Morgan's Southern Comfort

Until Morgan Freeman rode into town, Blues mecca Clarksdale, Mississippi, was a bleak, nondescript spot, in one of the poorest regions of America. John Carlin meets its unlikely saviour, whose gastronomic ventures look set to transform the place.

Sunday July 23, 2006, Observer Food Monthly, by John Carlin of the London Observer


Some days after the event, I remain bewildered as to how I ended up having dinner with one of the best actors in Hollywood in a two-horse town in Mississippi. Normally, you have to plan to see Oscar-winners like Morgan Freeman. Normally, these things never happen. You send emails to agents, to which they don't reply.

But in this case the story just landed in my lap. I flew to Memphis to do a story not about food, originally, nor movies - but about poverty in the Deep South. I chose the river-delta town of Clarksdale as my base of operations. Before going I needed to find some contacts there, so I called a friend at The New York Times, who gave me the number of a journalist in Jackson, who told me the man I wanted was a lawyer called Bill Luckett, Clarksdale's Mr Big.

I flew to Memphis, hired a car, and called Luckett. Something to do with that name of his, maybe, but as chance would have it, he was in Memphis, and getting into his car to begin the 75-mile drive to Clarksdale. Why, he suggested, didn't we stop and meet at the first Kentucky Fried Chicken on Highway 61 South? I pulled into the car park and, three minutes later, a very tall man - very tall - was tapping on my car window. 'OK, just follow
me on down, John,' said Bill. 'I'll keep an eye on you from my rear-view mirror.'

Down we swept into the vast, flat Mississippi Delta, 'the most Southern place in the world', Bill informed me from his mobile phone. He kept calling, every 10 minutes or so, to give me a topographical update. The fourth time he called he happened to mention that he owned a restaurant in Clarksdale jointly with Morgan Freeman. 'I think Morgan may be flying in today so maybe you'll have a chance to meet him,' Bill said.

We drove on and, as we were nearing our destination, Bill suddenly turned sharp right off the highway. I followed him down a narrow road. He turned right a couple of times more and I pulled up behind him on the tarmac of Clarksdale's tiny airport next to a small silver jet, out of which popped Red, the long-term prisoner and aphorism-utterer of the Shawshank Redemption, also known as Morgan Freeman, in denim shirt and jeans. It
was his own private jet. I looked around for a pilot, but didn't see one. It turned out Freeman himself was the pilot. He'd just breezed over from a shoot in Virginia, like you do if you're scoring 20 million dollars a movie. He came here often, Bill told me. This was the part of the world he was from and he loved coming back. He lived in Los Angeles but kept a house (several houses, I later heard) in the Delta. Bill introduced me, we shook hands and that was that.

Off Bill and I proceeded to Clarksdale, a steamy furnace of a town - the Mississippi Delta in summer is brutal - with some neat little suburban homes on the periphery and not much of anything going on in the middle. What passes for downtown has a largely derelict feel to it, with one big empty lot and a couple of big wooden carcasses that were once warehouses. Life, if it was ever here, has shifted to a strip a few miles out of town along the highway. But Bill is doing his bit to re-inject some vitality into Clarksdale. It is 'the capital of the Blues', they say. Or at least where Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and a couple of other icons of the genre were born. Bill figured it seemed silly not to cash in on the fine marketing potential these past greats offered so, in 2002 he founded, with his friend Morgan, the Ground Zero Blues Club, a converted warehouse where they serve food and drinks and play live music.

The restaurant he owned with Freeman was another thing altogether, and rather fancy, I was told, by the name of Madidi. Bill and I agreed that we'd meet that evening at six and then go and have dinner there. He picked me up at six sharp in a massive SUV. Sitting in the back, reading the local paper, was Morgan Freeman. Or rather Red, the most appealingly world-weary character ever seen on film. He looked up as I came in, nodded, more with his eyelids than with his head, and carried on reading the paper. Laconic as all hell. We drove through Clarksdale's deserted streets to Bill's home. Freeman and I sat down in the lounge and Bill went off to fetch what turned out to be a very nice Californian sauvignon blanc.

Freeman was more comfortable with laconic than I was, but fortunately we soon hit on a conversation subject of mutual interest. South Africa. I lived there for six years; he had been there a number of times and knew Mandela. It turned out too that there was nothing much he would rather do in his professional career than play Mandela in a film. He performed a brief imitation that was impeccably true to the great man. It was the one subject we spoke of over the next three hours or so that really stirred him, shook up his sleepy Mississippi understatedness. He spoke about Mandela with feeling, with affection and admir ation. We carried on talking animatedly about South Africa on the way to Madidi's.

The restaurant was a revelation. Open a place like Madidi's in New York or San Francisco, or London or Barcelona, and immediately it would be propelled into the top tier of city eating establishments. Deliciously air-conditioned, it is spacious, with ample gaps between the tables, each covered in white linen and top-of-the range cutlery and glassware. Bill apologised for the wine list. Said that the state of Mississippi had some
ludicrously outdated laws that severely limited the range of imported wines one could stock. But there was still plenty of good stuff from France, Italy and Australia, as well as the US. As for the waiters, the joy of it was that they did not feel compelled to tell us their names and the subjects they were majoring in at college and how cheerily solicitous they were going to be in their attentions tonight and all the othe r ghastly, low-grade amateur
dramatics that waiters the length and breadth of America consider to be an integral part of their jobs. They just silently handed out the menus and awaited further instructions.

Actually, the menus were a formality, for the chef had already decided upon a little degustation effort for us that night. But I read the menu all the same, each entry more staggeringly unexpected than the next. Ravioli of chicken confit and burst-tomato sauce with mustard seeds and basil; tuna lollipop with fingerling potatoes; green beard mussels with Thai-curry broth; field green folded with saffron, roasted garlic, tarragon and warm baby Swiss fondue; maple-glazed sea bass with maltagliati pasta, fava beans and shaved Gruyere; prosciutto-wrapped rack of lamb studded with basil pine nuts, accompanied by Israeli couscous and shiitake mushrooms...and so on, and so forth. Not remarkable in a pretentious London joint, but eye-popping in a part of the world where most people's idea of an exotic dinner out is pork ribs with gravy and mash; where, even more to the point, you have the highest concentration of poverty in the entire US. The Mississippi Delta vies with remoter corners of the Appalachians for the title of region with the greatest proportion of 'food-insecure' inhabitants. There are 38 million such people in the US, according to Department of Agriculture figures, meaning that they cannot reliably come up with the money required to put the food on the table necessary to avoid going hungry.

I asked Luckett and Freeman what had possessed them to set up this aberrant establishment in Clarksdale in the first place. 'First of all, I just wanted a good place to come and eat when I came on my visits here,' said Freeman, with the merest suggestion of a wink. 'The nearest decent dining otherwise was in Memphis, and that's too far.' He has a face that seems made for looking serious; dauntingly so if he put his mind to it, one suspects. He achieves his effects with the tiniest adjustments of his facial muscles. Yet once he lets go a bit, a playfulness emerges about the eyes that, in combination with the dour, leaning towards hang-dog set of his features, is very winning. He meant what he said about having selfish motives for setting up the restaurant, but there was more to it than that.

Closer to the truth was that he and Bill wanted to perk up Clarksdale, to help lift the local economy. Freeman said that, until he and Bill got involved, people would travel to Clarksdale from as far away as Norway to pay homage to the Blues mecca, only to find there was nothing going on. So they set up the Ground Zero club, which in turn spawned smaller blues joints round and about, and a shop that sells memorabilia and a museum. 'So now there's a market,' said Freeman. People before arrived all dressed up for the party, but there was no party. 'Now there is, and the best place to eat in the Deep South.' That good? 'I travel all over the world and I tend to eat in the best places,' said Freeman. 'This is as good as anything I've come across.'

Our first plate, elegantly presented, contained seared scallops in cilantro custard (sweet but not so sweet as to bury the essential fishy freshness), crispy crawfish (like croutons, only more interesting) and a blue crab claw stuffed with a smidgen of Mississippi catfish. The next plate - long, rectangular-shaped - bore the following: barbecued quail breast with potato dumplings; chorizo-stuffed quail leg with honey; seared foie gras with blueberries. The foie, always difficult to get right, was cooked to perfection, wonderfully delicate, almost runny but not quite. After all that, whatever food insecurity any of us might have experienced that day had been well and truly assuaged. Freeman groaned - well no, he is too cool to groan, he did his equivalent of a groan, which is to raise an eyebrow in a particular way- upon being informed that there remained another meat course. 'No, no, please. Serve the others but not me.' The waitress ignored him and brought us each what she described as a plate of veal cheeks with ginger and orange, accompanied by a berry compote with cucumber. They were so tender they went down like butter.

Freeman told me about the first chef they had had at Madidi's. 'The restaurant got a lot of attention at first and he got carried away. He succumbed to stardom.' Succumbed to stardom? 'Yes, succumbed to stardom. I see it all the time.' I asked him if by this he meant people believing the  propaganda. 'Exactly,' he said. 'You've got to fight it. You've got to distinguish between reality and fiction. You must never lose sight of the difference. Otherwise you're in trouble.' The new chef came out to see us. He was surprisingly young for someone in charge of a kitchen that made such sophisticated food. He was 29 and had been taught by some US-based Spanish master, whose name escaped me. His name was Lee Craven. I told him I knew some of the Spanish-based Spanish masters, like Ferrán Adrià of El Bulli. Craven said these Spanish vanguard guys were great, and he was glad they experimented the way they did, but that was not for him. Freeman wanted to hear more about El Bulli. I told him I'd heard that they'd recently auctioned a table. They'd never done it before, and were amazed by the response. The point is that to get a table at El Bulli you have to book a couple of years in advance. Freeman liked the story. 'You watch,' he said, revealing the marginally uncool, ambitious, competitive streak he obviously possesses, otherwise he would not have won an Oscar, and been nominated for four. 'You watch, we' ll be doing that here before too long.' I smiled, with what he may have interpreted as a hint of condescension. 'No, no,' he said. 'I'm serious.'

I went back to Madidi's the next night on my own, and instead of meat had seafood. The mussels in the coconut and Thai curry, the maple-glazed sea bass and something very fresh indeed called the Hydroponic Bibb Lettuce salad. I also asked for a piece of seared tuna, a dish accompanied by California roll with crab sushi. It was all fresh, delicious, cooked to exactly the right texture. Impossible not to keep on reminding oneself of
just how unlikely this place was, and how infinitely better in every respect than, for example, a high-falutin restaurant called Alto I'd eaten at a few days earlier in New York. And how infinitely (actually, by a factor of 2.5) less expensive. The whole meal, with glasses of California and Bordeaux wines included, came to $60. In terms of value for money, i t may have been the best meal I'd ever had. Next time I am in New York, and want to eat Madidi's-quality food, I may have to give serious thought to forget about New York altogether and fly out to Clarksdale. It would probably work out cheaper.

It certainly would if I could hitch a ride on Morgan Freeman's plane. It was only afterwards, when I read somewhere how old he was, that it struck me as peculiar that he was a jet pilot. Are you allowed to do that when you are 67? I suppose you must be. But the truly shocking thing was to discover that this was how old he was. It had never crossed my mind to inquire as to his age and, having spent the evening with him, I would never have guessed that that was how old he was. He may be 67 on paper but he has the air of a man 20 years, or more, younger.

When we said goodbye he gave me his email address. I wrote to him a few days later to thank him for dinner and the pleasure of meet ing him. He wrote back to say the pleasure had been his and to wish me luck. I probably need it more than he does. What with the money, the plane, the fame, the acclaim, the talent, the Oscar, he'd lived up to Red's redemptive cry, 'Get busy living, or get busy dying'. And busy eating too. When he is on a film set back in LA, the recollection that he is owner of Madidi's, the sensual summoning of those blue crab claws stuffed with catfish, always gives him, he says, a warm and happy feeling inside.