Long before the National Civil Rights Museum opened around the corner and while there were still ladies of the night frequenting the upstairs of Earnestine & Hazel’s down the street, the Marmalade Restaurant and Lounge thrived on Calhoun Avenue.

“The Marmalade was my mother’s idea,” Czenzie Smith said of her mother, Mae Smith, who died in 2020. “She got the bug of opening up a restaurant when she was 17.”

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The Marmalade’s story is one of Black ownership during a time when few minorities owned property Downtown, a story of a nuclear family banding together to run a successful business and a story of pride for a trailblazer who was way ahead of her time. 

It’s also a building looking for its next chapter, as the family who owns the property begins repairs and renovations for whatever comes next. 

‘Marmalade is a preserve’

Though she was a teenager when she began thinking about opening a restaurant, Mae Smith instead got a job with the postal service as manager of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which allowed her to travel.

“In (Mae’s) travels, she made sure that she checked out different restaurants and how they operated,” daughter Czenzie Smith said. “That’s where she got some of her ideas to incorporate into the Marmalade.”

For instance, some of her travels took Mae Smith to New Orleans, where her coworker knew the chef at a restaurant where they were dining.

“The chef at that restaurant in New Orleans took my mother back in the kitchen and showed her how to make gumbo,” Czenzie Smith said. “She held on to that recipe and, later, she had gumbo on her menu. People would come in and ask for her gumbo.”

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In the 1970s, Mae Smith went in search of a building to house her restaurant. Originally, she found one on Airways Boulevard and Ketchum Road, but after realizing it wasn’t the right fit for a restaurant, she turned it into a daycare center instead. 

Then she learned that Downtown needed minority-owned restaurants, and she came across a dilapidated building at 153 Calhoun Ave., now G.E. Patterson Avenue, which was owned by the Belz family.

After she bought the building and did some renovations, the Marmalade Restaurant and Lounge opened in 1982.

“Marmalade is a preserve,” Czenzie Smith said. “(Mae’s) idea was to try to preserve the Southern culture, meaning that she wanted to have Southern food such as black-eyed peas, cornbread, turnip greens, candied yams, pork chops, chicken, steak and things like that. That’s why she called it the Marmalade. It was to preserve the type of food that Southerners like to eat.” 

According to Czenzie Smith, as part of the renovations, Mae was told by the city that the restaurant had to have a parking lot, despite other Downtown restaurants not having one available for their patrons.

“There was a little lot on the side of the Marmalade building, and we purchased it, and that’s how we were able to make it into a parking lot,” she said. “They were trying to make it hard for us because they required us to have a parking lot, but they really did us a favor.”

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Lunch and live music 

During the 1980s, Memphis’ Central Station was run down, and the Lorraine Motel had closed.

“The train station was there, but it was like a ghost town,” Czenzie Smith said. “People were in fear of their life to catch the train because it was raggedy and dilapidated.”

Wanting to enhance the neighborhood, Mae Smith helped to create the Calhoun Downtown Business Development Group to encourage other minorities to invest in the area. (By 1996, the group included National Civil Rights Museum executive director Juanita Moore and Memphis City Council member Barbara Swearengen Ware.)

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“Even Beale Street wasn’t booming as it is now,” Czenzie Smith said. “(Mae) was way ahead of her time. She was a trailblazer.”

Despite a lack of activity in the neighborhood, the Marmalade quickly grew and became a family affair: Czenzie Smith’s uncle handled parking lot security, her father was a cook, a cousin was a waiter, another uncle was a bartender and Czenzie played the role of hostess.

“We started off with dinner, and then we saw a need for people to have somewhere to go to lunch,” Czenzie said. “There was a restaurant on Third and Crump, and there were places that were OK, but there weren’t a whole lot of restaurants. That was a plus right there for us.”

The Marmalade’s lunch was buffet-style, and customers could help themselves, though Czenzie Smith’s aunt was there to serve individuals as they went around the buffet.

“As time went on, it (the Marmalade) began to get bigger, and the family had other things to do,” she said. “We were able to hire individuals that did not have any experience. We had to train them, and a lot of them went on to get jobs at hotels like the Peabody and the Marriott.”

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Soon, the Marmalade began having live entertainment seven days a week, and it saw its fair share of well-known local artists such as Ruby Wilson and Melvia “Chick” Rodgers.

Czenzie Smith’s brother, Audie Smith, handled booking the entertainment.

“We did our research and went down to Blues Alley when it opened up on Front Street,” Czenzie Smith said. “We got some of their artists to come and be part of the entertainment at the Marmalade.”

Native Memphian Rodgers performed weekly at the Marmalade for several years, and she credits the setting for helping her to develop her stage presence.

“(The Marmalade) was cozy, and it was very intimate,” Rodgers said. “I could be close with the fans and the audience. It wasn’t difficult, but it was strange to me to play with a keyboard player and no guitar, no drums, no anything. It was just the keyboard player and me. It was unique and turned out to be fun. I loved it.”

As the Marmalade gained popularity, the Smiths renovated the upstairs, increasing the building’s capacity from 125 to 185. With a separate bar upstairs, the family began getting requests to host wedding receptions, parties, fashion shows and banquets.

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Last wishes

However, competition began to creep in for the Marmalade in more recent years. 

About five years ago, Czenzie Smith and her mother came to the realization that they could no longer contribute to the restaurant as they once had.

“Things started slowing down around 2016, and 2017 is when we decided to go ahead and close the Marmalade,” she said. “The business had slowed down, and we stopped doing live entertainment.”

As for the future of the Marmalade, Czenzie Smith is undecided about what exactly will happen with the family-owned property, but one thing is for certain: The Smiths will retain ownership of it.

“My mother, she passed in 2020, and her wish was always, ‘Don’t sell the building,’” Czenzie Smith said. “I’m going to make sure that I maintain that wish and not sell the building.”

But that doesn’t mean it will continue to sit vacant. 

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Repairs are being made to the roof, and the exterior will be repainted. Later, renovations will happen inside.

“It is a great location, with a lot of history,” said Brent Roler, SVP of planning and development for the Downtown Memphis Commission. “And is a critical corridor, linking South Main with the emergent South City.”

And it may become home to a new eatery. 

“If I decide anything, I want to have someone in there to appreciate the building itself,” Czenzie Smith said. “I’d like for it to continue to be a restaurant. Those are my wishes.”