2023 Charlotteans of the Year: Jamie Brown and Jeff Tonidandel
The acclaimed restaurateurs work overtime to preserve pieces of old Charlotte.

At the end of 2021, restaurateurs Jamie Brown and Jeff Tonidandel bought the historic church that housed Bonterra. They expected that they’d be able to open Leluia Hall, a steak-and-seafood restaurant, before the end of this year. After all, the building had been home to Bonterra for 22 years, and the couple already had a certificate to operate there.
“But as we’ve gone in that building and tried to make things happen,” Brown says, “each wall we take down or uncovering the ceiling—there are problems that we didn’t know were there.” When they removed the drop ceiling to expose the rafters, for example, they discovered that the roof beams had split.
The longtime partners—they were married in 2006 and opened their first restaurant in 2009—have been through this before. Leluia Hall will join five other concepts they own: Haberdish, Ever Andalo, Growlers Pourhouse, Reigning Doughnuts, and Supperland. It took four years to transform a 1956 Plaza Midwood church into Supperland, a project made even more complicated by the pandemic.
“There are usually more challenges than you expect at the get-go, but I think one of the things that’s very helpful is that you don’t know those things,” Brown says. “If I knew a year ago that we’d still be sitting here without (Leluia Hall) open, I don’t know if we would have begun.”
The daily challenges of historic preservation and renovation are enough to make anyone daydream of a new build, but Brown and Tonidandel believe the rewards go beyond themselves and their businesses. “It brings a lot of joy and pride to people in the city,” Brown says. “I think it sets a precedent for how growth can happen if we’re mindful.”
Four of Brown and Tonidandel’s restaurants are on North Davidson Street, in the heart of a community with past lives as a textile mill hub and arts district. Like South End and Plaza Midwood, NoDa is a historic community under the powerful influence of development. The YMCA of Greater Charlotte’s plan to sell the neighborhood’s “front porch,” the Johnston Y, to a developer is just one in a litany of deals that will remake Charlotte. In Plaza Midwood, rising rents and construction have pushed out local mainstays like Soul Gastrolounge and Sammy’s Deli to make way for chains like Emmy Squared and Dave’s Hot Chicken.
But she and Tonidandel don’t turn away from the city Charlotte has always been. They greet each project on its terms, paying close attention to the space and its setting.
“We have all these little neighborhoods that change from block to block, but each one has its own set of people and personality,” Tonidandel says. “The buildings represent that and have that personality, too.”
This year, with the Leluia Hall project ongoing, the couple took on an even greater challenge. They hope to relocate the Leeper-Wyatt building, a 1903 grocery store and one of Dilworth’s oldest surviving retail buildings, from South Boulevard to the Leluia Hall property. A Nashville developer, Southern Land Company, plans to build a 300-unit apartment building on the Dilworth site.
“With a city growing as fast as Charlotte,” Brown says, “it just feels so imperative to be able to hold on to some of these gems so we don’t look identical to all the other fast-growing cities out there.”
Brown and Tonidandel still aren’t sure what they’ll do with the Leeper-Wyatt structure. But when it opens, it will be more than a century old and still, somehow, altogether new. What could be more Charlotte than that?
Allison Braden is a contributing editor.