High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [110]
Sylvia’s in Harlem was one of these restaurants. Known to Har-lemites for decades—along with other soul food places that have now disappeared, like Wells and Copeland’s—it came to new fame in the 1990s and today is arguably the best-known soul food restaurant in the world. Like Edna Lewis, Sylvia Woods is an atavism—a survivor of another generation whose career has found new vigor in the twenty-first century. Sylvia Woods, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Soul Food,” opened Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem in the turbulent decades of the Civil Rights Movement. In a classic tale of black entrepreneurial success that mirrored those of black culinary entrepreneurs of earlier times, Sylvia worked her way from waitress to luncheonette owner to restaurateur to tycoon. It all began in 1954, when she was informed of a job at a local eatery. Sylvia’s willingness to work hard, her eight years’ tenure in the job, and a bad investment by the luncheonette’s owner resulted in her being offered ownership of the spot, which originally consisted of a counter and a few booths.
In 1962, Sylvia’s opened, serving the traditional pork and greens, cornbread, and fried catfish of the American South. It flourished and became a Harlem landmark. After a mention by New York magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene, it became the African American restaurant best known by tourists and visitors from as far afield as Brazil and Japan. Even today, tour buses disgorge groups by the hundreds to sample her African American meals. Especially lively are Sundays when a gospel brunch combines African American breakfast foods like grits and sausages with the rousing music of the black church; the place is packed not only with camera be-draped tourists looking for a taste of African American culture but also with Harlem natives, who remain loyal. All are served a menu featuring greens and pork chops, fried chicken and cornbread, all the totems of African American food.
Leveraging the fame conferred by Greene and other journalists, the diminutive Woods became the symbol of soul food to much of America, yet no one was more surprised at her success than she. But successful she is. Her face, topped with a chef’s toque, now appears on a line of Sylvia’s products, like canned black-eyed peas and collard greens, that is available at supermarkets around the country. Today, the booming enterprise includes not only the Harlem restaurant and the nationwide line of Sylvia’s Food Products, but also a full-service catering hall and several cookbooks.
If Sylvia Woods is the “Queen of Soul Food” in New York City, Leah Chase is New Orleans’s “Empress of Creole Cuisine.” Like Woods, Chase is a country girl and a survivor of another era. She too journeyed to the big city and found a job working in food service. But there their stories diverge, for Chase met and married musician Edgar “Dooky” Chase II, whose parents owned an eatery that catered to local patrons in the black Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. Chase envisioned a larger, more formal place like the white establishment in which she had worked in the French Quarter. She initially transformed the menu, expanding it from offering only sandwiches to serving hot meals at lunchtime to black men who were beginning to work in offices as the city was gradually being desegregated. She started out as a hostess, but soon she was redecorating the restaurant and eventually began working as chef. Five decades later, white-haired and feisty, she is still in the kitchen, and Dooky Chase restaurant (still a family-run endeavor) has grown into a New Orleans