Neon curlicues romp and flicker across a two-story masonry building, fronted by a towering sign stacked with seeming watercolors of a crab, a fish, an oyster, and a couple of shrimp. Inside, Hunter Evans, the new executive chef and co-owner of the Mayflower Cafe in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, delivers salads scattered with feta cubes to a group of tourists tucked into a booth wrapped in butterscotch vinyl. Five minutes later, he stands facing the front window, pulling oysters from a tile trough, shucking Eagle Points raised off the coast near Biloxi.
Before returning to the kitchen, Evans leans across a tabletop banded with bright chrome to ask a regular, Jean Medley, whether she wants her stuffed shrimp fried or broiled. On this warm October night, shortly after the Mayflower’s reopening last year, Evans appears to be everywhere at once, an earnest Zelig with round black glasses and a mission to reinvigorate this ninety-year-old restaurant.
A Jackson native, educated at the University of Mississippi and the Culinary Institute of America, Evans opened Elvie’s, a French-ish bistro, in the city’s Belhaven neighborhood in 2020. To begin, he worked the line, turning out rolled omelets for breakfast, lunches of redfish amandine, and tasting-menu dinners that started with caviar and ended with foamed pistachio mousse.
Last April, the chef, who’s now thirty-five, joined with two partners to purchase the Mayflower, for sale since 2022, from Jerry Kountouris, a descendant of one of the Greek families who founded the restaurant in 1935. The day after Evans picked up the keys, a contractor pulled those vinyl booths to get them re-chromed and demolished the kitchen. A four-month renovation followed.
In the pause before the reopening, the city of Jackson held its breath. Could Evans replicate the restaurant’s famous comeback dressing, a bright orange sauce made with mayonnaise and ketchup and flecked with curry powder? Would the redfish, filleted into slabs that covered the whole plate, survive the transition? Would the long-tenured staff, including fry man Eddie Tornes, pie lady and kitchen manager Qunika Reuben-Yarber, and thirty-two-year veteran Willie “Frank” Morgan, stick with him? Most important, could Evans steward a restaurant that many in Jackson, a city fighting decades of disinvestment and depopulation, see as a bellwether institution?
Evans kept his head down. He worked with the Kountouris family comeback recipe, converting hand-me-down instructions like “add a water glass of Worcestershire sauce” to standardized measurements. He earned the trust of employees and won over the old redfish supplier, too. As the contractor put the restaurant back together, Evans cleaned up flotsam accumulated over nine decades, reinstalling a flotilla of model boats in a front window and along the dining room walls.
When the Mayflower reopened in August, Jackson embraced some changes. No more trips out onto the sidewalk and up the back stairs to reach the bathroom. (For a couple of decades, the Mayflower had presented like a dive with better-than-average neon.) Others created tensions among longtime regulars. In place of brown bagging came a smart cocktail menu, featuring a Greek martini, garnished with a feta-stuffed green olive, and a wine list heavy on Greek bottles, including a couple of lovely orange wines aged in amphorae.
The old Mayflower’s menus were encyclopedias of American cooking and Greek assimilation—broiled speckled trout, shrimp chow mein, chicken liver omelets—often with just one Greek-inspired dish. At this new Mayflower, the menu focuses on Gulf seafood, like redfish and grouper broiled and bathed in the house fish sauce. A slurry of margarine, lemon juice, and Worcestershire, that sauce paints the bottom of white plates in a sort of tortoiseshell pattern. (Evans tried to use butter instead of margarine, but the sauce wouldn’t hold; two hours before his first customers showed up, twenty-five one-pound blocks of margarine arrived at the Mayflower’s back door.)
Greek ingredients now appear more often. Each Tuesday, Evans runs a sublime plate lunch special of feta-brined fried chicken with butter beans and squash. A juicy lunch burger, made with what amounts to a squashed lamb-and-beef meatball, the bun smeared with whipped feta, comes with a blue-and-white Greek flag planted in the crown.
Jean Medley and her husband, Tim, have eaten dinner at the Mayflower for more than thirty years. Her order was usually a captain’s platter, swimming in that fish sauce. He’s a redfish man, then and now. Over dinner in one of those re-chromed booths, he tells me that they began coming here for date nights in the late 1980s.
She says that’s too early; back then, their children were too young for them to go out regularly. He smiles at her, a wide grin that envelops his face and concedes her point. She loves her stuffed shrimp. He tries the gumbo. “This is better than it was last time,” he says. “They’re taking feedback from customers,” Jean says. “They’re listening. We’re so lucky to have the Mayflower in our lives.”
“I always wanted Elvie’s to be a hundred-year-old restaurant,” Evans told me back in the summer of 2024. “Now I have one.” He sounded then like he was marveling at his good fortune. Listening to the Medleys and other longtimers, who recognize that Evans and his investors are the right crew to carry the restaurant forward, it feels like the whole city of Jackson is now marveling at the Mayflower.
Plus: Good Loaves and Sammies at a Jackson Bakery
A cooperatively owned bakery and café that feels like it was transported from the Haight circa 1972, the scruffy and sweet Sunflower Oven, north of downtown Jackson in Belhaven Heights, bakes wild-leavened bread using stone-milled grains. Rugbrød, a dense Danish rye, takes well to cream cheese. For lunch, muffulettas benefit from house sesame focaccia.
