Leluia Hall Proves Tonidandel-Brown’s Penchant for Preservation

Walking through the 110-year-old Dilworth church that will soon be home to Leluia Hall early one January morning, I got the sense that Jamie Brown could see things that I couldn’t.

Where I saw ladders, buckets, tool boxes, bags of quick-set compound, bottles of caulk, extension cords and a slew of supplies strewn about an unfinished bar area, she saw a dining room complete with tables, seats, server stations, stools at the finished raw bar, and silverware settings. At least that’s what I imagined she saw.

“I think in any of these restoration projects, it’s a game of faith,” she said. “You’ve got to just keep moving forward. It does not always look pretty. This is one of those moments. It’s the chaos that happens right before you go to open.”

This process is nothing new to Brown, who co-founded Tonidandel-Brown restaurant group with her husband Jeff Tonidandel in 2009 with the opening of NoDa’s Crepe Cellar. They landed in that prime location by happenstance after searching for any space a property owner was willing to lease to two aspiring restaurateurs with no experience in the midst of the Great Recession.

And yet, as the pair of Davidson College graduates have continued to grow their company, opening more establishments along the North Davidson Street corridor — Growler’s Pourhouse, Haberdish, Ever Andalo, Reigning Doughnuts — before expanding to Plaza Midwood with the opening of Supperland, one thing has remained constant: each of their restaurants are located in old and sometimes historic buildings.

The two insist that preservation was never part of their mission when they launched Tonidandel-Brown, though it does play into their goals involving community.

“We are interested in the neighborhoods and having a presence in the neighborhood that we’re going into,” Tonidandel explained. “I think that leads us into some of these old buildings. We really want to be part of the neighborhood. It makes a little more sense to go into some building that’s been here for 100 years rather than jumping into a new build where you don’t quite feel like you’re really part of the neighborhood.”

“I think we’ve gravitated towards interesting spaces that are kind of like a very natural bedrock on which to build,” added Brown. “It’s not just this white room. It already has character, so it actually makes our jobs a lot easier. We always joke like, ‘We probably aren’t very good at what we do. It’s just the old space that offers that up already.’”

Safe to say that both Brown and Tonidandel are good at what they do, as they’ve proven time and again with their popular eateries. It appears that with each new establishment, the team grows stronger.

Building on the strong buzz behind Haberdish, the Southern-styled restaurant that opened in late 2016, the team’s 2021 opening of Supperland gained national recognition. The Plaza Midwood steakhouse, also located in a historic church, landed at No. 15 on Esquire’s list of Best New Restaurants in 2022.

Now with Leluia Hall, a steak-and-seafood restaurant set to open sometime in January or by winter’s end at the latest, Tonidandel and Brown look to continue building their legacy as two of Charlotte’s most impactful restaurateurs, not only for their great food and dining experiences but for the legacy they are building — if accidentally — as two of Charlotte’s most important preservationists.

The big move to Leluia Hall

“Somehow it is 2023 and I find myself here as a restaurateur in front of city council fighting to save a 1903 building,” said Jamie Brown during a Sept. 18, 2023, Charlotte City Council meeting, clearly somewhat frustrated. “That’s not where I expected to be.”

Brown was there to gain support for a rezoning hearing at the Leluia Hall site, located at 1823 Cleveland Avenue. While the historic church on the site was already zoned for the use they needed — renowned restaurant Bonterra operated there for more than 20 years before moving in 2021 — Tonidandel-Brown wanted to take things further.

Their plan was to move the Leeper & Wyatt building, Dilworth’s oldest surviving retail building that had been slated for demolition, from where it sat on South Boulevard to the lot on the church’s property on Cleveland Avenue.

The plan saw pushback from a handful of neighbors who were concerned that placing the building in what was supposed to be Leluia Hall’s parking lot would only exacerbate issues with parking in the neighborhood, adding more traffic while taking away parking spots.

The September hearing inspired a debate among council members about what it looked like to “preserve the character” of a neighborhood dubbed Charlotte’s oldest streetcar suburb.

“Dilworth was meant to be developed around mass transit and walking people. It is really not set up for the type of single-occupancy-vehicle traffic that most of its residents participate in today,” said then-Mayor Pro Tem Braxton Winston.

“We should ask ourselves which history we are trying to preserve,” he continued. “Are we trying to actually preserve the makeup of the neighborhood or do we want to preserve a gentrified version of the neighborhood, which exists today?”

The process was about more than business for Brown and Tonidandel, who are Dilworth residents raising their children in a home just a few blocks away from the Cleveland Avenue site.

“There were definitely frustrations or concerns around how are we really trying to grow in Charlotte?” said Brown. “But also, I live in this neighborhood and I’ve got children. I know what it’s like not to want change. A lot of people don’t want change. You’re happy where you are. So I can understand why people can feel upset or worried. That’s the last thing we want to do is create change for the worse. We want it to be a beautiful place for people to enjoy.”

The rezoning petition was eventually approved and the couple moved forward with relocating the Leeper & Wyatt building, a process that proved far more complex than any restoration they had carried out at their other establishments.

There were dozens of considerations to be made before the big move could take place, from city permitting to ensuring the streets could hold the weight of the building to raising power lines and trimming tree branches to working the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission.

“Jeff did all the legwork on that move,” Brown acknowledged. “The number of parties that had to come out here. There were days we’d have a meeting and there’d be 25 people out here just talking, all from different teams.”

In September 2024, a crowd of Dilworth and South End residents gathered to watch workers move the 120-year-old building 750 feet down the street from 1923 South Blvd. to 1823 Cleveland Ave.

Brown said she has kept in contact with some of her neighbors who had opposed the move in an effort to reconcile any differences the two parties may have had.

“I think some of the ones that weren’t in support of it are now seeing the vision,” Brown said. “They’re okay with it and excited for us to open and have been very accepting. I think we’re turning the corner. We’ll be excited to have all of them here, even if they were the people that stood up in front of the city council and spoke out against this project here. It’s okay. It’s all good.”

Tonidandel and Brown still haven’t finalized plans for the Leeper & Wyatt building, all they know is that it will be another restaurant separate from Leluia Hall with a glassed-in solarium on the rooftop patio.

With 1,500 square feet on each of the building’s three floors, Brown said her next job will be to find out how to best activate that limited space on each story.

Design is Brown’s strength, as Haberdish was recognized twice in 2017 by the American Institute of Architects, earning the AIA NC Award and AIA Charlotte Honor Award for its design and atmosphere.

She’s likely to find plenty to do with the historic building that now sits next door to Leluia Hall, but for now the focus is on getting their first Dilworth restaurant opened.

Tonidandel-Brown perfects adaptive reuse

With each of Tonidandel-Brown’s establishments carrying a slightly different variation of the family-style, shared-dining experience that runs through all of the restaurants — Southern fried chicken at Haberdish, Italian at Ever Andalo, steaks at Supperland — Leluia Hall marks the company’s first foray into seafood.

While Growlers Pourhouse offers up an enticing oyster program, Tonidandel, Brown and executive chef Chris Rogienski, who’s moving over from Supperland, are expanding on that for Leluia Hall’s raw bar, offering oysters and a range of ceviche options.

According to Tonidandel, citrus will be the root from which the raw bar’s menu items branch out.

“We have this huge knowledge base of things that we can do culinarily with citrus,” he said. “Right now we have the ability to take the acid content, take the sugar content of all the different stuff that goes into the cocktails, and we’re doing that for our ceviche as well to keep the consistency going.”

That includes taking some “tricks” that have worked wonders in their other establishments’ bar programs such as acidifying pineapple juice until it more resembles lime juice, then using that in the ceviche. They’ll also be working yuzu and other lesser known citrus fruits into some recipes.

Brown said each new concept for the company can often be tied to where the couple are in their own lives together. Ever Andalo was born of Jeff’s efforts to get more connected with his Italian roots, bringing the family there and even obtaining Italian citizenship.

Supperland was inspired by Brown’s experience with late-onset food insensitivities, which found her patronizing more steakhouses because they had menus she could work with more easily.

As for the menu at Leluia Hall, it will more closely resemble what Brown and Tonidandel like to cook at home.

“There are a lot of things at home that we do that are maybe a little bit more unusual than the way the standard American diet is,” she said. “We use a lot of coconut milk and cream at home. We use a ton of avocado and more meat and vegetable or seafood and vegetable type of approach, so that’s definitely influenced what we’re doing here.”

The restaurant will offer three seating options, with the main dining room on the ground floor, partially private dining on the upper mezzanine, and a private dining table in the basement, where diners will be surrounded by 1,200 bottles of 200 different varieties of wine, all temperature controlled.

Read more: How Aesthetic and Atmosphere Play Into the Haberdish Experience

With the name paying homage to the roots of the building — Leluia Hall is a mash-up of the word “Hallelujah” — the two hope to foster an environment that feels celebratory. They’ve worked toward that goal with every little touch from the stair risers to the overhead lighting.

“Yes, people are coming to eat, but they’re also coming to experience and spend their time and enjoy their time,” Brown said. “This being an old church, we just go to that. We just want this whole place to feel like a celebratory place and really fun.”

When they do open their doors, that will surely be the case, because regardless of their running joke, these two are good at what they do.