CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) - When JA Moore was first clued into the power of food, his insight wasn’t triggered by the sound of onions sizzling on the stove or the smell of biscuits browning in the oven. Instead, it was a stack of identical plastic-wrapped cardboard boxes, each holding a ham sandwich and piece of fruit, which helped him realize the uplifting potential of a meal.
It was Moore’s job, as a child, to distribute the lunch boxes to fellow residents of Hampton County who counted on his parents for groceries, childcare, transportation and job training, among other services offered through their non-profit, the Hampton County Committee for the Betterment of Poor People.
To keep the organization funded, James and Ernestine Moore regularly hosted dinner parties for political leaders and wealthy do-gooders. While still in grade school, JA (pronounced “J-A”) helped out at those events, too, prepping greens for the cabbage, kale and collards dish that his mother’s guests always demanded.
And even as a child, he noticed that people responded in much the same way to both shrink-wrapped sandwiches and beef stroganoff on a silver tray.
“They would always be happy,” he says now. “You’d put it out, and people would be smiling and laughing. It brought so much happiness.”
That was the feeling Moore wanted to cultivate when he enrolled in Johnson & Wales University’s culinary program, still located in Charleston when Moore graduated from high school in 2003.
After graduation, Moore cooked at chain restaurants and clubs, moving into management positions with Charleston restaurant groups before ultimately launching a catering company. Around the same time, he filed to run for a state House seat. Moore, on Nov. 6, 2018, was elected to represent the 15th District, which radiates from Goose Creek.
Then on March 18, 2020, Gov. Henry McMaster shut down restaurant dining rooms in hopes of containing the coronavirus, making Moore the only man in South Carolina to both suffer the food-and-beverage industry’s devastation and bear legislative responsibility for addressing it.
“He’s feeling it as much as anyone,” says Moore’s friend and fellow business owner, Michael Shemtov, a leader in the national movement to rehabilitate independent restaurants. “He told me, ‘I’m fighting for y’all because I’m one of y’all.’”
COMMUNITY FIXTURE
Chefs and politics are now so entwined that nobody questions it when Tom Colicchio addresses Congress. But 20 years ago, when Moore set out “to be a famous chef,” he imagined a future of glittering galas and televised consommé demonstrations. His career path wasn’t meant as a rebuke to his parents’ civil rights work, but it was supposed to run parallel, not perpendicular, to their efforts.
Soon after Moore moved to Charleston, though, he got in touch with one of the people on a list of highly placed locals that his father drew from his personal file of political contacts. (The only person on the list who Moore didn’t call was Mayor Joe Riley. Aware that he’d tacitly flouted his father’s advice, the first number Moore dialed when James A. Moore died in 2012 was Riley’s.)
That meeting put him in a pew at St. Matthew Baptist Church in North Charleston for a presentation on building up the community by supporting its promising teenagers.
“I’ve got to get involved,” Moore remembers thinking.
So while Moore continued his studies and started working, he served simultaneously as the neighborhood’s chef, teaching after-school nutrition classes and preparing healthy food for block parties. Still, he didn’t formalize his commitment to community organizing until Jerry Scheer of the Homegrown Hospitality Group urged him to think about what he wanted to do with his “entrepreneurial spirit.”
At the time, Moore was managing Liberty Tap Room and coping with the loss of two siblings in swift succession. His sister, Myra Thompson, was killed in the 2015 massacre at Emanuel AME Church, and his brother, James Moore, Jr., died the same year after being struck by two cars.
“He was very innovative with us, but you could tell” that Moore needed additional outlets for his ideas, Scheer says.
After he settled on trying to unseat Samuel Rivers, Jr., the only black Republican in the House, Moore went looking for a place to headquarter his campaign. He drove up and down Red Bank Road, trying to find its precise spiritual center. He located it on a busy weekend morning.
“We honestly brushed him to the side,” says Elana Pea of Howard’s Barber Shop, opened in 1986 on the then-dirt street by her father, Howard Boyd. “It was a high-volume Saturday. But he was very persistent. We took a faith leap and said, ‘OK, he seems sincere.’”
Once installed at Howard’s, Moore temporarily stopped seeing his longtime barber.
“I’d been going to her for 10 years, but her shop wasn’t in my district,” he says. “Mending that relationship was the toughest thing I ever did.”
Otherwise, the arrangement worked out beautifully for both Moore and the Boyd family. Moore every day had the chance to talk in the barber shop with African American men, and in the adjoining barber school with young Latinos - two demographic groups that many campaigns struggle to reach. And the Boyds had their shop refrigerator perpetually filled with snacks, salads and sandwiches that Moore prepared so he and his volunteers, including Pea’s two daughters, wouldn’t have to patronize chain restaurants while electioneering.
“I feel like he really went above and beyond to gain trust in the campaign,” Pea says. “Trust me: You know as residents of the city, we’re wondering, ‘Is this for show, or is he really serious?’ And I’m not going to lie, you know how you post things that make you happy? All the time I’ll share his posts and say, ‘This is my district representative.’”
‘STAGGERING’ LOSS OF REVENUE
As a legislator, Moore didn’t adopt an agenda focused explicitly on hospitality. Yet the issues he championed, from gun control to mental health reform, arose from his many years working closely with people on both ends of the economic spectrum.
It’s a phenomenon nearly unique to the food-and-beverage sector: Almost anyone who succeeds in the field has to be comfortable with employees kept out of work elsewhere by stringent criminal background checks, as well as guests who can casually plunk down cash for food that would cost less than half as much at a grocery store.
“I’m dealing with everyone in society,” Moore says, adding that few of his colleagues in the legislature who make their livings as doctors or bankers can claim the same. “The haves and have nots, both are friends of mine. So I understand both perspectives.”
Specifically, in Moore’s case, his catering company’s two primary sources of income were an airport contract and private parties for “a key group of prominent African Americans with second and third homes on Kiawah.” His culinary specialty is blending Gullah ingredients with classical French techniques, resulting in prosciutto-wrapped collards, sweet potato deviled eggs and a beet hummus that mimics the purple drink in “Black Panther.” (When the movie’s star, Chadwick Bozeman, held a family reunion here, Moore catered it.)
In the wake of the coronavirus, Moore is still cooking. But he’s lost the airport business and the ritzy gatherings, which would violate several social distancing restrictions. Now he’s selling Champagne-sauced poached cod off his front porch, one order at a time.
“I’m physically busier than I’ve ever been, but I went from $60,000 in sales to $2,000,” he says. “It’s staggering.”
Prior to the pandemic, Moore was thinking about how to use the state’s vaunted surplus to strengthen education and Medicaid. With those funds depleted by the crisis, he hasn’t entirely reordered his spending wishes. After all, he points out, some of the health conditions aggravated by being uninsured are associated with an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19. But he’s persuaded that money also needs to go directly to the restaurant industry.
“I wasn’t grandstanding when I was talking about $1 billion,” says Moore, who has had multiple conversations with S.C. House Speaker Jay Lucas about how to approach the problem. “We need this. The restaurant industry is our backbone.”
With the contours of the crisis still coming into focus, and Moore facing a re-election fight this fall as Rivers tries to take back his seat, it’s unclear exactly what Moore will be able to accomplish on behalf of his industry. For now, though, he’s deploying the listening skills that Pea praises and the easy friendliness, which impressed Scheer, to gather information and talk up the cause.
And on a recent weekday morning, he was in his catering kitchen, assembling turkey sandwiches for 20 healthcare workers at East Cooper Medical Center, hoping he could at least make them happy for as long as it takes to eat lunch.
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