South End

And then that's where I opened my first restaurant.

So I had my first restaurant as owner-partner is a place called SRV, and it's in the south end of Boston.

Stands for the Serene Republic of Venice.

And I opened it up.

Lucky for us.

She opened her first Flour in Boston South End in 2000, and she now has 11 locations around Boston and Cambridge.

She also opened a restaurant called Myers and Chang with her husband, Christopher Myers.

Joanne's won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker in 2016, and going back even further than that, when she was at Harvard, she was the one baking cookies for her study group, apparently, and they called her the Cookie Girl.

"I'm not gonna lay a hand on you."

Yeah, you know, you know, Phil, I, I'm so old that I can remember when I used to hang out at Foley's in the South End.

It's still there.

But it was all, it was all k- you know, it was all reporters and cops and, you know, basically a, a, uh, a local, a local bar, uh, on, in no man's land.

I used to walk by it on my way to the T on my way to work.

every day i was like this is i i belong here and i gave him my pitch and they sold me the house and when i got the house it was full of his life because they had sold all of his fancy south end property and moved everything into this house and they didn't even know it was there i remember calling his sister and be like um honey you know i'm standing here holding his emmy awards and his uh bet awards uh And then they were like, oh, my God.

So then we went through a period of several months, maybe even six months, where we had to find the right place for his stuff from the Museum of African-American History on Beacon Hill, which he was the president of the board of, to his colleges to get his papers set up and everything.

It just became this giant project of, you know, how do we preserve his legacy? And somehow I ended up, the guy that he said bye Felicia to, I ended up being like the central guy and making sure that his legacy got preserved, which is kind of funny in its own way.

We couldn't because of, and it felt like it was racism and socialism.

I mean, we were through before the race card got thrown in, but as soon as the race card got thrown into there, you know, it became an unwinnable battle because everyone wanted to preserve Henry's legacy.

And my opinion was, well, the buildings that should be earmarked for Henry were the buildings where he made the movies, which were on Chamadav in the South End.

They weren't here.

There used to be this little dive bar.

I lived in the South End of Boston.

A little dive bar called Anchovies.

I used to go in there a lot.

It was

great.

Yeah, and the South End used to...

The South End is... changed a lot in 50 years it's a beautiful part of the city it used to be a rougher part of town so you had a lot of different mixed mixed background folks in bars like that years ago one of the reason when we started the company you know boston has a strong bar or pub culture especially you know in the u.s you know it's a bit of an our weather's not great here people spend a lot of the year indoors as opposed to outdoors and so that that we built our brand on premise, meaning in the bars and restaurants, because we were able to.

We want to do something about it.

So it starts as south end community development in one neighborhood of Boston where every building's been crumbling for a hundred years.

The economy in Boston was the worst in the country between 1920 and 1960.

So 1964, let's fix some housing.

Yeah, I'm in Boston.

I lived in the South End.

Okay, I'm in...

I'm not going to say where I live because they're stalkers, but not in the South End.

But I live close.

So...

But eventually I was able to find like a group of friends that were the same vibe as me.

And I'm still friends with all of them right now.