Lester Johnson (Photo by Jay Paul)
A lot of people who are looking to open a restaurant, they ask me, “Lester, what do I need to know to be successful?”
The first thing I tell them is you have to understand not only how to cook, but how to run a business. The other thing you need to decide is what you want to be and who do you want to serve.
The first people you should want to serve are the people around you. I still can remember the homemade dinner rolls my grandma would make for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The first thing that would hit me when I walked through the door: that smell. And those rolls weren't just for our family. Our extended family came over. The people next door would come over, and people in the neighborhood. It was a whole community.
And my mom — Mama J, Velma Johnson — she continues to do it, continues to feed groups of seniors and the homeless. It’s important to be a good community steward.
In this social media age, the internet age, we’ve gotten away from that.
Our slogan is: Welcome Home. That’s what we want people to feel. And I think a lot of people who didn’t know us learned that about us last year during Black Restaurant Week.
For a lot of black people and black businesses, it comes down to capital. For most black people, there’s no family member loaning us the startup money. We don’t have that access to capital. Or access, period.
I’m on the city’s Minority Business Enterprise and Emerging Small Business Advisory Board. It was designed to create opportunities for people in business, and for people in this business. I wish there were a lot more black restaurateurs out there, for us to try to support.
Race is a factor. Of course, it is. But it’s not the only factor.
That’s progress, having everybody under the same roof.
Richmond is a little more progressive and laid-back than people on the outside think. You don’t have that element that I would say you have in other cities in the South. I grew up here, in the West End, over by Byrd Park — the real West End — and have been here for 44 years. In every city there’s a racial element, but in 44 years in this city, I have never had to deal with real racism. Minor racism, but not super racism.
I always tell myself: I went to VMI, and I survived it. Some of the black alumni, we still talk about that: How did we get through it? But our attitude was: We came to get an education; we’re not gonna let you all distract us.
That’s what Trump is doing now. He’s very good at controlling the narrative, directing people’s frustration, controlling them.
My mom raised me to be confident in who I was. When you’re that person, you can flow into any situation.
Just because I’m an Obama supporter and you’re a Trump supporter, does that mean we can’t talk? We can’t get along? That’s what racism back in the day was about: I don’t understand your position, and so I don’t like you.
Instead of going to a restaurant and breaking bread, we go to the other side of the street. We self-segregate.
What we wanted to do at Mama J’s was to create an environment where, if you can get them all under one roof and see, then maybe it lessens the fear. You know, “Maybe I don’t have a lot of black friends, but I was just at dinner with 30 of them all around me, and it wasn’t so bad.”
You can walk into Mama J’s one day, and it’s majority black. Then the next you can walk in and it’s majority white. And the next day it’s 50-50. That’s progress, having everybody under the same roof.
When I first opened, I called it “Southern cuisine.” I didn’t want to just target black people — I wanted it to be for everybody.
Well, the people, they didn’t know what Southern cuisine is. They didn’t know. Black and white, everybody — they didn’t know. So, now we’re a soul food restaurant.
Most people think soul food is black, but we all grew up, all of us in the South — all of us ate the same food. The only difference is the quality of the meats. Instead of getting that choice cut, we had to make do with what was left over from the big house. But sweet potatoes, collard greens, it’s the same. There’s a broad category, and that’s Southern food, and there’s a subcategory, and that’s soul food.
You can elevate it, but at the end of the day, it’s the same food that everybody’s been eating in Virginia for 400 years.
I go back and forth in my mind all the time, whether to be hopeful or not. I think the ramifications of the last year are gonna reverberate for a long time. I just had a daughter a year ago, and I worry about the world she’s gonna inherit. But there’s a lot of good people in this world. And a lot of us, we’re not ideological. We’re just there in the center, trying to figure out the most practical solutions.
—As told to Todd Kliman
Richmond Black Restaurant Experience is a week dedicated to supporting black-owned culinary businesses in Richmond. It runs from March 4-11, 2018.
