The white Formica counter at Louise’s Family Restaurant in Harlem is the original, and is more than 40 years old. Southern dishes like pig’s feet with black-eyed peas and candied yams cost $8. Sweet lemonade is still served in a plastic foam cup.
The restaurant seats 18, about the same number it always has, but it is rarely full. The menu makes few concessions to modern eating habits. The food is unapologetically heavy, fried, salty and fattening, with nary a fresh fruit or vegetable. Many dishes are considered incomplete without a dollop of brown gravy, a big clump of butter, or both.
Louise’s is among a handful of culinary survivors of an older Harlem, when inexpensive, family-run restaurants operated by black Southern transplants dominated the streetscape. “People are used to eating soul food the way we make it,” Julia Wilson, 63, Louise’s owner and the daughter of the restaurant’s founder, said on a recent afternoon. “A lot of people like it how I keep it, old-fashioned.”
But Louise’s is on the wrong side of several trends. Soul food is dying in Harlem and elsewhere in the city, and not being able to fill 18 seats is as good an indication as any. The reasons can be chalked up to the vagaries of contemporary city life: Changing tastes; health consciousness; the fast-food culture; and an influx of wealthier young adults — including African-Americans, long a customer base for soul food restaurants — who are more comfortable eating Indian or Thai dishes.
A recitation of the names of the vanished Harlem soul food restaurants — where the waitress/owner called everyone “Baby,” and the temperature in the room was determined by the amount of lard in the skillet — would be longer than the menu at most of the places.
Among those now out of business are: 22 West, where Malcolm X used the pay phone in back to do radio broadcasts; Adel’s, popular for its fried chicken; Pan Pan, which burned down in 2004; Wilson’s, known for its breakfasts; Wimps, revered for its smothered chicken and red velvet cake; Singleton’s, which was among the last restaurants to regularly serve pig tail stew, hog maws, and pig ears; and Wells Supper Club, best known as the restaurant credited with putting chicken and waffles on the same plate.
Onetime staples like butter beans, country fried steak, hog maws, oxtails, chicken livers, ham hocks, neck bones, and chitterlings have become uncommon, and in some cases, unavailable, in this former soul food capital.
“There used to be two or three soul food places on a block,” said Johnny Manning, 67, who has lived in Harlem since 1966 and for the past eight years has operated a Web site, eatinharlem.com, focused on the neighborhood’s culinary options. “Now you’ve got to look for them. When I came here, Harlem was predominantly black, so you had a predominantly black cuisine in restaurants.”
Each month seems to bring a new casualty: Charles’s Southern Style Kitchen closed its 125th Street location this summer after the rent doubled; and House of Seafood and an outlet of Manna’s Soul Food Restaurant will most likely be shuttered by the end of summer, the casualties of a planned shopping mall, also on 125th Street.
Charles Copeland, 83, who closed his landmark soul food restaurant Copeland’s last summer after 50 years because of declining business, said gentrification and accelerating prices for basics like cooking oil and collard greens may doom many of the rest.
“The transformation of Harlem snuck up on me like a tornado,” Mr. Copeland said. “I don’t expect many of those places to last. Soul food was supposed to be a cheap type of food that black people made at home. What we used to call cheap isn’t cheap anymore.
Louise’s, on Lenox Avenue, was opened in 1964 by the sister of Sylvia Woods, who started Sylvia’s two years earlier. But while Louise’s has resisted change, Sylvia’s has bucked the trend and become a soul food temple, expanding into grocery stores nationwide and onto the Internet with items as varied as canned turnip greens and shampoo.
In addition to Louise’s, Sylvia’s, and the original Charles’s Southern Style Kitchen location on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, holdouts include M & G Diner and several newer soul food places, including Amy Ruth’s, Margie’s Red Rose Diner, a Taste of Seafood, Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too, and Londel’s.More recently, restaurants serving dishes inspired by soul food have also arrived in Harlem. Their food is lighter and tends to be more healthful. They include Mobay, Cafe Veg, Native, Revival, Melba’s, and Raw Soul, a raw food restaurant.
Mobay, on 125th Street, for instance, serves collard greens with a vegetarian flavoring, instead of pork or turkey.
Though some of the newer restaurants charge as much as $15 for an entree, Charles Gabriel, 60, owner of Charles’s Southern Style Kitchen, said he could not afford to raise prices.
“Uptown, people don’t have so much money, so when the prices go up, they’ll go to a Chinese place,” which have sold items such as fried chicken wings for years, he said.
Restaurants, including soul food places, are also operating under increased pressure from the city to offer more nutritious meals. This summer, the city banned restaurants from using artificial trans fat to prepare foods, and also required chain restaurants to post calorie counts of their menu items.Even before the new laws took effect, some traditional soul food restaurants began to offer more healthful choices, including sometimes using skim milk in macaroni and cheese, and offering the option of oven fried, instead of deep fried, chicken.
The calorie count for a traditionally prepared dish of macaroni and cheese, for instance, is about 650 calories, and a single piece of deep fried chicken can have more than 400 calories, said Lindsey Williams, author of Neo Soul cookbook.
Those numbers are in line with a typical fast food meal: At McDonald’s, a Big Mac has about 540 calories, while a McDonald’s premium crispy chicken club sandwich contains 630 calories, according to the restaurant.At Louise’s, Ms. Wilson, a tall, quiet woman who was a factory worker before she took over the restaurant, has changed little about the place since her mother, Louise Thompson, died in 1977.
The handwritten menu above the grill includes breakfasts of fried bologna, corned beef hash and a sardine sandwich. There are more choices now, but the sign remains. Three stools at the old lunch counter are missing their seats. The juke box, featuring songs by Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, has not worked for at least 10 years.
“The guys from the phone company used to come and play it,” Ms. Wilson said, smiling at the memory. “It used to be fun. We used to play it as much as the customers did.”
During a recent afternoon, the restaurant had four customers during the lunch hour. Three other people looked at the menu, but left.
As they waited, Ms. Wilson, her husband, Issac, 67, who does the cooking, and her daughter, Cassandra, 43, who is the waitress, watched the “Young and the Restless” on a portable television set.
Mornings are busier, and Louise’s does a brisk business in dishes like fish and grits.
“A lot of people look forward to breakfast: grits and home fries and biscuits,” she said. “They wait on that.”
Maurice Robinson, 48, who was eating breakfast at the counter recently, has been coming to Louise’s for more than 20 years.
“I can get grits here,” he said, between bites. “And it’s not easy getting grits.”
Ms. Wilson said she might like to update the restaurant’s menu with salads and baked goods, and perhaps give the place a makeover. She is reluctant to make too many changes though, she said.
Then she turned to the coffee machine, a 1950s-era stainless steel gas-powered model that dispenses coffee through a spigot. “Maybe get a new coffeemaker — with a coffee pot,” she said.
After a few moments, she changed her mind. “I don’t know,” she said. “Everybody loves my coffee.”
Ms. Wilson, who has been on her feet at the restaurant from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. six days a week for decades now, said she wanted to keep Louise’s open to pass it on to her children, as it had been passed to her.
In the meantime, health issues have led to a ticklish situation that she has kept to herself for years.“The doctor said I’m not supposed to eat fried food anymore,” she said, chuckling, as fish and bacon sizzled in oil on the grill. “How am I supposed to give up fried food?”
The restaurant seats 18, about the same number it always has, but it is rarely full. The menu makes few concessions to modern eating habits. The food is unapologetically heavy, fried, salty and fattening, with nary a fresh fruit or vegetable. Many dishes are considered incomplete without a dollop of brown gravy, a big clump of butter, or both.
Louise’s is among a handful of culinary survivors of an older Harlem, when inexpensive, family-run restaurants operated by black Southern transplants dominated the streetscape. “People are used to eating soul food the way we make it,” Julia Wilson, 63, Louise’s owner and the daughter of the restaurant’s founder, said on a recent afternoon. “A lot of people like it how I keep it, old-fashioned.”
But Louise’s is on the wrong side of several trends. Soul food is dying in Harlem and elsewhere in the city, and not being able to fill 18 seats is as good an indication as any. The reasons can be chalked up to the vagaries of contemporary city life: Changing tastes; health consciousness; the fast-food culture; and an influx of wealthier young adults — including African-Americans, long a customer base for soul food restaurants — who are more comfortable eating Indian or Thai dishes.
A recitation of the names of the vanished Harlem soul food restaurants — where the waitress/owner called everyone “Baby,” and the temperature in the room was determined by the amount of lard in the skillet — would be longer than the menu at most of the places.
Among those now out of business are: 22 West, where Malcolm X used the pay phone in back to do radio broadcasts; Adel’s, popular for its fried chicken; Pan Pan, which burned down in 2004; Wilson’s, known for its breakfasts; Wimps, revered for its smothered chicken and red velvet cake; Singleton’s, which was among the last restaurants to regularly serve pig tail stew, hog maws, and pig ears; and Wells Supper Club, best known as the restaurant credited with putting chicken and waffles on the same plate.
Onetime staples like butter beans, country fried steak, hog maws, oxtails, chicken livers, ham hocks, neck bones, and chitterlings have become uncommon, and in some cases, unavailable, in this former soul food capital.
“There used to be two or three soul food places on a block,” said Johnny Manning, 67, who has lived in Harlem since 1966 and for the past eight years has operated a Web site, eatinharlem.com, focused on the neighborhood’s culinary options. “Now you’ve got to look for them. When I came here, Harlem was predominantly black, so you had a predominantly black cuisine in restaurants.”
Each month seems to bring a new casualty: Charles’s Southern Style Kitchen closed its 125th Street location this summer after the rent doubled; and House of Seafood and an outlet of Manna’s Soul Food Restaurant will most likely be shuttered by the end of summer, the casualties of a planned shopping mall, also on 125th Street.
Charles Copeland, 83, who closed his landmark soul food restaurant Copeland’s last summer after 50 years because of declining business, said gentrification and accelerating prices for basics like cooking oil and collard greens may doom many of the rest.
“The transformation of Harlem snuck up on me like a tornado,” Mr. Copeland said. “I don’t expect many of those places to last. Soul food was supposed to be a cheap type of food that black people made at home. What we used to call cheap isn’t cheap anymore.
Louise’s, on Lenox Avenue, was opened in 1964 by the sister of Sylvia Woods, who started Sylvia’s two years earlier. But while Louise’s has resisted change, Sylvia’s has bucked the trend and become a soul food temple, expanding into grocery stores nationwide and onto the Internet with items as varied as canned turnip greens and shampoo.
In addition to Louise’s, Sylvia’s, and the original Charles’s Southern Style Kitchen location on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, holdouts include M & G Diner and several newer soul food places, including Amy Ruth’s, Margie’s Red Rose Diner, a Taste of Seafood, Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too, and Londel’s.More recently, restaurants serving dishes inspired by soul food have also arrived in Harlem. Their food is lighter and tends to be more healthful. They include Mobay, Cafe Veg, Native, Revival, Melba’s, and Raw Soul, a raw food restaurant.
Mobay, on 125th Street, for instance, serves collard greens with a vegetarian flavoring, instead of pork or turkey.
Though some of the newer restaurants charge as much as $15 for an entree, Charles Gabriel, 60, owner of Charles’s Southern Style Kitchen, said he could not afford to raise prices.
“Uptown, people don’t have so much money, so when the prices go up, they’ll go to a Chinese place,” which have sold items such as fried chicken wings for years, he said.
Restaurants, including soul food places, are also operating under increased pressure from the city to offer more nutritious meals. This summer, the city banned restaurants from using artificial trans fat to prepare foods, and also required chain restaurants to post calorie counts of their menu items.Even before the new laws took effect, some traditional soul food restaurants began to offer more healthful choices, including sometimes using skim milk in macaroni and cheese, and offering the option of oven fried, instead of deep fried, chicken.
The calorie count for a traditionally prepared dish of macaroni and cheese, for instance, is about 650 calories, and a single piece of deep fried chicken can have more than 400 calories, said Lindsey Williams, author of Neo Soul cookbook.
Those numbers are in line with a typical fast food meal: At McDonald’s, a Big Mac has about 540 calories, while a McDonald’s premium crispy chicken club sandwich contains 630 calories, according to the restaurant.At Louise’s, Ms. Wilson, a tall, quiet woman who was a factory worker before she took over the restaurant, has changed little about the place since her mother, Louise Thompson, died in 1977.
The handwritten menu above the grill includes breakfasts of fried bologna, corned beef hash and a sardine sandwich. There are more choices now, but the sign remains. Three stools at the old lunch counter are missing their seats. The juke box, featuring songs by Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, has not worked for at least 10 years.
“The guys from the phone company used to come and play it,” Ms. Wilson said, smiling at the memory. “It used to be fun. We used to play it as much as the customers did.”
During a recent afternoon, the restaurant had four customers during the lunch hour. Three other people looked at the menu, but left.
As they waited, Ms. Wilson, her husband, Issac, 67, who does the cooking, and her daughter, Cassandra, 43, who is the waitress, watched the “Young and the Restless” on a portable television set.
Mornings are busier, and Louise’s does a brisk business in dishes like fish and grits.
“A lot of people look forward to breakfast: grits and home fries and biscuits,” she said. “They wait on that.”
Maurice Robinson, 48, who was eating breakfast at the counter recently, has been coming to Louise’s for more than 20 years.
“I can get grits here,” he said, between bites. “And it’s not easy getting grits.”
Ms. Wilson said she might like to update the restaurant’s menu with salads and baked goods, and perhaps give the place a makeover. She is reluctant to make too many changes though, she said.
Then she turned to the coffee machine, a 1950s-era stainless steel gas-powered model that dispenses coffee through a spigot. “Maybe get a new coffeemaker — with a coffee pot,” she said.
After a few moments, she changed her mind. “I don’t know,” she said. “Everybody loves my coffee.”
Ms. Wilson, who has been on her feet at the restaurant from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. six days a week for decades now, said she wanted to keep Louise’s open to pass it on to her children, as it had been passed to her.
In the meantime, health issues have led to a ticklish situation that she has kept to herself for years.“The doctor said I’m not supposed to eat fried food anymore,” she said, chuckling, as fish and bacon sizzled in oil on the grill. “How am I supposed to give up fried food?”
New York Times 5 August 2008 by Timothy Williams
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