new, the first stop is the hotel front desk, and the question is always the same: where do the locals eat breakfast? Take me where the men are talking sports and politics over pancakes. More can be learned about a town at that counter than from any brochure or tourism website ever printed.
Then the 1970s and 80s rolled in. Themed restaurants and corporate chains spread across the country and pushed the local, independently owned cafes out of business, one Main Street at a time. That has bothered me for a long time. Those little cafes in my hometown were the places I loved growing up.
The coast had them too.
My love of restaurants was born on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. My father died when I was six, and my mother raised my brother and me on a public-school art teacher’s salary. We didn’t have any money. Somehow, she scraped together enough to buy a small fish camp on the Pascagoula River, and that’s where my love of seafood was born as well. Weekends were spent fishing and running crab traps and skiing, and many evenings we’d ride out to eat at the restaurants strung along the coast.
I had my first raw oyster at Baricev’s. Fried shrimp meant the Friendship House. The Tiki Room at Mary Walker Marina was the biggest treat of all, because we could get there by boat. Angelo’s had the red gravy, and red gravy was serious business in our family.
That’s the food we serve at The Downtowner. Real breakfast: eggs, biscuits, pancakes. A proper meat-and-three at lunch, which is getting nearly as hard to find as the cafes themselves. Some call that kind of cooking soul food. Some call it country cooking. My name for it is heritage cuisine. It’s the food our grandmothers raised us on, and something that important shouldn’t be allowed to slip away. Those traditions deserve to be carried forward and handed down.
The Downtowner is a sister restaurant to our Midtowner in Hattiesburg, which has been open seven years now. Opening a concept that time has tried to eliminate is a risk, and that much was clear going in. Six days in, the verdict is showing up in people’s faces when they walk through the door. More than a thousand images of historic Gulfport hang on the walls, and the stories keep coming from folks who used to eat downtown and have been waiting years for somebody to turn the lights back on in that building.
Hiring on the coast had me worried, truth be told. The casinos employ half the region, and a historic hotel opened a block away a month before we did. My assumption was that the hospitality talent pool had already been drained dry.
I was wrong.
We have put together as solid and professional a team of hospitalitarians, front of the house and back, as any kitchen of mine has ever fielded. They are the reason there was nothing for me to do the day before we opened.
One of these mornings, three shifts of coffee drinkers are going to claim what they’ll call “the liar’s table” and pick up the argument right where Triplett Day left off. When that happens, my job will be the same one I had the day before we opened.
Stay out of the way.
Onward.
The World’s Last Meatloaf
2 pounds Ground beef
1 Tbl Bacon grease (or canola oil)
1 cup Onion, minced
3 /4 cup Celery, minced
3 /4 cup Bell pepper, minced
1 tsp Garlic, minced
1 /8 tsp Thyme, dry
1 /4 tsp Oregano, dry
2 tsp Steak Seasoning
1 Tbl Salt
1 cup Milk
1 /2 cup Ketchup
1 Tbl Worcestershire sauce
3 Eggs
1 cup Bread crumbs, course
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Heat the bacon grease in a large skillet over medium heat. Sauté vegetables with salt and dry herbs until tender. Allow to cool.
Combine milk, eggs, Worcestershire and ketchup and mix well. Place ground beef, cooled vegetables and egg mixture into a large mixing bowl. Using your hands, squish the meatloaf until you have mixed everything together and all is well incorporated. Fold in the breadcrumbs last.
Shape the meat mixture into the form of a loaf on a baking sheet. Using your hand, make an indentation down the center of the loaf (This is where the glaze goes). Bake 50 minutes.
While meatloaf is cooking make the glaze. Remove from the oven and spoon glaze down the center of the meatloaf and spread over the sides. Return meatloaf to oven, lower heat to 300 degrees and bake 30 minutes more. Allow meatloaf to rest 15 minutes before serving. Yield: 8-10 servings
Tomato Glaze
Ingredients:
1 tsp. Bacon fat
1 tsp. Garlic, minced
1 Tbl. Onion, minced
¼ cup Brown sugar
2 Tbl. Yellow mustard
1 Tbl. Worcestershire Sauce
1 cup Ketchup
Heat the bacon fat in a small skillet over a low heat. Cook the onions and garlic for 2-3 minutes. Add the brown sugar and allow it to melt. Stir in remaining ingredients.
(Robert St. John is a chef, restauranteur and published cookbook author who lives in Hattiesburg, Miss.)