On a Wednesday night early this month, as the DJ was spinning Southern blues and the bar was beginning to crowd, UA starting quarterback Nick Foles strolled into Mays Counter.
He and a few of his teammates took up a couple of the six tables in the Roost - the raised dining area where you imagine VIPs could escape the crush of college students, families and older folks who have already become regulars at the upstart eatery.
The players hunkered down over plates of chicken and waffles while ESPN flickered from the flat screen overhead. On their way out, Foles and Co. obligingly signed a few autographs and posed for fan photos.
"They come to the restaurant every week," says owner John Foster.
A few days later, a coach from the Oklahoma Sooners basketball team called in an order for 33 waffles and 33 orders of chicken tenders. Perhaps he was hoping that fluffy malted waffles slicked with melted butter and real maple syrup and topped by juicy chicken fried in a pressure cooker might be the salvo to the drubbing University of Arizona Wildcats doled them at McKale Center.
In the four short months since it opened over Labor Day weekend, Mays Counter Chicken & Waffles has become a go-to eatery and hip hangout for college athletes.
But it's also more. On a recent Friday, young couples with toddlers in tow swooned over the signature house "tot-chos" (think nachos but substitute tater tots for tortilla chips). Middle-aged businesswomen shared a laugh over boxed leftovers - the waffles here fill a dinner plate and most menu items are in the $10 range. And college kids sipped Pabst Blue Ribbon out of paper bags (yes, it's served that way - greasy fingers and metal cans don't mix) at the mahogany and cherry wood bar that looks into the modest open kitchen.
On any given day, worlds come together in a dining room that marries sports bar chic - a half-dozen flat-screen TVs mounted throughout the 3,000-square-foot restaurant air basketball, football, baseball and golf - with neighborhood diner.
"First and foremost, if we didn't have the good food, nobody's coming," said general manager and managing partner Kurt Constantineau, who greets customers with a friendly question: "Is this your first time?"
Breaking ground
If you don't count the brief tenure of Auntie Dora's Porch, which opened and closed in summer 2009, Mays Counter is Tucson's first chicken and waffles restaurant.
"Everyone was like 'John what are you doing?' But I knew that comfort food makes sense at times like this, you know. People are ready to really get fed. It's that kind of place," said Foster, a longtime commercial kitchen designer who has been around the Tucson restaurant scene his entire life.
Foster's parents owned a restaurant supply company and his father installed kitchen equipment in dozens of restaurants throughout the city in the 1970s and '80s. By the time Foster left Tucson High School, he was helping his dad in the family business and had seen the inside of most of Tucson's restaurants. But he wanted to do more than just supply restaurants with an ice machine or walk-in freezer and fix them when they broke down. So he segued into kitchen design. He designed his first restaurant, the Down Under Cafe, inside the Outback night club in 1996. He owned the restaurant for about a year.
Eight years ago, he started his company, Kitchen Pro.
"There's no school that you can go to that will teach you how to design a commercial kitchen," Foster said, then ticked off a long list of restaurants with kitchens he designed: El Paso Barbecue, My Big Fat Greek Restaurant in the Foothills Mall, the Xoom Juice shops, Tubac Golf Resort and its Dos Silos restaurant, and the kitchen redesign at Sun City Vistoso in Oro Valley, along with a couple for Aaron May, a rising chef out of Phoenix.
"John has restaurant design running through his veins," said Xoom Juice's Ari Shapiro, who worked with Foster on his three Tucson Xoom Juice locations and his first licensed store in New York City. "He's a force of personality and he's very committed to what I would call the integrity of kitchen design."
Foster dreamed up the idea of Mays Counter over a cold beer on a hot afternoon in his backyard. He was recalling all those soul food meals he had enjoyed at friends' homes growing up on Tucson's racially diverse west side - the slow-cooked collard greens splashed with Louisiana hot sauce and given a porky perk with ham hocks; rich and creamy mac and cheese; fried okra; and chicken simply seasoned and lightly floured before it was stove-fried in an iron skillet.
Foster turned to two friends to realize his dream. May, who owns seven restaurants in the Phoenix area, created a menu of inspired Southern comfort foods. Ryan Field, who owns three My Big Fat Greek Restaurant franchises in Southern Arizona and Taverna Greek Grill in Flagstaff, brought business acumen to the table.
The trio invested equally in the $600,000 start-up costs, which included redesigning the long-vacant former Pizza Hut on Speedway just west of Country Club Road.
"The building fit what I had on my mind," said Foster, a 39-year-old father of three who stands a lanky 6 foot 4 and looks more surfer dude than businessman with his tousled beach-blond hair.
What Foster had in mind was a neighborhood pub of sorts, a place where you could meet friends out for comfort food, cocktails and blues.
"I wanted to do something fun and I love the blues," Foster said, standing at the mahogany bar as the Friday lunch rush picked up. He pointed out portraits of blues greats, such as Buddy Guy, Taj Mahal, Curtis Salgado, that hang on the walls at each booth. "This was a way to express it."
Foster handled the painstaking redesign. He envisioned everything from the tile floors that resemble stained concrete to using Tucson Red paint on the walls. Foster also created a modest L-shaped kitchen with two work stations - the main cooking area has the ovens, grills and deep-fryers on one wall and a half-dozen waffle irons and prep station on the other. In the back room, there's a rolling metal table where cooks under Executive Chef Steve Sergeant prepare fresh roasted yams and made-from-scratch Southern side dishes including biscuits and gravy using May's recipes. Permit issues delayed the opening by three months.
"I got to be fully self-expressed, and I've never been able to do that because when I'm working for someone else, it's their dream, their vision," said Foster. "To do Mays Counter has been 100-percent emotional for me."
When it came to the food, Foster turned the operation over to May.
Enter a celebrity chef
Aaron May was 14 when he got his first restaurant job in his native Chicago.
He washed dishes and got to try his hand at cooking, but May wasn't altogether sure the kitchen was where he wanted to spend his life.
At 17, he left for Tucson and enrolled in the University of Arizona. He hopscotched majors over four years and left the UA "not being close to getting a degree."
"I was a little scattered at that point," said May, whose soft voice belies a 6-foot-4 300-pound frame, topped by shoulder-length unkempt, wavy hair that he pulls back in a ponytail. "I decided to follow my passion to restaurants."
He attended culinary school in Scottsdale and studied cooking in France before returning to the States. His resume included stops at the Four Seasons in Scottsdale and restaurants in New York and Chicago. He worked in the kitchen with Food Network celebrity chef Mario Batali in New York and with James Beard-winning New York chef Douglas Rodriguez before returning to Arizona to strike out on his own.
He was 26 when he opened his first restaurant, the popular breakfast joint Over Easy. (Food Network star Guy Fieri featured May in a 2009 episode of "Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.") In the seven years since, May and his Eat Well Drink A Lot company has opened 10 restaurants - three of them in the last year: Vitamin T. in Phoenix's downtown CityScape, Iruña in Old Town Scottsdale and Mays Counter in Tucson. He's also closed two - Autostrada and Sol y Sombra, both located in Scottsdale - citing the economy.
His restaurants have topped numerous best-of lists in Phoenix, and May has appeared at enough charitable food events to get the adjective "celebrity" attached to his name. Last spring, he was inducted into Arizona's Culinary Hall of Fame.
Mays Counter is the first concept in May's stable that is not his original idea.
"There's not really a lot of places … in Arizona that are serving that kind of chicken and waffles, the full bar, the blues and Southern emphasis," said May, 33, who regularly works in all his kitchens. He comes to Tucson once a week. "I love fried chicken, I love waffles. I love everything about that low country Southern food."
More than a slogan
Eat well. Drink a lot.
"It speaks to everything we're about," May said on that busy Friday lunch rush at Mays. "Drink with carefree abundance and eat healthy, well-sourced ingredients. It's all that we're about."
Everything in Mays Counter, with the exception of the tater tots in the tot-chos, is made from scratch.
"You don't want food that's made in a factory in Yonkers, N.Y.," May quipped as Sergeant and his staff churned out dish after dish of well-crafted crispy waffles topped by chicken fried brown and juicy in a pressure-cooker. "I think that's one of the most important things, to be able to know where all your food comes from and how it was handled and prepared."
May leaned on the bar and looked out into the dining room. All of the booths and half of the tables were filled with a demographic collage of Tucson: young, old and in-between, white, black, Hispanic and Asian. The college guys at the bar with the paper-bag PBRs, a pair of Davis-Monthan airmen in deep conversation over a plate of chicken and waffles, business types on their lunch hour, Foster's young fiance with their year-old son taking a break from errands.
Foster leaned against the wall and sighed. Someday, he said, he hopes to open more Mays Counter restaurants in other cities.
Then he looked at May, who had slipped off into the kitchen to work a little magic on the grill.
"I love Aaron like a brother," Foster remarked. "Being able to be the guy who got Aaron May to come back here and open a restaurant was exciting."
If you go
Mays Counter Chicken & Waffles, 2945 E. Speedway; 327-2421.
• Hours: 10:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.
• Online: www.mayscounter.com or eatwellanddrinkalot.com
How to eat it
Here's a primer for the novice chicken and waffle diner:
1. Slather the waffle with butter and syrup.
2. Rip the chicken off the bone.
3. Cut the waffle in triangles.
4. Put the chicken back on the waffle and splash on hot sauce. (Mays offers several; we recommend old-school Southern-style Louisiana hot sauce.)
5. Think of the waffle as a tortilla; pick it up and eat it with your hands.
Did you know?
Chicken and waffles has its roots in soul food, and could date back as early as the late 18th century. Its earliest advertisement was by the now long-gone Wells Supper Club in Harlem, which boasted that it began serving chicken and waffles in 1938 to late-night diners. (Too early for breakfast, too late for dinner, so the story goes.) Today's notable chicken and waffle houses include Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in Harlem (with locations in California); Lucky J's Chicken and Waffles in Austin, Texas; and Gladys Knight and Ron Winans' Chicken & Waffles in Atlanta.
