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landmark. Chase has served Republican and Democratic presidents and has seen the notable and the notorious come to her art-filled establishment in Tremé to sample mamére’s crab soup and other dishes. Although gifted with great culinary curiosity and also an innovative cook, Chase is also a traditionalist. On Mondays there will always be red beans and rice; there will be fish on Fridays. Once a year, on Holy Thursday, there will be a crowd for the bowl of gumbo-z’herbes, a creole Lenten creation made from an odd number (nine, eleven, or thirteen) of greens—some store-bought, like collards and kale; some foraged, like sourgrass—that are prepared with sausage and ham. Dooky Chase celebrates Creole cooking, and the menu reveals some of the sophistication and culinary diversity of African American culture. It offers not only fried catfish and peach cobbler but also such uniquely creole New Orleans dishes as grits and grillades, seafood and okra gumbo, and jambalaya.

Sylvia’s and Dooky Chase’s continue to be successful, but by the last decades of the twentieth century, many of the other classic soul food eateries were forced to shut their doors. Health concerns about the high-fat, high-calorie traditional African American diet, rising rents brought about by gentrification, and an ignorance of the true tastes of traditional African American foods among a generation raised on fast food signaled their death knell. Then, in 1997 Cooking Light magazine named soul food one of the culinary trends to watch, and the neo-soul movement that had been percolating quietly got fully underway. Soon upscale dining spots serving improvisations on traditional African American fare—like Los Angeles’s Georgia and Hartford, Connecticut’s Savannah—flourished. Satisfy Your Soul, a guide to African American, African, and Caribbean restaurants published the same year listed more than 250 around the country. New York was the culinary epicenter and featured numerous upscale black restaurants outside Harlem, many of them owned by famous blacks, like Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs’ Justin’s and singers Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson’s Sugar Bar. There was a range of others—like the Motown Café, Soul Café, Mekka, and the Shark Bar—where newly affluent “buppies” (black upwardly mobile professionals) met after work to drink and mix. The neo-soul restaurants traded on African American nostalgia for the traditional foods of the past, but each added a nod to changing culinary conventions and the health concerns of the day. They showcased African American culinary innovations and were an incubator for a new wave of culinary entrepreneurs.

One of the precursors of the trend was owned by former model B. Smith, who opened her eponymous restaurant on the edge of New York’s theater district in 1986. It was a gamble, but the place rapidly became a hangout for black professionals; it was one of the few places downtown where they could congregate among like folks. The restaurant thrived, driven by the bar scene, and eventually moved to larger digs a few blocks away. The menu revivified old Southern favorites like fried green tomatoes, crab cakes, macaroni and cheese, and mashed sweet potatoes, and it also gave a nod to Caribbean influences, with pigeon peas and rice and fried plantains. They were served alongside dishes like curried coconut oysters with a coconut wasabi dip and “Swamp Thang,” a sauté of shrimps, scallops, and crayfish napped with a Dijon mustard sauce and presented over a bed of greens. Smith grew from success to success. With her model bearing and polish, she was the perfect crossover culinary icon for the period. Eventually she moved out of the metaphoric “kitchen” and became a brand, following in the footsteps of Martha Stewart, perhaps the most successful of all the culinary entrepreneurs. Media-genic Smith has been so successful with her endeavors that she has penned cooking and lifestyle books, had her own radio show, and was the host of her own television series. Her B. Smith with Style Home Collection is sold at Bed Bath and Beyond stores around the