ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, July 25, 1996 TAG: 9607250016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Off the clock
SOURCE: CHRIS HENSON
Claudia's Blues Cafe - a sure cure for botheration
"The blues ain't nothin' but a botheration in your mind...''
- Memphis Slim
Long before Robert Johnson, "King of the Delta Blues," went down to the crossroads and tried to flag a ride, people suffered through one bad day after another.
The blues. Sooner or later, it gets us all.
It's a well-known fact that it was the creation of the blues music genre that brought on the Great Depression. Nostradamus, 16th-century prophet of doom, predicted the popularity of blues hundreds of years before its birth in a divinely inspired quatrain that began: "Well, I woke up this morning...''
If you're like most Americans, you've experienced the blues yourself. You've been dumped or you wrecked your car or mowed over your petunias. To wit, you've slurped from the Big Gulp of despair.
Well, now there's a place you can go to commiserate with the miserable and conglomerate with the glum. Or you can just latch onto some good blackened chicken.
It's Claudia's Blues Cafe, on Main Street in Salem, and they'll take you on your worst day.
A neon likeness of John Lee Hooker peers through the window, and an aching blue note wails out the door. Inside, the unfortunate sons and daughters of the valley wash up against the bar and order another round of buffalo wings to try to numb their troubled minds.
"It's really not a gloomy atmosphere at all," co-owner Claudia Lambruscati says of the tiny cafe. "People come in after a hard day at work or something, and the music just picks them right up."
And that's what Claudia has always wanted. She's waited tables and tended bars at Cafe Jano and Mac and Maggie's for a long time. When she found a little space to call her own, finding the theme was no problem.
"I have always loved the blues," she says. "This place is small, but it reminds me of the tiny blues clubs in Chicago. It's intimate."
Since opening in May, Claudia's Blues Cafe has become a happening nightspot in Salem. Lambruscati blames her chef, Wells Bishop, and his authentic Cajun cuisine. "A lot of times, Cajun food doesn't have any flavor. It's not authentic,'' she says. "Here, if something's blackened, you can really taste it."
The menu features bayou dip, fried mushrooms, beans and rice, blackened rib-eye and "Blues B-Que." The bar offers beer, exotic and domestic, and mixed drinks.
"The food is killer," says Dean, the bartender. "Claudia picks the best music. People are always asking me what's playing."
"She makes the best blues tapes I've ever heard," adds Quill Giles, a regular customer. "It's the best music anywhere in the area."
Claudia isn't exactly sure when her love of blues began. "I started getting into it during my 'wild' years," she says. But then, the blues aren't really about remembering, she points out. They're about forgetting.
"I love Stevie Ray Vaughan," she says. "Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson, The Blues Brothers...''
The stereo features a mix of old and new stuff, lots of guitars and moaning about good love gone bad, and the hootchy-cootchy man.
Claudia believes that if you like country or jazz or rock 'n' roll, then you'll enjoy blues. She figures they're all connected musically. Though she's shy about saying so, you can tell she's on a blues mission.
"I don't know if I've converted people," she says, "but a lot of people have come in here that I don't think have ever listened to the blues. ... They love it now."
So if you've got a botheration in your mind (or better yet, a rumblin' in your belly), walk that walk right on in to Claudia's Blues Cafe. Unhitch your hoodoo and wrap your frown around a spoonful of beans and rice.
There. Isn't that better?
Claudia's Blues Cafe is located in downtown Salem, on Main Street across from the courthouse. It opens Monday through Saturday at 5 p.m.
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