Barbecue and blues come to Milford

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Michael Cleveland photo Chuck Hall behind the bar at the new Memphis BBQ and Blues club on Elm Street in Milford.

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MILFORD – When it comes to barbecue and the blues, Chuck Hall is a very serious guy.

At the new Memphis BBQ and Blues restaurant and club at 770 Elm St., where he is the general manager, both – which he has high expectations for – are on display. So, too, he said in an interview on Monday, Dec. 26, do the businesses owners – his wife Nadine and his friend of long standing from their days at Merrimack High School, Marc Deshaies.

“Our purpose in life,” he said on a chilly Monday when he arrived at the club before 7 a.m. (his chef was already there, checking meat that had started roasting on Christmas night), “is to educate this area about what good barbecue is.”

Here is what it’s not, in Hall’s words: “It’s not taking a piece of meat and throwing it on the grill and slathering it in sauce and calling it barbecue. That’s grilling.”

Memphis barbecue, he explained, takes time. Lots of time and care.

“Memphis style is smoked meat,” Hall said. “When we put our briskets in, and when we put our pork butts in, which is where you get the pulled pork from, it’s in there for 14 hours. We were in (Christmas night) putting in today’s food, and it will go in there and slow smoke at 200 degrees to the point where you slice it in half and you get this beautiful pink ring going around the inside called the rose, and that’s means it’s smoked, it’s good meat.”

Oh, and you get the sauce on the side, he said.

Ah, the sauce: Being a New Hampshire native, Hall was concerned that the concept of “spicy hot” wasn’t one with which everyone was comfortable, but ...

“I ate a plate of crow about the size of this table,” he said, referring to one of the round tables in the bar area. “We have comment cards and just about unanimously, they said the same thing: Make the sauce hotter, make the spices hotter.”

So, as they finish their second week in business, Memphis Blues & BBQ has three sauces: a smokey sweet sauce, that is Hall’s favorite; a spicy mustard sauce that he says goes well with the pulled pork, “and then we have a spicy barbecue sauce, and (customers) are still telling me to make it hotter.”

Also hot at the club and all over the area, Hall said, is the blues.

“We started setting this place up and through a friend of a friend of a friend, this blues band heard we were opening and stopped in and said they’d like to come play,” he said. “Not even a week later, I’m getting phone calls on a daily basis from bands all the way down to Worcester, up north to Concord and Manchester, out to the Seacoast, to Peterborough, Vermont, blues bands that don’t have a venue to play blues anymore.”

Well, fantastic, he thought: So he had bands, but what about people to listen? Were there any?

There sure were.

Again, word spread and, Hall said, “I started getting e-mails, phone calls, ‘When are you opening? We love the blues’. We’re trying to build this thing so I finally had to say, don’t tell anybody we’re here because we’ll never get anything done. They’re always coming in wanting to talk about this place.

“There is a huge, huge fan base for the blues.”

And blues is what will be played at the new club, nothing but the blues.

“I’ve had a lot of blues bands come in that play other stuff at other places because, the economy being what it is, you play what pays,” Hall said. “I said, no mix. I don’t want a mix of anything. You come in here, you play blues. You don’t play blues, you don’t come back. Blues is what we’re here for.”

And, yes, there are skeptics, people who have told him the club won’t make it on a blues-only diet.

“That’s not true,” he said. “We’ve had some of our best nights …” He pauses and laughs. “We’ve only been open seven days. But the best night that we had we had the Bursitis Bros in here and they were playing just blues. Not a peep of complaint from anybody in the audience. There is a definite fan base out there.”

For Hall, the blues is pretty much it in terms of his musical preference, but he also seems fascinated by the food aspect of the new club.

“It’s funny,” he said. “When we started this out, the intention was to build a bar that had a nice little kitchen in it.”

After all, when they were at Merrimack High (they graduated in 1980), he and Deshaies often talked about, specifically, a bar, although in those days, the idea was to open in Barbados.

“It’s turned out to be a nice restaurant that has a cool bar,” he said.

His wife, who grew up in Sharon, wasn’t part of the high school discussion, but when the chance came to take over the building that once housed Milford Coffee, she was all for it.

“I was more in love with the building than anything else,” said Hall, who spent more than two decades in the construction business.

When the building came up for sale several months ago, he jumped at it and called Deshaies, an emergency room doctor working out of Chicago, who jumped right in.

“It’s just a really cool building,” said Hall, explaining that the building had opened in 1906 as a private home and then became a schoolhouse.

Once they got years of coatings off the floors, he discovered 116-year-old maple.

“The quality of the way it was built, the fact that there are solid oak two-by-fours in these walls … to somebody who’s been in the construction business for a long time, it’s pretty cool,” he said.

That it became a home for barbecue and blues is because of Hall’s passion for both, and the trust of the two people with whom he is in business.

“I said, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do something that I like,” he said. “If I’m going to serve food, it’s going to be food I like and I love barbecue.”

So he explained it all to his wife.

“I love the blues,” he said. “I’m pretty much past the point of listening to anything else, we’re going to do this, and if it’s successful, fantastic. If it fails, at least I’ll have something to eat that I like and I can listen to music that I want to.

“And have a building that I love.”

Memphis seats only 50 but that’s primarily because its parking lot takes only 24 cars. It is open for lunch and dinner with live music Friday and Saturday. Hours are Monday-Wednesday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Thursday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-1 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. For more information, find them on Facebook by searching for “MB&B: Memphis Barbecue & Blues.”