Photo by Langdon Clay

April 2011. Haute cuisine, and the idea of Clarksdale, Mississippi.

I stopped briefly before a Mississippi Blues Trail Marker that explained Ike Turner had once been an elevator operator and janitor at the Hotel Alcazan, which stood behind the marker boarded up on the near deserted streets of Clarksdale, Mississippi. I love this town, though I hardly know why it still exists, hanging by the one thread of history to which it ardently clings. It is the undisputed home of the blues.

I’d just checked in as the only guest at the Big Pink Guest House, a shabby-chic gem of a building on Yazoo Avenue, just around the corner from my true destination for the evening, the acclaimed French restaurant Madidi. Big Pink, a former ice cream factory turned curious mansion, is one of the many properties in Clarksdale that have been salvaged from the ravages of the Delta to become boutique lodging. It’s the brainchild of entrepreneur Tommy Polk, who’s also created the Shack-Up Inn, a collection of refurbished sharecropper’s cabins on the outskirts of town. Similarly Madidi is an implausibly ritzy fine dining restaurant on the next block, dreamt up by local attorney Bill Luckett and actor Morgan Freeman. A lot of people have a lot of ideas about what to do with Clarksdale.

The temperatures were plummeting that January night; a freak ice storm was on its way to paralyze the Delta, and I only had a few moments before I was to get a glimpse at the kitchen at Madidi. It was a special night; a collection of chefs spanning from Jackson, Mississippi to Avignon, France were all brought in to contribute their best dish to honor Master French Chef Sir Phillip Boulot of the Heathman in Portland, Oregon, who happened to be the mentor of Madidi executive chef Levi Minyard. There were to be special wine pairings with each of the eight courses selected by Scott Sutherland, sommelier of Miko at the Pearl River Resort. Not the kind of thing to which I wanted to risk being fashionably late.

I did have a second to pop into Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art to pick up The Ladies Man, a recent record by Clarksdale bluesman T-Model Ford. Cat Head owner Steve Greer is another guy with ideas for Clarksdale; “Promote from within” is what he says on his website to be the mission under which he opened the combination book store/record store/art gallery dedicated to all things Clarksdale blues. I hoped to get his take on the idea of Clarksdale, but he’d already left for the evening.

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