Photographby Ben Rollins
For more than 20 years, my life has revolved around the moods of a beast, a noisy and badly behaved stainless steel reach-in refrigerator of the kind commonly found in restaurant kitchens. It requires a separate freezer on the side, a faithful Sub-Zero that rarely gives me trouble and produces ice by the bucket. But were it not for the Victory Raetone behemoth that rules my kitchen, I would never have met James Virgil.
Commonly known as “Mr. V,” Virgil operates a restaurant supply store, dealing in mostly used commercial appliances, that attracts a cult following of designers and chefs to his facility in the shadow of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. I have spent hours squeezing myself down the tightly packed aisles of Mr. V’s Restaurant Equipment and Store Fixtures, where bar coolers, margarita machines, fridges with glass doors, and fryers rotate on an almost daily basis.
The first time I met Mr. V, he handed me a gift—a logoed set of pens in red, white, and blue—as he flashed me one of his infectious, rakish smiles. Photographs in his office alerted me to the fact that the man whose expertise I sought to bring my dead fridge back to life (or find me another just like it) had had another, entirely different life, one in which he was famous, a friend of music producers, actors, and comedians.
Before moving to Atlanta, the Mississippi native ran a club in Chicago. But fame truly came knocking when he opened Mr. V’s Figure 8 on Campbellton Road in Atlanta, during the heyday of TBS. Ted Turner’s station broadcast his commercials (and his face) all over the world. For almost 10 years, the likes of Muhammad Ali, Andrew Young, Tina Turner, Lionel Richie, and Eddie Murphy hung out in a joint billed as classy and with a stringent dress code, as pictures and videos from the ’70s and ’80s attest. Limos fetched celebrities at the airport, and parties went on through…
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