Essie’s, a restaurant and music venue in Clementon, is a tribute to patience — and a special aunt

It takes months, in some cases a year, to open a restaurant, what with the design, construction, permitting, and staffing.

For Mike and Chèrie Gillespie to create Essie’s, their upscale restaurant and live-music lounge in Clementon, it took 4½ years.

At the end of 2017, the South Jersey couple, who grew up in Camden and now live in Gloucester County, settled on a former biker bar called JWalkers in Clementon. They knew they would have to fix up the two-story corner building on Berlin Road at Garfield Avenue, across from Clementon Park amusement park.

Then came the first delay. Shortly after a snowstorm in early 2018, “our engineer called us and said, ‘You guys need to come down here.’ We get here and it’s all taped off,” said Mike Gillespie. “The whole roof collapsed. You could walk in the door and see the sky.”

Some aspiring restaurateurs may have thought of walking away, “but we’re strong believers,” he said. “This is our purpose. For us, it’s a legacy.” Their son, Michael, works with them.

The Gillespies put together the extra money to move forward. His background is in music and concert promoting, and hers is in nursing, and together they invest in real estate and have owned a barbershop.

A couple since high school, the Gillespies, both 46, share a common bond through Essie, their inspiration. She was Mike’s aunt, who took him in when he was 4. Essie also took in Chèrie when she was a teenager.

The restaurant project was beset with contractor and zoning delays, which they had anticipated. “We didn’t want to rush this thing through because we were trying to perfect it,” Mike Gillespie said. “People were telling us that a restaurant can never be perfect, but we wanted to be next to perfect.”

Next: the pandemic.

“I think at that time maybe it was just [the world] telling us we weren’t ready,” said Chèrie Gillespie.

“We used that as a learning experience,” Mike Gillespie said. “We wanted the business to be sharp, so when these doors open for us, being first-time restaurant owners, I think we’d probably be better than guys who had done it 10 years. We’re not sloppy. We’re very strategic on what we’re doing.”

Before the pandemic, they were looking at several chefs, though they wanted Mike’s cousin Arlene Reynolds to head the kitchen. She wasn’t ready then, he said, but had gained enough kitchen experience in the interim to assume the chef’s role when Essie’s opened in early June.

Reynolds’ Creole American menu features wings, sweet-and-spicy shrimp, and tacos as appetizers; entrees include blackened lamb chops over fried rice, a 16-ounce ribeye with compound butter, seafood gumbo, blackened salmon, and chicken and shrimp etouffée.

The restaurant is open Tuesday through Sunday from 3 p.m. to 1 a.m., with dinner served until 10 p.m., and small plates available in the lounge and at the bar until midnight. Weekend brunch will launch later this summer. Live music is offered Tuesdays and Saturdays, and DJs spin nightly on both floors.

The decor reflects Essie’s elegant style, they said. (She died just after they bought the building.) “She had to have pearls on,” Chèrie Gillespie said.

The first floor, with a bar-lounge in the front, and dining room and stage in the rear interior, features slate gray floor tiles, seafoam green glass wall tiles, a python leather padded wall (doubling as sound suppression), 3D wallpaper, and a brilliant white crystallite bar top. The steps leading upstairs are piano keys; the second floor includes a wall of gold records, a DJ booth, and a private dining room that can accommodate 12 to 15 people.

The music is mainly 1980s and 1990s soul and R&B, with jazz classics (Mike is a distant nephew of Dizzy Gillespie). “We’re keeping it real dim and low,” Mike Gillespie said. “It’s real mellow. So when you get off of work, you have your drink, and you soothe your mind and your body.”