Life in the restaurant game delivers wild ride for Mitch McCamey
Sep. 2—TUPELO — The recipe for success in America is simple: All it takes to succeed is absolutely everything you have.
That's a formula Mitch McCamey, 45, has proven. He's demonstrated it through ventures that took everything and still failed, through others that never got started, through more that blew through like passing rain. He's paid for his passage with heartbreak and sweat equity, and he's put his life and mind deep into the fine details.
Jobo's, on Main Street, lives at the focal point of all that. Much of it stands on the firm industry principles McCamey came to know in the traditional way, working on the job. The rest? That's owed to a day in the tropical sun, just off a small island where the trade winds sing, a day of clear skies, blue waves and an undertow that nearly claimed his life, only to set him free to find it again.
Originally from Okolona, McCamey learned about hard work while tromping through the mud on a cattle farm.
"That was hilarious, because I wasn't a country boy at all," he said. "It taught me a whole lot."
He learned about dedication and dependability, about the inescapable value of your word.
"On Friday nights, we'd be running cattle while my friends were all out running around," he said. "It's like the restaurant industry, in a way. It'll never pay you what you're worth or compensate you for all you've put into it. You've got to love it to do it very long."
A love of the game
McCamey discovered his own love of the restaurant game while living in Colorado.
"I was 20 or 21, and I met some folks who had a barbecue joint in a trailer," he said. "I met those guys and hooked up with them."
The restauranteur was Michael Fernandez, and the barbecue joint would become the first Moe's Original BBQ.
"He wound up applying a classic French food education to soul food," McCamey said. "I worked for him and learned a lot. I'm manic and naturally motivated. I have lots of good ideas, but I can't always finish them out. Michael talked to me straight, asked me if I was going to do what I was doing then for the rest of my days, encouraged me to get real training in food."
McCamey began that education with a survey course on life.
"While I was in Colorado, I lived in Vail," he said. "I worked at a bookstore, then a ski shop. My friends were from all over the world, from South Boston to South Africa. I got a real education on people. Living out there gave me so much confidence returning to the South."
McCamey's passion, dedication and work ethic stood him in good stead with one successful chef after another. Significantly, he continued his education in Birmingham at the world famous Hot and Hot Fish Club.
"You ever get somewhere and you're suited perfectly for the situation?" McCamey said. "I was so well prepared to work at Hot and Hot Fish Club. I had read all the books, and I was ready to give it my life. Chef Chris Hastings is one of the last true American chefs, I think. A man's man, very smart, but not the celebrity type. When I first got into it, the celebrity portion wasn't what it is now."
A practical education
McCamey's culinary education has taken place in restaurants of every size, in locations well known and obscure. That education didn't so much conclude as accelerate when he came home to Northeast Mississippi on a mission to create a place of his own. He and a group of friends opened Neon Pig at 1203 N. Gloster Street, a restaurant that thrives to this day. Neon Pig is a butcher shop, fresh seafood shop, a food bar and a craft beer specialist. It combines a lot of creativity into a culinary experience, both for customers and culinary artisans alike.
"Creativity is the part of it that draws me," McCamey said. "In college, I was an architecture major, but I was really interested in design. Everything is design. I don't know that I've ever been a chef so much as I just like creating. What I didn't understand was how that creativity will kill you.
"When we opened Neon Pig, I had no idea what I was doing," he said. "I didn't know anything about depreciation or insurance, any of the things you need to know to be effective as a founder in the restaurant business."
Writing a menu and producing it is one thing; creating the same things every day for years is quite another. The latter is not in McCamey's repertoire, so creativity keeps calling him to different roads.
In quick succession, his drive and connections with others who shared his passion led to the birth of Kermit's in Downtown Tupelo, to a Neon Pig in Oxford, and to two locations of King Chicken Fillin' Station before arriving at what he says will be his final stop: Jobo's in Hotel Tupelo.
"I've learned so much at every step along the way," McCamey said. "If I hadn't done Kermit's, I couldn't have done Jobo's."
Neon Pig Oxford fell victim to a plague of difficulties, while dining restrictions around the COVID-19 pandemic largely killed Kermit's on its own. Both losses broke McCamey's heart and wrecked his financing.
Kermit's he said, was unlike any other restaurant experience of his career.
"I had gone through unbelievable failure," he said. "I wasn't suicidal, but I definitely know how it feels when someone is in that place."
When Kermit's closed, it took a piece of McCamey's heart with it. But it gave him a lot in return.
A learning experience
"It taught me money is nothing," he said. "I had to start all over after that. It took the cash. I found out I didn't need that anyway."
When the Thrash Group approached him about designing a restaurant in the boutique hotel they were planning to build in Tupelo's Fairpark District, McCamey couldn't say "no." His past experiences guided him, and it haunted him, too.
"Eventually I decided I'd do it," he said. "I knew if I got it wrong, I'd lose everything, but it wasn't like I had the ability to finance that after going through COVID. If you've gone through what I had gone through and learned what was there to learn, you could do it."
The creative passion kicked in for McCamey and he began his work with a restaurant plan, putting his touch on everything from the look of the space to the kinds of forks on the tables.
What was missing, however, was a theme.
That's when a surfing trip to Puerto Rico came up, and the fast water held him down.
"The trip changed me," McCamey said. "I lived through getting held under by the undertow. It felt like forever. I've never been that scared for that long."
When he returned to the surface, the breath of air he inhaled brought with it a new outlook on many elements of life. That included his new restaurant.
A new life
"I knew I wanted the restaurant I was doing to be beautiful, fun and clean," he said. "I wanted it to be fun for the people who worked there, as much as it was fun for the patrons."
Besides the perspective he needed, the trip also gave McCamey the name he had been looking for.
"There was one little surfing break, hidden back on a path by itself," he said. "It was a beautiful place. A special place. The kind of place you want to go back to, both in person and in your mind. The locals called it Jobo's."
McCamey and his leadership team are working to make Jobo's in Tupelo special in many of the same ways.
"We play music at a little higher beats-per-minute, always upbeat, refreshing and energizing," he said. "I want this restaurant to be kind. No yelling. No bad culture. None of the stuff that plagues the restaurant industry."
He believes the realization of the vision is 90% there. That, he says, is 100% the right place to be.
"I try not to obsess about the last 10% that makes it perfect anymore," he said. "There are a lot of people around me that obsession crushed. Including me."
Tupelo is the right place for the vision to take shape, he said, because of the spirit that makes Tupelo shine.
"There's not another city in the U.S. set up like this," he said. "I've been so lucky to be able to build restaurants here, to fail here, to succeed here. To appreciate it. It's important to know the battles the city's founders and leaders went through. The intentional leadership Tupelo has had made all the difference, and a restaurant is an ideal place to enjoy it.
"Restaurants let people get together," he said. "It's about treating people correctly, whether they're your patrons or your employees or just passersby on the street."
Today, McCamey expresses his creativity in a variety of ways. He's consulted with restaurant founders in Alabama and Oklahoma, put a Neon Pig in a casino on the Plains, developed concepts far past the "what if?" stage and all the way to completion. It's an art he can't get away from, in part because the elements of adrenaline keep calling him home.
"It's the Friday night, 400 people, machine-manic click click click, 'yes chef, yes chef, yes chef,'" he said of the game's hook. "It's like a sport; it really is. You've got your team, you know everything's about to go awry, but you've got your team's back and they have yours, overcoming challenges and setbacks. Then the night ends, and you sit down and enjoy a beer or a cigarette with the team. I love that, and I miss that. The rest of it, I could live without."
Thanks to his resilience, a manic drive, and the cold force of ocean waves in warm, tropical surf, that's exactly what he's positioned to do.
Kevin is the weekend edition editor for the Daily Journal. Contact him at kevin.tate@journalinc.com.
