Joe Brown, his restaurant days behind him, has a different mission at a New Jersey church

Life for chef Joe Brown changed dramatically on May 23, 2013. That day, customers were eating lunch inside Melange @ Haddonfield, his restaurant on Tanner Street. He spotted two police officers and two agents from the state of New Jersey, seeking to collect nearly $72,000 in back taxes.

Brown, behind on Melange’s payment plan, told them that he had recently sent money to Trenton. But he didn’t have the $71,875.08 the agents wanted. He walked into the dining room and asked his customers to finish their meals. Melange’s door was padlocked.

It was a sad denouement for a restaurant career that had begun 18 years before. Brown and his wife, Robin, high school sweethearts, opened Melange Cafe on Chapel Avenue in Cherry Hill in 1995, closing in 2010 — two years after Haddonfield opened.

Now we’re chatting in the banquet room of Bethany Baptist Church on Gibbsboro Road in Lindenwold. It’s a Tuesday morning, and Brown and his one salaried sous chef are prepping food for the week.

Bethany, a megachurch with 23,000 members and a 3,000-seat chapel complete with a videocamera mounted on a crane for web-streamed services, is Brown’s home now. He oversees its banquet-size kitchen — entirely staffed by volunteers, save the sous chef — that serves takeout food from the church to the public. He also feeds the pastors and staff.

It’s here where you can taste Melange memories four days a week, via Harvest Cafe & Abundant Harvest Catering, the church’s food service. It serves from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

The business memories are still fresh for Brown, who intersperses his struggles and even some of his successes among recipes in his new book, Melange: The Story, the Recipes, the Faith (self-published, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online sites).

What he doesn’t tell his book readers is his personal story. Brown, now 61 and a grandfather who lives in Sicklerville, grew up in Willingboro’s Pennypacker Park, the youngest of 10 children.

His mother, France Brown, cooked Southern food, having grown up in Tennessee. She also enjoyed making dishes from French cookbooks, grew her own vegetables, and baked bread from scratch.

“I cannot remember a time when there wasn’t something cooking,” he said. “When you came home from school, you would smell something that made your day better. That’s pretty much what I felt when I cook for people. It happens right here at the church. When I’m cooking for the pastors, it reminds them of something that they had in the past. You can see their mood change and that’s what my food does.”

Out of Willingboro High, Brown wanted to get into construction in Atlantic City, but union strikes dried up the work prospects. He started working at Pirates Inn in Mount Laurel as a dishwasher. “The chef who was there noticed my work ethic, and the girl who was doing sandwiches at that time had a constant issue with coming in late,” he said. “He fired her and said, ‘Joe, I need you.’ I had never done anything like this before in my life. I picked up on it so fast, he never let the girl come back.”

While moving up at Pirates Inn, Brown attended what is now the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia. He then became a sous chef at the Landmark Inn in Maple Shade. “This was my first time I’ve ever met an actual African American executive chef,” he said. “Elijah Dawes, God rest his soul, was my mentor growing up in this business.” (Dawes died in 2006.)

At the Landmark, Brown oversaw the food at the dining room and banquet hall until the Pirates Inn called with an offer to come back as executive chef. He left in 1995 to open his restaurant.

When determining the cuisine, Brown remembered his childhood. “At any given point in time, you could be eating matzo ball soup one day, macaroni and cheese another day and spaghetti and meatballs another day and it could be at anybody’s house,” he said.

It was a melange, and that would become the name. He’d serve Cajun- and Creole-inspired food, which he enjoyed, with an Italian influence — a nod to Mario’s, the Italian restaurant previously in that space. The white-tablecloth dining room was warm and inviting with paintings.

The Browns, who are Black, opened in Cherry Hill, which at the time had few if any Black-owned restaurants. However, shortly before the opening, Brown said, an older white man walked in. “He looked at us. I put my hand out and said, ‘Hi. I’m Chef Joe,’ and he wouldn’t shake my hand. Then he said, ‘You’re the new owners here?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’”

Brown said the man told them, “I guess we won’t be eating here anymore.”

“Straight to our faces,” Brown said. “We were kind of like ‘wow.’ And here we are beautifying this boarded-up building.”

Three days after the Browns opened Melange, the adoption agency notified them that their son, Jordan, had been born and would be ready to come home. Jordan Brown, 27, works in the mortgage industry. “He loves to cook, but I would not let him get into the business,” Joe Brown said.

The business is never easy.

Brown said he began to feel the pressure after a snowstorm in 1996, less than a year after he opened. “I remember trying to get to the restaurant because I had an older couple that lived up above the restaurant and I knew they could not get out of the building,” he said. “I dug myself out, got some food for my family at home, and I sent up some food upstairs that would hold them over for a few days. I had to get the lot plowed at least three or four times that week, at $500 a shot. At the same time in Cherry Hill, it was an older building. We had already put a lot of money into it, but after two or three years if you’re a restaurant owner, you know you have to renovate.I tried to always reinvest what I made. If something had to suffer somewhere along the line, it just happened to be me not paying myself at certain times, too.”

And apparently the Division of Taxes.

Running two restaurants was an even greater challenge. “My restaurant was always built on people seeing me,” he said. “I think most chefs don’t really realize how personal guests are when they see a chef. I was always the type of chef who would come out of the kitchen, touch the tables, talk to everybody. They always knew me. But I’d wake up in the morning, go to one place and you hear all the problems and the issues and the employees and you get them all straight and you go to the next place and you’d do the same thing. I decided it was time to just focus.”

Melange’s heyday dovetailed with the rise of the celebrity-chef era. Brown did some Food Network appearances and was featured in the February 2000 Ebony magazine, showing off his smoked turkey jambalaya and chocolate ravioli. He also shot a Home Matters episode for Discovery Channel.

After Haddonfield’s closing, Brown worked for a health system in food service. When Bishop David G. Evans called to consider the job at Bethany eight years ago, he said, “‘Are you sure you want to cook for church folk?’” Brown said. “I came over, looked at the place. I knew what it needed. It needed some love.”

Evans wrote the foreword of the book, calling Brown “a trailblazer in his profession.”

At Bethany, Brown said he enjoys teaching the volunteers, whether it’s cooking or service. “I love the fact that I’m here, being able to give back to the volunteers so] that some of them want to get into the business, and some of them are just older people and just want to learn different recipes. I’d like to one day get back to teaching, and giving back to the industry.”