Mt. Airy's 'Jazz Brothers' donate 150 dinners to hospital

by Len Lear
Posted 6/4/20

Robert and Benjamin Bynum, of Mt. Airy, donated 150 dinners from their restaurants to Temple Hospital frontline workers on May 24, and in June they will doing the same thing at several other …

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Mt. Airy's 'Jazz Brothers' donate 150 dinners to hospital

Posted
Robert and Benjamin Bynum, of Mt. Airy, donated 150 dinners from their restaurants to Temple Hospital frontline workers on May 24, and in June they will doing the same thing at several other Philadelphia hospitals, including Chestnut Hill Hospital.

You might call them “The Jazz Brothers” — Robert and Benjamin Bynum, who grew up in Mt. Airy and went to Central High School. The Bynum brothers were basically fed music with their daily breakfast as small children. Their parents had owned the Cadillac Lounge in Germantown in the 1950s, which hosted such stars as Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Robert and Benjamin opened their own jazz club, Zanzibar Blue, on South 11th Street, near Spruce, in 1990.

The club moved to a larger, glitzier space in the Bellevue Hyatt on Broad Street in 1996, where nationally known jazz singers and musicians such as Low Rawls, Chick Corea, Chuck Mangione and Tony Grandberry performed. Zanzibar Blue folded on April 29, 2007, however. The brothers said at the time that their lease was up and that their landlord had literally doubled their rent.

Today the brothers own four restaurants in the city that serve soul food — SOUTH, Green Soul, Warmdaddy's and Relish. (Also, they were previously partners with Al Paris in Heirloom, a now-defunct BYOB in Chestnut Hill, and Paris Bistro, the jazz club/restaurant next to the Chestnut Hill Hotel that opened in January, 2014, which is now owned by Rob and Vanessa Mullen, who also own Campbell's Place.)

In addition to jazz and soul food, another passion for the Bynums has always been social justice and paying back. So it was not a shock on Sunday, May 24, when the brothers delivered 150 dinners to the emergency department's intensive care unit medical staff and other staffers who work the third shift at Temple University Hospital.

The donation was made possible by a generous grant from senior pastor Alyn Waller and the Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church, of East Mt. Airy. Rev. Waller himself recently tested positive for the coronavirus virus, but he has recovered. “This proves why everyone should be tested,” said the pastor recently, “because I was asymptomatic.” In April Rev. Waller collaborated with the Black Doctors Covid-19 Consortium to offer testing to parishoners. Waller chose to be the first person tested, and he came up positive.

Over the next month, according to Robert Bynum, “Chestnut Hill Hospital, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and other health care institutions will also receive dinners prepared at SOUTH, Warmdaddy's and Relish, individually packaged and dropped off in time for the night shift. We are committed to providing meals for our health care heroes.”

Explaining their longevity in the music club and restaurant businesses, both of which are filled with potholes and jagged spikes, Robert explained in an earlier interview, “We do feel that we have a responsibility to the African American community to be a place where the African American community can come and feel comfortable. We do think that’s one of the challenges in the city that is such a racially segregated city.

“And it’s interesting. I think two years after we opened Zanzibar Blue, Philadelphia Magazine did a piece on us. And it was 'Zanzibar Blue, one of the only places in the city where you can find black people and white people together.' And to this day, that is oftentimes the case. We’re very fortunate to have a clientele that is diverse because there are a lot of people who are not African American who feel like because we are African American-owned that we are an African American establishment.

“We always try to put ourselves out there from a position of inclusion, as opposed to exclusion. We’ve always wanted to have places where everyone is included, where everyone felt comfortable. And Green Soul to some extent is the culmination of all that also because we want to include everybody in that, not just racially, but also gender preference, sexuality, everything.”

For more information about the free meals for health care workers or to donate, email info@southrestaurant.net Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com

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