DURHAM, N.C. — When he fires up the custom-made smoker each day, the smell of white oak and smoked meats drifts across Durham’s Lakewood neighborhood. “That's kind of our calling card that we’re open,” Chef Mark Mishalanie said.
Mishalanie opened the Honeysuckle at Lakewood in September in the landmark red barn on Chapel Hill Road in Durham. The restaurant sits on a large triangular lot just outside of downtown Durham, with tables and fireplaces spread around the property.
“Opening during a pandemic certainly is a crazy idea,” he said. “We were given a great opportunity and just decided this was the right location, and we have the right group to run this operation. And certainly enough passion, ideas and talent.”
“It’s been a wild ride,” he said.
Sitting at a table in the dining room on a recent morning, Mishalanie spoke with Spectrum News 1 as the staff prepared to open for the day’s lunch service. He wore a mask with the City of Durham flag printed on it and an Alice in Chains t-shirt.
“The community has responded fantastically, which is really nice,” he said. The layout of the restaurant and the half-acre of outdoor space seem almost custom made for what dining has become during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Even in the middle of a pandemic, people feel very comfortable here,” he said.
The tables are spaced out inside and out, each customer gets a temperature check on the way in the door, and everyone wears masks when not at their tables.
The smoker is a hulking icon on wheels at the Honeysuckle at Lakewood, black metal parts welded together in something of a u-shape. It’s also at the center of Mishalanie’s menu of smoked meats and vegetables.
Outside, much of the seating is set around fireplaces, made from found objects like barrels of large pipe joints. On cold evenings, Honeysuckles’ new-found regulars gather around the fires to stay warm and socially distanced.
The restaurant serves s’mores kits with outdoor fireside dinners on weekend nights.
Mishalanie is no stranger to the restaurant business. He describes himself as a classically trained chef with 28 years experience. He’s even won Guy’s Grocery Games, a Food Network staple from celebrity chef Guy Fieri that pits chefs against each other.
Durham’s Honeysuckle is part of a broader organization that includes The Honeysuckle Teahouse and Farm in Chapel Hill, a cafe in Carrboro, a meadery where they make honey wine and the Southern Harvest Hospitality Group, a catering operation with big clients like Duke University.
Mishalanie was working as the executive chef for Southern Harvest when the idea for the new Honeysuckle restaurant in Durham started to come together.
“When the pandemic hit back in March, we hadn’t fully incorporated yet,” he said. “Our culinary team at Southern Harvest was really up against a wall. Obviously, weddings weren’t happening, large corporate events weren’t happening, Duke basically shut down.”
He said the company had 35 people facing furloughs as business dried up. Mishalanie and Southern Harvest Owner Tom Meyer created what they called the “love and Nourish” initiative.
“With some crowd sourcing and some fundraising, we were able to feed hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. Those meals went to school children who weren’t getting food, senior facilities and homeless people.
“We were able to put all of our team back to work, or everybody who felt safe coming back to work, and just pour into the community,” Mishalanie said. “It’s pretty wild what we were able to accomplish as a team."
The Love and Nourish program lasted for a few months during the tightest periods of the pandemic lockdowns in North Carolina.
As that program began to wind down, Mishalanie and the rest of his team were able to get to work, upfitting the red barn on Chapel Hill Road and working on the menu for the new restaurant.
“It feels like it’s been years,” he said, “2020 has been a wild, wild year for us.”
Mishalanie said Honeysuckle wanted to open up to the neighborhood. “We made sure we weren’t doing anything too upscale or highfalutin.”
“This side of Durham is in a big transition phase,” Mishalanie said. “We wanted to make sure that, in light of all the gentrification talk and everything else, that we rolled in here as a neighborhood joint.”
The goal, he said, was to “be that place where you go, you get a beer, you meet your neighbors, you have a great bite to eat and you feel safe.”
A little over three months in, Mishalanie said, “It’s crazy to think that we have regulars.”
“I wish I could give them a hug,” he said. Even with the pandemic restrictions and curfew, “We still have a good thing going,” he said.
This week, they’ve been putting the final touches on “miniature tea houses” on the property to make private dining rooms for parties to have their own little heated space.