‘Durgin-Park, I can’t believe that’: How a Mattapan restaurant got its liquor license from the historic Faneuil Hall spot - The Boston Globe (2024)

“It’s a gem in the city,” said Jo Lesperance, who swings by Mello Vibez three times a week on her way home from the Dorchester salon where she does locs and braids. She winds down with tequila and an order of oxtail rasta pasta or curry goat. One Saturday night in March, she rented out the 26-seat restaurant to celebrate her 43rd birthday.

“It feels safe here. It feels like family,” Lesperance said. “It feels like community, and I appreciate that.”

From the North End to Jamaica Plain, restaurants serve as the economic backbone of neighborhoods across Boston, where people eat a meal, enjoy a glass of wine, and stay for a while. Yet in Mattapan a place like Mello Vibez is the exception when it should be the rule, highlighting a Boston liquor license system that squashes opportunities to build both wealth and community life in underserved neighborhoods.

It’s not for lack of trying. A decade ago, the Legislature — at the prodding of then-city councilor, now Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley — created 70 new liquor licenses in Boston with the hopes of developing the restaurant scene in neighborhoods like Mattapan. Not a single license landed there.

Yet in the spring of 2022 the universe found a way to give Mattapan what Beacon Hill could not. How Mello Vibez landed a liquor license worth more than half a million dollars is a story of Boston then and Boston now, one that is bound to become lore, perhaps shared over a round of late-night drinks.

So much had to fall into place: the closure of a 192-year-old restaurant, a global pandemic that squeezed the economy, a City Hall doubling down on equity, and the remarkable moxie of a first-time restaurant owner.

It’s a preposterously unlikely sequence of events that can hardly serve as a blueprint on how to get a license. To the contrary, the story of Mello Vibez only underscores one question: Why it’s so hard and takes so long for a neighborhood in need to get what it needs.

Melissa Dell-Lamey, 35, is in the kitchen of Mello Vibez stirring curried stews and frying cassava. Her husband, Paul Lamey, 41, is working the register and pouring drinks. It’s just the two of them fulfilling her lifelong dream to open a restaurant. Their place is cozy, with just eight tables, yet welcoming. The walls are decorated with reminders of Jamaica from artwork of palm trees, beaches, and reggae legend Bob Marley.

Dell-Lamey, who grew up in Mattapan and still lives there, fell in love with cooking when she was 10. During visits to Jamaica, where her mother is from, Dell-Lamey would spend time in her grandmother’s kitchen learning to cook Caribbean food such as ackee and salt fish, the national dish of Jamaica.

Her passion became her profession. Dell-Lamey and her husband spent years in the restaurant business, both as managers, and eventually entrepreneurs. They had been looking all over the city for space they could call their own. Then the pandemic struck.

With its rolling waves of closures and restrictions and customers scared to gather in groups, the virus would prove fatal to many restaurants.

One of those casualties: La Belle Creole Cuisine, a Haitian place on River Street in Mattapan.

Dell-Lamey knew the spot well, and recognized its continuing potential as a dining venue. On a busy thoroughfare that feeds into Blue Hill Avenue, it is an ideal location for a restaurant with commuters getting on and off the Mattapan Trolley and drivers from all over the city whizzing by on their way to somewhere.

It may have been the middle of the pandemic, but the chance to open a restaurant felt like now or never.

“I had to jump on it,” said Dell-Lamey.

So in June 2021, she opened Mello Vibez. The plan was to get up and running, and then pursue a liquor license from the city. Dell-Lamey had worked at SuyaJoint in Roxbury, a West African restaurant that received a license thanks to the 2014 law that created more liquor permits. She figured she’d get one too, given that no restaurant in Mattapan got a license from that batch.

Dell-Lamey did all the paperwork herself and won approval from the Boston Licensing Board that October.

Then she learned something that shocked her. The city had no licenses to give out. All the newly minted ones were gone, issued to establishments in other neighborhoods.

“How am I supposed to get approved for something that doesn’t even exist?” Dell-Lamey wondered. “This is not fair.”

Instead of giving up, Dell-Lamey got angry. She talked to any politician or community leader who would take her call. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

As anybody in the hyper-competitive and low-margin restaurant industry knows, food alone can’t guarantee success. Alcohol boosts the bottom line and brings customers back. Because the state has limited the number of licenses Boston can issue, it’s created a system of haves and have-nots.

When the city does not have a license available, would-be restaurateurs must look to the secondary market to buy an existing license from a restaurant that has closed. That can cost more than $500,000, and typically only chains and deep-pocketed restaurant owners setting up in upscale neighborhoods, including the Seaport District and the Back Bay, can afford those prices.

Buying a six-figure license was not an option for Dell-Lamey. It didn’t make financial sense for such a small restaurant. She might never recoup her investment.

“Somebody has to help me,” Dell-Lamey reasoned. “My concept won’t be complete unless I get the license. ... What do Jamaicans love? We love rum, co*cktails ... so we have to showcase that.”

So she waited, and made do, and for months Dell-Lamey regularly called the licensing board to see if by any chance a license had become available.

One day, one did. In April 2022, nearly a year after Mello Vibez opened, the Licensing Board awarded Dell-Lamey a full liquor license. All she had to pay was the annual renewal fee of about $3,000.

So whose license was it? Who would give up a license and not try to sell it? Dell-Lamey never asked. But I did.

And now it was my turn to be shocked. City officials told me the license came from Durgin-Park, the landmark Faneuil Hall Marketplace restaurant famous for its sassy waitresses and Yankee pot roast. The restaurant, which opened in 1827, closed in 2019.

Durgin-Park had been family-owned, but in its later years Ark Restaurants in New York City purchased the business. Was this a case of an out-of-town owner not knowing how the Boston liquor licensing system works?

Not exactly.

Ark CEO Michael Weinstein knew the license was worth a lot of money. But in the process of closing down Durgin-Park, he discovered that the restaurant didn’t actually own its liquor license. Its landlord did. That would be Ashkenazy Acquisition, which until recently managed Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

Weinstein, in an interview, said he talked to Ashkenazy’s lawyer multiple times and urged him to sell the license.

“You are sitting on something that is worth $500,000,” Weinstein recalled saying.

Nothing happened.

Just like the restaurant industry, the commercial real estate business was in crisis during the pandemic. Perhaps that’s why Ashkenazy — a New York City real estate firm founded by Ben Ashkenazy, who has become a fixture on Forbes’s list of richest Americans — wasn’t focused on how to dispose of a Boston liquor license.

“At one point, the guy was worth about $4 billion,” Weinstein said. “I guess $500,000 wasn’t meaningful for him.”

Through a statement, Ashkenazy Acquisition said the company “has never owned a liquor license at Faneuil Hall. It is always a tenant responsibility.”

Either way, the big guys’ loss was Dell-Lamey’s gain. She was at the right place at the right time. Liquor licenses are renewed every November. When Durgin-Park did not renew, staff called several times and sent emails to make sure of its decision, said Kathleen Joyce, chairperson of the Boston Licensing Board.

“We do everything we possibly can,” she said.

But in the end, the license came back to the city. And the city handed it to Dell-Lamey, who’d been approved to receive one a few months prior.

“She was the only one that qualified for that license,” said Joyce.

Joyce said that during her six years chairing the board, only a few full-value licenses have been turned in. Not only that, it’s exceedingly rare that a license from downtown migrates to a far corner of the city. It’s usually the other way around.

Buoyed by the right to serve drinks, Mello Vibez has become so successful that Dell-Lamey has been on the hunt for more space. She’s hoping to double in size. When she found out she had Durgin-Park’s former license, it felt like a sign that anything was possible.

“Durgin-Park, I can’t believe that, oh my God,” Dell-Lamey exclaimed. “That opens up so many doors for us. We can do so much. ... I can go anywhere in the city.”

My hope is that she doesn’t, that she stays in Mattapan and builds her empire there.

The inequities in Boston’s liquor license process are undeniable — a system that favors those with money in order to help them make more money. Yet for a brief shining moment, a Black entrepreneur struggling on the city’s dining frontier caught a lucky break.

Shirley Leung is a Business columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com.