Melba's Contains Multitudes

Welcome to America’s best po’boy shop/daiquiri bar/laundromat/video poker den/bookshop.

Story by Rien Fertel | Photos by Casey Joiner

Attending a book signing at Melba’s in New Orleans can feel a little like going to see “Macbeth” at a NASCAR track. You might find yourself asking if you’re in the right place. It’s the bright blue building in the deadman’s curve at the crossroads of Elysian Fields and North Claiborne avenues, next to the AutoZone. You can’t miss it. Covered in more flashing neon than the Superdome:

Eat at Melba’s
OPEN 24 HOURS
30 Shrimp Guaranteed!

Don’t head for the left door — that leads to the laundromat. You want to enter on your right. Squeeze through the bottleneck of customers queuing to get a sandwich or plate lunch before heading back to work. If you entered through the back door, take a left past the row of frozen daiquiri machines and the video poker room. You should hear the author by now, though they might be drowned out by the cashiers shouting orders: 

Fish and shrimp po’boy — dressed!
Where my five-piece at?
Ninth Ward Gumbo, order up!

There they are, a New York Times bestselling author — come all this way to sign books at a po’boy shop. “America’s busiest po’boy shop,” as its owners, Jane and Scott Wolfe, boldly advertise, despite the unlikelihood of being able to prove such a claim.

Take a look around. Author photos dangle from the ceiling like Christmas ornaments. A wall-sized display case holds copies from previous in-store events: Colson Whitehead, Stacy Schiff, Matthew McConaughey, Hillary Clinton. Novels, histories, current events, and inspirational titles. Illustrated children’s books, university press monographs, self-published memoirs. Buy lunch, get a free copy from that day’s visiting author — that’s the deal. Eat and Read at Melba’s, the nonprofit program is called. It’s literacy for lunch.

Roast beef po’boy — free book.
Boiled crawfish, when in season — free book.
Stuffed bell pepper with a side of turkey necks — free book. 

Unlike many cities these days, New Orleans can still lay claim to a flourishing literary marketplace. We’re no New York, of course, but there’s a whole social order of new and used bookstores, pop-up poetry readings, book festivals, and visiting bestselling authors. We no doubt have more writers living in the city than ever before. More writers, I’d wager, than we have live oaks. And though we have a whole hell of a lot of oak trees — picturesquely dripping in Spanish moss and last season’s Mardi Gras beads — those oaks ain’t proliferating at the same rate as us writers. 

New Orleans writers, as well as visiting authors, love nothing more than throwing ourselves book events in the most idiosyncratic of spaces. I once watched Eileen Myles read their poems in a shabby French Quarter saloon better known as a place where undergrads knock back flaming Dr Pepper shots in between snorting lines of cocaine measured out on the screens of vintage arcade machines. I attended one book event in a yoga studio, where the audience raised their glasses and serenaded the author with an a cappella rendition of “Free Bird.” (That was my own book event, actually.) I’m too young to have attended Anne Rice’s book release party where the goth queen showed up in a coffin, but I’ve watched the proceedings repeatedly on YouTube. The point is, New Orleans likes to mix literature with getting lit — and vice versa. So a po’boy shop might not be that out of the ordinary, even one that moonlights as a combination 24 hours a day, seven days a week daiquiri bar/laundromat/gambling den/bookshop.

Literacy for lunch is the order of the day at Melba’s. The eclectic New Orleans institution serves up books and author signings along with po’boys and potent potables worthy of the Big Easy. Proprietors Jane and Scott Wolfe combine their entrepreneurial bent with a serious commitment to stoking an appetite for reading.

At the center of this literary mash-up is Jane Wolfe. And today, a Friday in early December, she’s hustling to get an event ready just minutes before Cody Keenan, former chief speechwriter for President Barack Obama, is scheduled to appear via Zoom. But this is the restaurant business — if something isn’t going wrong, then you forgot to unlock the front doors. The credit card machines are down. There’s a frenzy of customers eating like it’s already the holidays. And the brand-new screen meant to beam Keenan in from Chicago isn’t working.

Melba’s manager jiggles some wires as a crush of Obama superfans anxiously lean in. Keenan’s face materializes. “What I gotta do?” he asks, hesitantly.

“We’re not a stuffy bookstore,” Wolfe assures. “Don’t worry about it. Just chill out.” Her nasal staccato is, for my money, one of the purest examples of the local white working-class “Yat” accent ever to grace New Orleans’ soundscape. One Yat aficionado described the once ubiquitous, now increasingly rare, vernacular as sounding like “all of Brooklyn on Quaaludes.”

While Wolfe introduces her guest, I sneak a peek at her copy of Keenan’s memoir, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America. Its pages swarm with penciled underlinings and stars — resembling nothing if not a grad student’s well-thumbed scholarly tome. “This book lets us learn that even up there, at the very top of where Cody operated,” she says, rounding out her intro, “he still questioned his confidence.”

A long and solitary “God bless” rings out from the crowd.

Melba’s offers the type of event every author hopes for, but that — in my experience attending hundreds of traditional bookstore readings — happens far too rarely: an engaged, enthusiastic, and racially and economically diverse audience. It doesn’t hurt that Wolfe also purchases 100 books to give away — big numbers for most authors. (Sensing a crowd, Wolfe supplied 150 copies of Keenan’s memoir.) Today, there are book lovers, Michelle Obama acolytes, and a pair of young speechwriters seeking advice. One by one they ask questions, lavish praise on the Obamas, and take pictures with the author, posing next to the screen with a book and po’boy in hand.

Chita Manuel says she made sure to be first in line, because this was the “closest I could be to Obama.” Gertrude Ivory often drives an hour round trip to build her Melba’s library. “Literacy is my passion,” she tells me. An Eat and Read regular named Kevin Grandpré Sr. asks Keenan if Obama is as cool in real life as when he played president. “Yeah, he really is the same when the cameras are off,” the author responds. “He’s a little more profane, he uses more colorful language, but he’s the same guy.” Keenan then describes what he calls his former boss’s “monkish” eating habits and regimented drinking schedule: “two martinis a week — one on Friday, one on Saturday; never any more than that, because he had control of the nuclear weapons.”

Wolfe has a knack for roping unsuspecting customers into interacting with authors they hadn’t yet realized they wanted to meet. “Come say hello to Obama’s speechwriter,” she says to more than one hungry patron heading for the register. Each reacts in the same fashion: shouts of profanity-laced joy.

Keenan confesses that when he received Wolfe’s invitation, his first thought was, “This sounds crazy.” But Melba’s offered something different. “I had a good mix of people at my [other] events,” he tells me, “but let’s be honest, there was no other event that was majority Black, majority working class. That was wonderful. That’s who I want to reach with this book, too.”

While Keenan answers the crowd’s questions, Wolfe introduces me to Brian Bagneris, a truck driver who stumbled upon his first Melba’s book event in January 2020, after stopping in for a bowl of chicken and sausage gumbo. He ended up chatting with that day’s author, Walter Isaacson, the former CEO of CNN and editor of Time magazine and now a perennially bestselling biographer. Isaacson encouraged Bagneris to finish a manuscript he had been writing. That book, a redemptive memoir titled Hustle Till I Die, came out last year.

It’s clear that Wolfe is proud of the books promoted, discovered, and even conceived under her roof. “This guy,” she shouts over the crowd, shoulder-hugging Bagneris, “makes me keep doing what I’m doing.”

The po’boy contains multitudes. You’ll find, layered between a sliced French bread loaf, fried seafood, cold cuts, hot roast beef, or sausage. Lettuce, tomato, pickles, and a healthy mopping of mayonnaise — what New Orleanians call “dressed.” And a heaping of historical baloney. The history of New Orleans’ foodways is built upon a foundation of fables, opaque origin stories that seek to turn a complex cultural narrative into a simple, and often whitewashed, set of legends-as-recipes. Creole cuisine, to take one widely circulated whale of a tale called the Petticoat Rebellion, was not the invention of Madame Langlois — housekeeper to the city’s founder, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville — who supposedly quelled protests over the colony’s monotonous corn mush diet by sharing her culinary expertise with the city’s women. The Ursuline nuns did not bring pralines — then made with almonds, instead of pecans — over from France. And the term “po’boy” almost certainly does not date back to a 1929 streetcar strike, when two enterprising and semantically savvy sandwich-making brothers coined the phrase. 

According to lore, Benny and Clovis Martin, owners of an eponymous French Market sandwich and coffee stand, stood in solidarity with the thousand-plus members of the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Street Railway Employees, Division 194, who went on strike on July 1, 1929. Tensions ran high as that summer wore on. After the city recruited scabs, the unionized workers rioted, firebombing streetcars. On August 6, the brothers Martin, retired streetcar conductors themselves, penned a letter to local newspapers. “Our meal is free to any members of Division 194,” they wrote. “We are with you till h--l freezes, and when it does, we will furnish blankets to keep you warm.” Hungry strikers skipped the blankets but came for the complimentary meal: a fried potato and roast beef gravy-stuffed loaf. “Whenever we saw one of the striking men coming,” Benny recalled decades later, “one of us would say, ‘Here comes another poor boy.’”

The po'boy contains multitudes. The history of New Orleans' foodways is built upon a foundation of fables, opaque origin stories that seek to turn a complex cultural narrative into a simple, and often whitewashed, set of legends-as-recipes.

It’s a splendid though dubious origin story. Similar sandwiches called “loaves” and “peacemakers” — sold citywide in corner groceries, bars, and lunch stands — predated the now-famous streetcar strike by well over half a century. Recent research convincingly argues that first-wave jazz titans like Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet were noshing on sandwiches they called “poor boys” in the 1910s. But helped along by its new name — variously spelled po-boy, po’boy, po boy, poboy, or, as the Martins and a curmudgeonly cadre of New Orleanians prefer, poor boy — the sandwich had achieved icon status by the late 1960s, when the strike story first appeared in print. 

However you slice this historical sandwich, Benny and Clovis Martin should at least be credited for their largesse in feeding the downtrodden at a time of need. Po’boys, like most examples of American sandwich culture, were a working-class meal: cheap, portable, and filling. Surveying today’s lunch landscape, inflation and seafood scarcity have caused po’boy prices to skyrocket. At Parkway Bakery and Tavern, arguably the city’s most lauded po’boy shop, a large fried oyster goes for $22.99 (though it’s worth every penny). It’s easy to forget that this sandwich might once have been free. Now it’s cheaper to give away books. Though Jane Wolfe didn’t directly seek to replicate the Martin brothers’ generosity, Melba’s literacy program does just that. Putting something free in the hands of hungry people becomes, in its own way, an offering of peace — a literal breaking of the bread.

Jane Lewis didn’t read a single book for nearly 30 years, she admits, starting around the age of 15, when her Catholic school kicked her out for being pregnant. She married her 17-year-old sweetheart, Scott Wolfe, in a shotgun wedding, followed by a honeymoon at Disney World, the most obvious destination for a pair of newlywed teens. The Wolfes began stocking shelves at her father’s neighborhood grocery, Ideal Food Store in New Orleans, making the drive each morning from their home in the suburb of Chalmette. 

A few years later, in 1982, the couple bought a tiny rundown corner grocery named Wagner’s Meat, located near the Desire Housing Projects, an isolated Ninth Ward development that ranked among the city’s poorest, worst maintained, and least desirable places to live. Wagner’s was the only grocery around. The Wolfes spruced up the store and kept the name and its longtime butcher, Tom, who regaled the couple with stories of the grocery’s glory days, when the line for the meat counter stretched out the door and down the block. They immediately beefed up the butcher’s offerings. 

Over time, Jane and Scott turned one Wagner’s into many. Every local knew their slogan, even if they had never stepped foot inside any one of the 10 locations: “You Can’t Beat Wagner’s Meat!” They had a second child, opened gas stations, laundromats, and their own fried chicken chain, Chicken Box, which offered to host weddings for couples who purchased its 1,000-piece party package. By century’s end, Jane and Scott had become serial entrepreneurs, with a real estate portfolio that would make many moguls blush. 

Then came August 29, 2005. The failure of the levee system following Hurricane Katrina washed away the Wolfes’ mini-empire. In response, Scott started a roofing business. Jane, empty-nesting at home, enrolled in Tulane University’s Intro to American Government course. “My mom and dad did not push a book on me,” Wolfe says. “No one was giving me books.” 

Forty-three years old and now surrounded by books, Wolfe sought out every opportunity to fill her life like a library’s shelves. She enrolled as a Tulane undergraduate, dual majoring in history and religious studies, and graduated in 2012. She then applied to Harvard’s Divinity School, where one professor disparaged her accent. After earning a master’s degree in theological studies, she returned home and taught world religion classes at Tulane and the University of Holy Cross, a Catholic liberal arts campus across town.

Her husband had meanwhile reentered the laundry biz, turning a long-vacant storefront into a combination washeteria and coffee/frozen yogurt café. No one living in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods downtown from the French Quarter, however, was clamoring for a taste of suburban soft serve. But in an area where few can afford to outfit their own laundry room, Wash World attracted a crowd. The promotion of free dryers from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. helped, but I like to think that Scott’s clever naming system kept customers coming back. Here, the washers and dryers are named for local luminaries: musicians mostly (Dr. John, Irma Thomas, Clarence “Frogman” Henry), with a scattering of sports stars (the Manning brothers), Hollywood heavyweights (Tyler Perry, Ellen DeGeneres), and, in this Catholic-leaning city, nuns (Henriette DeLille, Sister Helen Prejean). At Wash World, you can take Lil Wayne for a gentle spin cycle before tossing your undies for a hot tumble in Louis Armstrong. 

By 2014, po’boys had replaced the fro-yo idea, and Melba’s was bustling. Scott had a flair for the sensational. Not at all bookish, Jane says, he’s “a businessman at heart,” one who often overstepped boundaries of decency and laws. A local blog outlined his transgressions in a post titled, “The problematic sandwich shop.” In one episode, Scott’s brother, Melba’s then-manager, publicly denounced NFL players who kneeled in protest during the national anthem. “What he said was not the opinion of Melba’s,” Scott told a reporter. Then there was Scott’s failed attempt to skirt local short-term rental laws by offering a free night’s stay in “Melba’s Mansion” to vacationers who purchased 20 po’boys for $595. And who could forget the advertising stunt that earned Scott a fine from the city after he painted several neighboring vacant shotgun houses with an unsubtle shade of Yves Klein blue to spell out “Eat at Melba’s.” (The name Melba’s honors a domestic worker who did laundry for Scott’s grandmother, Mitzy, a Bourbon Street nightclub singer.) But for me, nothing beats the half-minute commercial featuring a possibly stoned Jesus. “I so loved the world that I created Melba’s, just for you,” the Son of God proclaims with a cheesy grin. “We have a Melba’s up here, too.”

Jane kindled a different set of ideas. On a whim, in 2018, she invited professor Jonathan Walton, her former Harvard Divinity adviser, to distribute copies of his new book to customers. The event proved a success. “I saw the ivory tower coming through Melba’s,” she says, a bridge linking literacy and lunch. The next year, Jane scored a coup with her third book giveaway, when Colson Whitehead stopped in with copies of The Nickel Boys, a novel that would soon earn him a second Pulitzer Prize. Sarah Broom, a locally born author and soon-to-be National Book Award winner, followed. A po’boy shop now ranked as the hottest stop on America’s literary circuit. Then came the Clintons. Chelsea, Hillary, and Bill visited the shop in October 2019 to hand out books, pose for pictures, and check out the next evolutionary step in Melba’s reading revolution: a children’s library and play area. 

On a recent visit, I find the kids zone supplied with industrial-sized reams of butcher paper begging to be torn, crayoned, and taped to the walls while families wait for the Tide PODS to do their thing. An early-reader bookshelf lacks the mind-numbing titles that haunt my childhood memories of pediatric waiting rooms, their end tables piled high with third-tier Little Golden Books and decades-old copies of Highlights magazine. Instead, Wash World stocks what some might denounce as worker reads: She Persisted in Science, ¡Vamos a Disfrutar!, and The Story of Ruby Bridges, which recently appeared on one Pennsylvania school district’s banned books list. No matter your age, it’s difficult to walk into Melba’s — fresh laundry or fried shrimp on your mind — and not be inspired to pick up a book.

Toward the end of a long sit-down interview with Jane Wolfe, she asked me why I care enough to write this profile. It’s not a question writers are often asked, perhaps to our detriment. There are parallels, I told her, between your story and mine. I ran a combination grocery store and po’boy shop before Katrina. After the storm, I returned to school, eventually landing in Tulane’s history department — unbeknownst to me, we even shared an adviser. Moreover, I’m a ravenous reader, devouring well over 100 books a year for work, pleasure, and, if I’m completely honest, obsessive compulsion. 

But I didn’t tell her that I also carried a seed of cynicism. In this era of book bans, shuttered bookstores, merging publishing houses, and high illiteracy rates (an astonishing 26 percent of adults in New Orleans), it’s tempting to dismiss Melba’s Eat and Read program as a well-disguised ploy to sell sandwiches. The Wolfes are entrepreneurs, after all. And few authors will turn down selling 100 copies of their book (including me — I did an event in early February). 

But Wolfe continues to push beyond. She has a vision of signing up 50 restaurants, one in each state, to offer their own Eat and Read programs. She dreams of encouraging Mardi Gras parades to toss books instead of cheap, disposable beads. I’m reminded of the words of Thomas Jefferson. “Books constitute capital,” he wrote to James Madison. “A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years.” Wolfe now finds herself richer in other ways, and the Eat and Read program might just be her way of sharing that wealth, of building a house that lasts well beyond her years.

There’s yet one more Melba’s book promotion that I haven’t told you about. If I could prove my name was Melba — birth certificate in hand, per Melba’s rules — I’d earn a free frozen daiquiri a week, for life. But because my parents did not bestow such an honorable name upon me, I must settle for scoring a complimentary daiquiri in another way. At Melba’s, if you buy a children’s book — at cheaper than cover price, I should add — you receive a small frozen daiquiri, for free. I don’t completely understand the reasoning behind the giveaway but consider it a ludicrous yet perfectly rational manifestation of New Orleans culture. 

On a recent early Sunday morning — it was Carnival season, so please allow me a wakeup daiquiri — I brought my boo, Katy, a novelist, to Melba’s to pick out a children’s book. She chose an illustrated history of Rome’s Colosseum, the setting for her forthcoming novel. I chose an XTC, a bestselling, boozy concoction of rum, blue curaçao, tequila, Sprite, and a mysterious ingredient listed as “international wine & spirits.” A worker named Rose poured me a cup. “It’ll get you right, believe me,” she said. “You’ll drink it and go, ‘Ahh, I made a mistake.’” I took this as a sign to wait until I returned home to take a sip. There, I cracked open the lid and slurped deep. Its flavor was sweet, complex, intoxicating. Almost like a good book.

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