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The show’s still on at Last Concert Cafe
By GREG MAY
Houston Chronicle
Wednesday, April 3,1991
When 62-year old
Elena "Mama" Lopez opened a small Mexican restaurant in 1949 at
1403 Nance, she christened it the Last Concert Cafe to signify
this would be her last endeavor.
Lopez, a fragile-looking woman whose photograph hangs
in a corner of the restaurant, died in 1985, at the age of 95.
But as for the cafe itself, the last concert may be a long time
coming.
Every night, the place throbs with live
music ranging from gentle folk to gritty rhythm and blues.
In addition, the cafe serves lunch to a
crowd that includes burly workers from the warehoused district
and corporate executives from downtown.
Under current owner, Dawn Fudge, the rambling,
wood-framed establishment has become a venue for local musicians
performing original songs. Fudge, 36, agrees to share a cut of
bar sales with bands and guarantees a meal for every performer.
"We love this place," said Lupe Olivarez, a wiry
singer with The Basics, a "roots rock" group that sometimes
performs at the cafe. "You can at least count on getting fed and
getting beers. If you bring a crowd, you know you’re going to
make money.
"It was here the producers from Sugar Hill heard us,"
he said proudly, adding that the result has been contract
negotiations with that company.
On this night, Olivarez and another band member were
not performing. Instead, they sat beneath a glowing string of
Christmas lights in the cafe’s dining section, hailing friends
and prodding each other.
Musicians and artists living in nearby warehouse
apartments often come to relax on the ripped vinyl seats or on
the benches shaded by banana trees in the courtyard. Visitors
can include an occasional celebrity such as ZZ Top’s Billy
Gibbons who sometimes stops to pour a drink or two past his
flowing beard.
Olivarez gestures toward a large portrait of Franklin
Roosevelt that hands behind the bar. "Mama put that up," he
said. "This is pretty much the same as it was."
Olivarez and other bar regulars don’t need
encouragement to recite life from the days when Lopez ran the
cafe. But perhaps the best expert in Last Concert Cafe history,
is Fudge, who takes pains to ensure several cafe traditions are
upheld.
One is to keep the red door at the entrance locked
during business hours. Customers must rap twice to gain
entrance. The custom dates from when cafe patrons wished to
screen who came in.
Depending on whom you talk to, the practice was to
keep neighborhood hooligans from barging in, to safeguard
philandering husbands from surprise visits by their wives or to
hide some of the customers’ activities from the law.
The custom of locking the door is particularly
impractical on busy nights when cafe workers are constantly
hopping to the entrance. But Fudge declared she has no intention
of changing the policy.
The only concession was to place a door knob on the
outside to meet fire code requirements.
"Last Concert always had that mystique, that intrigue
about it, and it that was one of the things I felt strongly that
we should keep," she said.
There is no sign on the outside of the building
either, other than a large metal one propped against a wall that
reads. "Thank you for visiting Alabama. Please come again."
The bands perform in the courtyard, which is
surrounded by walls painted red and green and adorned with crude
wooden cutouts intended to resemble watermelon slices.
Corrugated fiberglass sheets that cover the overhead rafters in
winter are removed in warm weather.
Fudge takes a keen interest in the music. "We have
our favorites and it’s kind of hard to get a gig here," she
said. "We do let new people in (as performers), but we get to be
a lot more selective now."
But what let her to the cafe was the restaurant
aspect of the business. "That’s more where my creativity comes
out," she said.
Sporting casual clothes and tousled blond hair, Fudge
now looks the part of maverick tavern owner, betraying not one
trace of her former role as compliance officer for an investment
brokerage firm.
She had risen through the corporate ranks after
starting as a secretary. But her passion was not compliance
monitoring, but cooking. So in 1986, she decided to moonlight as
a restaurant worker.
"I took this little Leisure Learning class, "So You
Want To Start A Restaurant,’ "she said, "and the main point they
made in it was - if you had never worked in a restaurant, that
was the first step. I never had done that."
A friend knew someone at the Last Concert Cafe who
might let her work for free. "Well, I heard of the Last Concert
since I was 15 years old," she said. " It was one of those
things that I was always curious about and had heard stories
of."
She began working in the cafe at night. The Last
Concert had exchanged hands several times after Lopez died, and
frequent closings had driven away many customers.
Not long afterward, Fudge received a strange phone
call. It was the cafe’s owner, asking if she would buy the
business. Although she had only spent a few nights doing menial
tasks in the cafe,
Fudge found the offer too tempting to turn down.
She convinced some friends to join as partners and
took charge. Her close-cropped hair sprouted into wavy bunches
and her body slimmed as the hectic hours in the restaurant
burned away 50 pounds.
Her routine was to work a full day at her job, rush
to the restaurant and toil into the early morning. The partners
dropped off as business grew worse, and Fudge paid bills by
credit card.
"I changed my whole life style," she said. "It became
something I was consumed with."
At first , she had trouble even communicating with
the Spanish-speaking employees in the kitchen. "People would
laugh because we couldn’t understand each other back there and I
would get louder and louder and everybody out here would hear
everything I was saying," she said. "We were the entertainment
from the kitchen."
After some lean months, customers suddenly seemed to
rediscover the cafe. Musicians began stopping by to play for
tips and crowds began to gather in the evenings.
"It has gone up ever since," Fudge said. "It was
confirmation to me that this is what I was supposed to be
doing."
hat realization softened the blow when her employer
fired her. Fudge said the company reasoned that her involvement
with the bar comprised her duties as a compliance officer.
The newest Last Concert Tradition is a block party in
the neighborhood that Fudge throws the last Saturday in July as
a benefit for her pet charity, the Rainforest Action Network.
More than a thousand people may cram into the general area for
such parties.
On this Monday night, however, the cafe had about two
dozen customers and the atmosphere was tranquil. The performer
was Donna Chatham, a Houston-area resident who accompanied
herself on six -string guitar as she sang about the tenderness
and sharp teeth of love.
Chatham said she hopes to someday make a living as a
musician and songsmith, but she now pays the bills as a tutor
and substitute teacher. "Actually I feel more comfortable on the
stage than I do talking to people," she said. "I’ll play to as
many people as are here. I’ve actually had people ask me for my
songs. And that’s a compliment."
Toward the weekend, bands such as the Screamin’
Waheenees and Moe & the Lawn play blistering sessions of
electric rock or blues and the capacity crowds become
boisterous.
Fudge comes by the
cafe often, and still cooks in a pinch.
But she now finds time for other activities, including a course
she teaches for Leisure Learning, Inc.
The course’s title?
"So You Want to Start A Restaurant."
The Arizona Republic
Wednesday, August 8, 1990
Under a Houston off ramp, cafe has a lock on survival
Houston - Twelve feet from an exit ramp off
Interstate 10, in the urban hodgepodge of Texas' largest city,
rests a hardy survivor of the havoc a major highway project can
inflict upon a neighborhood.
The Last Concert Cafe, spared from the wrecking ball
when I-10 blew through Houston in the late 1960's,may be the
most anonymous-looking Mexican restaurant in Texas, if not the
United States. The nondescript red-and-white building has a
small courtyard, no sign and a red front door that remains
locked.
To gain entrance, patrons must knock - not once, but twice -
for owner Dawn Fudge or one of the regulars to let them in.
Once inside, however, you begin to understand why, after 40
years, the Last Concert remains Houston's most eclectic eating
spot. The decor is watermelon red and green, the booths and
chairs are spare and rickety, and the tables on the patio are
adorned with plastic tablecloths and spray cans of insect
repellent.
Banana trees flourish, and stray cats wander about, hoping
for a random fajita morsel. The clientele is just as
bric-a-brac, with artists from the surrounding warehouse
district, students, construction workers and the well-to-do all
numbered among the faithful. The Texas rock band ZZ Top has
been known to dine and drink here.
"We don't advertise, and most people can't even find it,"
says Fudge, who bought and revamped the Last Concert four years
ago. "It's always been a word of mouth place."
Hard-to-find address
Literally in the shadow of I-10 at 1403 Nance St., the Last
concert has to be one of Houston's most inaccessible addresses
(no one seems to be able to tell you how to get here, you just
have to look). Sharing the building with the restaurant is
Eddie Wollen, whose mother, Elena "Mama" Lopez, started the cafe
in the years after World War II.
Wollen, 63 helped his mother run the Last Concert for years
and lived with her in the quarters, adjoining the eatery. But
when Mama died in 1982 at age 95, he sold the business and began
to concentrate on his inventions, which he proudly displays in a
makeshift office with blacked-out windows on the I-10 side of
the building.
Wollen is particularly obsessed with talking electronic
devices, from security systems to fax machines. His favorite is
a talking condom-vending machine he's perfecting, which can be
rigged to deliver a taped message when a purchase is made or
when someone passes by.
("Hey stud!" the message goes. "Whether or not you have a
hot date coming up, be ready!")
Wollen tends to downplay the Last Concert's reputedly sordid
past, but fortunately for visiting historians, Fudge is happy to
provide the steamy details.
Dodging demolition
I-10's right-of-way originally meant that the restaurant
would have to be demolished.
But the place was so popular that they moved the right-of-way
over a few feet so we could be spared. "Wollen says.
It may not have been quite that simple.
"Mama had some pull," Fudge, 36, admits in her drop-dead
Texas drawl. That influence was was a remnant of the days when
Mama Lopez's place was a hideaway where "you could pay a quarter
and dance with a lady, if you get my drift." Fudge says
Norm Wigginton, public affairs officer for the Texas
Department of Highways and Public Transportation, says rumors
have abounded for years that Mama strong-armed city officials
and congressmen alike to save the Last Concert.
I've looked into it, and there appears that there might have
been some truth to it," he says. Wigginton adds hat another
notorious establishment, the All Nations Cafe, wasn't as
fortunate, that bordello, run by a madam named "Sweetie" who
sported a diamond tooth, was demolished.
"Sweetie took the money and moved to Trinity Texas," a
coastal resort, Wigginton says.
Whether the locale is Houston, Phoenix or somewhere else,
plotting the path of an interstate and acquiring the
right-of-way requires delicate negotiations and a lot of money.
In Phoenix, the final 20 mile link - which cost about $500
million to build - rang up more than 150 million in right-of-way
costs.
"The city of Phoenix held tough and got what it wanted," says
Mark Bonan, spokesman for the Arizona Department of
Transportation. What it wanted was a park, a high occupancy
vehicle lane and protection for archaeological dig sites; and
the city got it all, "which was a lot more than anyone else has
ever gotten from the federal government," Bonan says.
Yet for every large, multimillion-dollar battle fought over
right-of-way, a hundred others are waged by private individuals
simply trying to protect a lifelong investment or a way of life.
"We had instances where the I-10 route was moved to
accommodate someone whose livelihood was threatened," Wigginton
says "Sometimes it was because it made financial sense, but
often it was just a matter of having a little compassion.
Dancing on the tables
All of which still doesn't fully explain how the Last Concert
dodged the ax.
In the early 1960's, the Last Concert was one of Houston's
first gay bars. And about that time, the biggest marijuana bust
in the city's history occurred there, buttressing the cafe's
fly-by-night reputation
"That was how the tradition of locking the door began." Fudge
says. "I don't know if it was to keep the undesirables or the
cops away. But the front door didn't even have a doorknob for
years.
City fire codes soon put an end to that, but the door remains
locked as a nod to Mama Lopez's legacy.
The Last Concert had fallen on hard times when Fudge appeared
on the scene in 1986. A compliance officer for an investment
broker, with a degree in home economics, she assumed ownership,
expanded the menu and pumped new lifeblood into the
establishment, while protecting the Bohemian ambience its
patrons love.
"Dancing on the tables is not unheard of here." she says,
laughing. Live music is featured on the patio most evenings,
with the emphasis on rock and roll oldies and rhythm and blues.
"It's important to me and our customers that we keep this place
comfortable and casual.
Any restaurant where the mood music is the hiss of tires on a
freeway ramp probably isn't in much danger of getting upscale.
And that's just fine with Fudge.
This is a magical place," she says. Besides, when things get
cranked up at night, you don't even hear the traffic."
This
is stellar compared to almost everyone I have read.
The writers are a secret
panel of undercover chefs
by Robin Goldstein.
Fearless
Critic
Houston
Restaurant
Guide
Brutally honest reviews and ratings
of Houston's restaurants
In a land where berkenstocks and beads rule
supreme,
you will find that everyone's favorite hippie
haven
and Mexican restaurant is Last Concert Cafe. The
place started out as a humble Mexican restaurant,
but
it was slowly take over by the
alternative-lifestyle
types. Nowadays, you can go to the Last Concert
Cafe
not only to enjoy tostadas and enchiladas but
also to
partake in a drum circle or take in a psychedelic
hula
hoop show. The menu is simple Tex-Mex peppered
with
the occasional award-winning burger and (hippies
take
note) vegetarian options, but its dominated by
the
enchilada, which is hardly a hippie dish.
Cheese,
beef, spinach or chicken - you name it - and they
will
roll it up in a tortilla and smother it in
sauce. The
Last Concert Cafe will definitely leave you
scratching
your head at times - but the food satisfies more
often
than not.
You dont have to change your name to Moonchild or
Earthwoman when you step inside, but be ready for
an
alternative lifestyle, especially when the sun
goes
down. This compound, hidden on the edges of
downtown
on Nance, is very unassuming during the day, but
at
night everyone comes out to play. Appetizers are
normal Tex-Mxe, we like the botana platter, with
its
quesadillas, jalapenos, chicken flauas, and
guacamole.
It'll definitely fill up those used to alfalfa
sprouts and organic tofu. The potato with green
chile soup is one of the best items on the menu.
Chunks of potatoes, simmered in chicken broth mix
with
pablano peppers, cheeses, and pico de gallo, the
resulting dish is statisfying. The "Apolinars
Enchiladas" are delicious, two roast-beef-stuffed
enchiladas with chili gravy and rice and beans.
On any given night you'll hear music coming from
out
back. Order a beer and head back there to enter
a
different universe. Vendors are selling beads
and
jewelry, hula hoops are being whipped around
gracefully, and it all turns into a mellowed-out
party. It would be hard to conjure up an
atmosphere
for Tex-Mex in Houston that's more transportative
than
this one. So wipe the dirt off the kids' feet,
strap
'em to your chest in a hemp carrier, and come on
down.
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Sunday Houston
Chronicle
May 1, 2005
Shelby Hodge
shelby.hodge@chron.com
Leave it to the
gourmet-minded French to put a twist on typical
Tex-Mex traditions. When French Consulate
cultural attache' Joel Savary entertained 25
visiting rench VIPs Wednesday night at the Last
Concert Cafe, They Washed down their nachos not
with margaritas but with specially ordered lime
daiquris.
Apparently, the night spot
was tres OK with Savary's guest. They stayed
until 1 am dancing to the sounds of Pot Roast
and raving about the unique Houston locale.
Praia
Urbana
Last Concert Cafe
June 18, 2011
Saturday, the
all-day electronic
music festival Praia
Urbana was held at
Last Concert Café.
From what Aftermath
saw while we were
there, it was pretty
much a packed house.
Due to a previous
commitment, we got
there two hours
before the party
came to a close.
Many people were
winding down, but
just as many were
still going strong
on the dance floors,
while a few were
recharging their
batteries with cold
beverages on the
patio tables.
When we first
walked in, Aftermath
kind of thought it
was a rave. Which,
we suppose, it kind
of was... minus some
of raves' more
unpleasant aspects
and for a pretty
steep $35 ticket.
Like the
crowds at Free Press
Summer Fest a few
weeks ago, plenty of
concertgoers found
interesting ways to
beat the heat,
mostly by taking off
as many articles of
clothing as they
could. The
festival's promoters
and organizers put
together water
stations and a few
sprinkler tents
where people could
cool off.
It wasn't Summer
Fest, of course, but
it wasn't supposed
to be. Praia Urbana
says it has boasted
crowds of more than
1,500 people in the
past, and Saturday
night's festival may
have reached that
number again.
At least, that's
what the dance floor
felt like, as we
tried to make our
way through it to
the restroom.
While the
festival pegged
itself as an
electronica expose,
there were a few
reasons to visit
even if you weren't
into the whole
"dance" thing. The
first thing
Aftermath noticed as
we walked in was the
wall near the back
of the venue, which
had been designated
an art wall, of
sorts - a blank
canvas for a few
graffiti artists to
cover with whatever
they saw fit.
By far, this was
our favorite part of
the evening.
Three artists
(that we saw)
contributed to the
mural, but we assume
that it had been in
the process of being
completed since the
event started at 2
p.m. We kind of wish
we had gotten there
earlier. But then
again, it was
100-something
degrees, so we'll
content ourselves
with congratulating
those who were
strong enough to
withstand the
Houston heat and
sun.
While dancing,
nonetheless.
Praia Urbana means "beach" in Portugese, and this was the festival's sixth concurrent year in Houston. The daytime electronic music festival featured all sorts of DJs, some of whom are internationally renowned. This year, Wally Lopez, Honey Dijon and Riddler headlined the festival, and plenty of local DJs were spinning too, alongside live percussionists.
Past headliners include Jimpster, Saeed Younan, Mr. V, Alix Alvarez, Cevin Fisher, Chuck Love, Collette, David Tort, Gonzalo Menoyo, Randall Jones, Jay-J and DJ Wady.
The festival happens four times a year and, according to its Web site, strives to be "the electronic music enthusiast's fix for their insatiable appetite to the indulgence that is called House."
Consider us satisfied. We may have only been there for two hours, but we had enough beer spilled on us, sweat transferred to us and speakers right next to our heads to last a few weeks.
The festival only ran until 11 p.m., but its attendees all seemed satisfied by the time it all ended. We're sure that they would have been more than happy to stick around for much, much longer, but we didn't hear anyone griping as they made their way back to their cars outside Last Concert Café.
All we saw were smiles. A lot of sweet, sweaty smiles. If there were another Praia Urbana this weekend, we just might go.
Personal Bias: Honestly, we had never heard of this thing, and it didn't sound like we'd know anyone there, but we like putting ourselves out of our element from time to time, so we hopped on board.
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