In her final days in business in the neighborhood she helped shape, Lesa Kastanas sold everything. The jewelry. The candles. The kitschy buttons that said things like “I wanna rock and roll all night-ish, and party every third day.” Even the shelves and mannequins.
Now she was packing up the vinyl records. Those were not for sale.
They have 30,000 of them, and you read that right. For 10 years the most righteous personal music library in Charlotte was hidden here off of Central Avenue, behind a wall and secret door at Lesa’s little retail shop CLTCH, in one of last rooms in Plaza Midwood that still smelled like cigarettes.
The vinyl belongs to Lesa’s husband, Andy, or DJ Andy K. He’s been spinning good times in this town for 45 years, and using this room for the past decade as a cave of inspiration. Now the records and the memories had to move to a new home, because the thing about cool places in Charlotte is, well, let Lesa tell it:
“It’s cool. People find out it’s cool. They uncool it.”
So goes the life of Charlotte’s original hipsters, ‘round and ‘round.
Lesa closed CLTCH for good this weekend after a decade in business, and this next sentence should be bigger news than it is. Lesa and Andy Kastanas are taking their talents out of Plaza Midwood.
They’ve owned or part-owned a half-dozen small businesses on this block over the past 20 years. Their essence became the neighborhood’s essence, and they helped transform the Central Avenue strip into a “best of” mainstay. Now they’re giving their full attention to the “third act” of their career — reopening their incomparable restaurant, Soul Gastrolounge, a few miles north at The Pass off of Sugar Creek.
With luck Soul will debut later this summer, and based on what I saw when touring its shell recently, it’ll be unlike any other restaurant in the city. This is excellent news for The Pass; Lesa and Andy have Tinkerbell’s touch on any neighborhood they’ve chosen. But for Plaza Midwood…
What’s that lyric about doves crying? Yeah, this is what it sounds like.
“You gotta number it by section, not a perpetual number all the way around,” Andy was telling Lesa one day two weeks ago, trying to make sense of the way she’d organized the vinyl collection. “It’s gotta be 1 through 10, 1 through 10, because I don’t know where box No. 75 belongs.”
“Listen,” Lesa said. “I do.”
“I’m trying…” Andy said.
“Can you listen?” Lesa stopped him. “You know you can talk to me. We can speak to each other. You can say, ‘Hey Lesa, what’s this box?’”
Golden shovels and press releases may warn us that a neighborhood is moving from one era to the next. But the real transition comes in misshapen conversations like these, when someone packs up the music.
“Well that’s why I put these stickers here,” Andy said.
“I can’t even read what that says,” Lesa said. “This is serial-killer handwriting.”
I spent about five hours with Lesa and Andy last month, off and on through the closing process. And in moments like these it was hard to tell whether they — a couple on the cusp of their 40th wedding anniversary — were arguing or joking or getting ready to close the door and put a “do not disturb” sign on the knob.
***
“Everything comes from music,” Andy told me on another morning.
We were sitting in the new Soul Gastrolounge space, which will be the cornerstone of a sprawling development near the Sugar Creek light rail stop. Specifically, we were sitting in what will be a “listening lounge,” a little room with a bar off the main dining area where Andy will install his vintage audio equipment so guests can hear “music in its purest form.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“I mean, does music make the universe or does the universe make music?” Andy said. “I think music makes the universe.”
Every conversation with them included lines of unscripted poetry. They’re both writers. (Lesa’s Observer column on their love of Prince, after the artist died in 2016, remains one of the best things I’ve read in any local publication.)
But that idea, that music makes the universe, is evident throughout the new Soul. The vision began innocently, back during the pandemic, when Andy retreated to that vinyl room with close friends, looking for community in quarantine. They spent hours and hours in there, spinning and spinning. When the lockdowns lifted, he got back into DJ-ing at other restaurants and bars around town. He explored music he hadn’t thought of in years.
When they finally closed on the deal to move Soul into its new location, Lesa saw the fruits of those hours. Andy had that artist’s stare again, the kind where he could be in one conversation but a thousand miles away in his mind.
“It’s almost like watching a cicada come out from underground,” Lesa told me.
Lesa’s role, she says, is to help him take his countless ideas and pick one or two. He doesn’t always listen, but it’s a pretty effective operating partnership.
The only topic that was off limits during our conversations, they told me, was an opening date for the new Soul. A warning to anybody else who interviews them this month: They hate that question.
Soul will be ready when the souls behind it are ready. Same as it’s always been, in anything they’ve done together.
***
In the summer of 1980, Lesa was at a club when a 19-year-old boy with a Greek accent asked her to dance. Andy was born in Athens and moved to Charlotte when he was 7. Lesa was a Southern girl, the daughter of two cotton mill workers, and spent her childhood riding horses out near Indian Land. They’ve been each other’s only one since.
“What are you gonna do with your life?” she asked him not long after that dance.
“I want to own a nightclub and a restaurant,” he said.
She was in college at Queens and thought she might move to New York to be a writer. They went with his plan. They spent days lying on the pillow in his dorm room, ear to ear, listening to music underneath a Prince poster. Andy became a DJ and a reporter for Billboard. He had a vote in the dance music weekly charts, and the records kept coming in for him to review.
Andy’s first DJ gig was at the Sheraton on McDowell Street. That’s where he asked Lesa’s dad if he could marry her, over a plate of bananas foster.
They had a wedding in 1985 and kept on living for late nights. She did some corporate work for stability, eventually landing at Microsoft, and within a few years they had a daughter, Alex. Andy earned a culinary degree at Central Piedmont Community College.
Then, in 1993, Andy opened his first club on North College Street in uptown, and the mere mention of its name here will make Charlotte Gen Xers feel the tingle of their cellphone-less youth:
Mythos.
“Nothing transformed nightlife like Mythos. It opened in 1993 as a big-city club in an uptown few dared visit at night,” wrote Tonya Jameson, who documented that era in her must-read Observer column “Paid to Party.”
Mythos’ biggest party was on Dec. 31, 1999, when a local artist created a flying saucer that “crashed” into the building, and an “alien queen” arrived at midnight.
Andy opened more clubs, more than he can remember. Cosmos, Salamandra, Alley Cat, Q. The newspaper called him “the pope of College Street.”
When Mythos closed in 2004, Jameson spilled tears on the page: “It was a nightclub in the heart of an uptown that had no heart.”
Andy turned Mythos into Phoenix and the Forum, but by then he’d already started to get restless uptown. The neighborhood had become popular. Not his thing. Developers were scooping up land for high-rises and apartments.
So he inched his way out of businesses there, and he and Lesa shifted their gaze to Plaza Midwood, for the second act.
***
When Soul Gastrolounge opened at the corner of Central and Pecan avenues in 2009, it had a MySpace page:
“This lounge will encourage conversation and creativity with a perpetual sexygroovy house music soundtrack,” the page read. “Our love for cuisine matches our love for music.”
Here’s what sexygroovy looked like: For 13 years people stood in line on a staircase at that corner, waiting for a seat in a restaurant that didn’t take reservations. There are any number of people married in Charlotte today who met on a first date there. It was a tapas spot with a DJ before tapas spots with DJs were everywhere. It’s in some way a predecessor to places like Yunta, one of the city’s best restaurants. (Andy DJs at Yunta on occasion now.)
Chef Jay Pound created a furor around his pork belly tacos. They became so popular that Andy grew to have mixed feelings about them, the way a musician might have about a No. 1 hit. “It’s like a mainstream dish for us, and you know how much I hate mainstream,” he told me.
Andy gives partial credit for Soul’s success to the recession during which it was born. As “bougie” places and big businesses struggled, consumers turned their money toward “mom and pops” that lined Central Avenue. “And I’d say we were a mom and pop,” Andy laughed. “I’m pop. She’s mom.”
Mom and pop got involved in several other businesses in Plaza Midwood. Andy became a part-owner of The Diamond for a decade. Lesa opened CLTCH because she worried bars and restaurants were overtaking the neighborhood, and that local retail was vital to vibrancy. Then they opened KiKi and Tattoo, with daughter Alex running operations, in the space underneath Soul. But that was just months before the pandemic, so it didn’t stand much of a chance. After restrictions lifted, they changed KiKi into an all-day cafe named Sister.
Plaza Midwood’s signature restaurant before Soul was The Penguin, a burger and fried pickle joint that was on “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” And that’s a whole other story. Seriously, you should read it, and read how the author of that story, my friend Jeremy Markovich, described the neighborhood in that 2011 Charlotte magazine piece.
- Plaza Midwood is throbbing with barbershops and salons, tattoo parlors and pawnshops, and a record store selling vinyl. Bungalows sit on the streets behind Central Avenue, and in front, spread out over two square blocks, there are a dozen places to get a drink and a meal. There’s a Jamaican joint next to the art gallery that serves beer under Soul Gastrolounge, which is down the block from John’s Country Kitchen, across the street from Dish, which is across from Zada Jane’s. Thomas Street Tavern is in the old post office. There’s probably a band playing at Snug Harbor.
Some of that is still there. Some is not. Yes, there are signs of the old “middle finger to corporate Charlotte” vibes. The postcard example is the Thirsty Beaver, which still hoots and hollers down the street, in spite of the big apartment complex around it. But many of the neighborhood’s current occupants won’t recall how hard it had to fight to stay, or how the former owner of the surrounding property once put up a tall fence in hopes of getting the bar to leave, and how fans of the bar launched a “Free the Beaver!” campaign. The bar won. The Beaver got freed. It was no small moment in Charlotte history, a small business batting back big development.
The reality now is that the neighborhood is a blend. The old Dairy Queen is a bit of a small business success story — it was purchased by Joe and Katy Kindred, who spared no expense to renovate it and flip it into a coffee-shop/fried-chicken-sandwich/holy-shit-have-you-had-their-oatmeal-cream-pies joint, Milkbread.
Across Central Avenue, Crosland Southeast raised up a huge development on what used to be a parking lot that was famous mostly for not allowing people to park there. There’s a pilates studio there now.
Who knows? Plaza Midwood may be one of the few places where new development and old standbys can coexist. Not everything has to be reduced to winners and losers. Regardless, the tension between what the neighborhood was in the MySpace era and what it’ll be in the AI era makes Plaza Midwood a compelling story. And there’s no question which side Andy and Lesa are on.
“This neighborhood is gonna have to fight to keep these small businesses,” Lesa said, sitting in CLTCH. “It is the actual warp and weave of a community. You can have stores that sell ‘stuff.’ But … I want to be somewhere where you feel the personality of the people who curated the store.”
Andy’s take? You can guess.
“Good or bad, the underground will always be consumed by the overground,” he told me. “The world will become mainstream. Because once somebody does something cool, the big dogs come in and they want a piece of it and they ruin it. Greed will ruin the neighborhood.”
I wasn’t sure, after talking to them, whether Andy and Lesa had spent their lives running toward what they wanted to Charlotte to be — or running away from what they didn’t want it to be.
Either way, Soul was having a terrific year financially in 2022. Andy and Lesa had asked for years to have the first option to purchase the building it was housed in. But one day they got an email that the building had been sold to an outside group, and rent was going up. They could’ve done things to make the business model work, maybe raise prices, but Andy “felt like he was being stepped on,” so they shut down one of the most popular restaurants in the city.
“I can sleep at night knowing I haven’t screwed anybody over,” Andy told me. “If I were to sell my ass then the people around me, they’d know. They’d have me hanging by the flagpole at Dairy Queen against my choosing. I just do what I think is right.”
On the last night at Soul in August 2022, they closed the doors and stood on the staircase, looking out toward the skyline. Andy said it was the first time he realized Soul had been a success.
“I felt really good in that last moment, looking out,” he said. “Like, we’ve done it.”
***
About four months later, Lesa was scrolling through social media when she saw a post from a stranger that read: “Life is great, but until Soul Gastrolounge finds a new location and is able to reopen … it could never be perfect.”
We were sitting in Lesa’s office in the back of CLTCH when she tried to find the post. She started crying.
“She was still thinking about this thing that was missing, that we’re connected to, and we’re missing it,” Lesa said. “It’s just like having somebody care about something that only you should care about, because it’s how we make our money. It’s how we pay our bills. Any time things would get hard, I would think about her.”
They searched for a new location for Soul for months. They started a Soul food truck, mostly to keep the name out there, but it wasn’t worth the time. They found a couple of spots and nearly signed leases, but the deals fell through.
Then they met Third & Urban, the developers of The Pass. The developers wanted a signature restaurant, and Andy and Lesa wanted to go into an area where they could leave a signature. They signed a lease in 2023.
“All my life I’ve been inspired by emptiness,” Andy said once. “Empty buildings. Dead space. Missing experiences. I’m inspired by the possibilities of pouring my heart out into something that’s not there yet.”
I could see that as we walked around the empty space that will be Soul. I’ve seen dozens of restaurateurs in the build-out phase over the years, and most of them are quick to share a laundry list of tasks to be completed before opening. Not Andy. He seemed to be breathing in the space, waiting for it to tell him what the day’s tasks would be.
They’re working with longtime friend Scott Weaver on the interior. Weaver is the renowned creative who designed the interior of CLTCH, the original Soul, The Diamond, and countless other Kastanas projects. There’ll be a bar where the crafty cocktails will be poured, the DJ booth where house music will pulse.
“I want it to have the feel of the old Soul, obviously,” Andy told me. “I don’t want it to be squeaky and shiny. No matter what it’s going to be different. What’s going to make it the same is us. If you look at the place it might look foreign to you. The spirit is what I’m trying to recapture.”
The biggest difference this time is the addition of the listening lounge. On the day I was there, it was sparse. But the old, giant disco ball from Mythos hung overhead. He talked about where he might put turntables. He talked about curating evenings there around musical themes, and how excited he was to play Herbie Hancock.
They’re getting closer. They closed the CLTCH chapter earlier Sunday, when Lesa moved the giant fiddle-leaf fig out of the front window, and they’ll sign on that sale Monday. Next week they have a big family trip to Greece planned. Then they’ll return and drop the final touches on launching the third act, which of course will only begin when Soul tells them it’s ready to shine.
“You have to temper all of this,” Lesa said. “You can’t get caught up in the hype. You can use that as motivation but you can’t count on it. You have to work at it. Because the things can be there — the music is there, the cocktails are there, the food can be there, the sushi is there. All these things can be in place. But there’s some kind of magic. It’s so much more than just things. There’s something out there that you can’t touch that’s part of this. I don’t even know what it is. It’s bigger. It’s almost …”
She paused for a few seconds.
“It’s like your best memory.”
