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B. Smith’s had been open for several years when Café Beulah opened downtown in the early 1990s. Café Beulah, however, was a new kind of African American culinary endeavor: one that combined African American food with a setting full of black and white celebrities and bold-face names. Also located downtown, outside of Harlem, it offered a menu of foods described as “Southern revival” by Alexander Smalls, the force majeure behind the place. The bistrolike décor—tile floors, cream and white walls, and a burnished wood bar near the entrance of the small eighty-seat spot—offered no hint to its ethnicity. That was subtly done by the photographs decorating the walls showing blacks at play, including one of blacks in a car in Paris with the Arc de Triomphe in the background! The menu was like no other: chicken liver paté wrapped in collard greens, macaroni and cheese terrine, and free-range fried poussin with wild rice cake and Lowcountry succotash. Here was an African American place that dared to “signify,” or slyly comment on, American attitudes toward soul food and expectations of black restaurants. While the menu was sassy, many of the dishes, like the seafood and crab gumbo and the hush puppies, offered Carolina Lowcoun-try food in almost classic presentation.

Part of the lure of Café Beulah was the people-watching. A former opera singer, Smalls treated Café Beulah as his own personal salon, and the place attracted a crowd of black notables, from opera singer Kathleen Battle to writer Toni Morrison, giving the spot a frothy feel appropriate to the fin de siècle. Café Beulah closed before the century did, in 1998, but Smalls went on to open two other restaurants: Sweet Ophelia’s and the Shoebox Café, an eat-in/take-out place in Grand Central Station. However neither matched the excitement and verve of Café Beulah, and the restaurant-phobic aftermath of 9/11 regrettably put a temporary end to Smalls’s restaurant empire.

Uptown, in Harlem, another former model, Norma Jean Darden, staked her claim. Two decades prior, in 1978, she had penned one of the first black cookbooks of the post-Civil Rights era, Spoon-bread and Strawberry Wine, with her sister, Carole. The book, an intriguing mixture of memoir, anecdotes, and recipes, tells the multigenerational tale of their family through the foods they loved to cook and eat. Illustrated with family photographs and telling a compelling family story in the Roots-dominated period, it quickly became an African American classic. Based on the book’s success, Darden was also empire building by the 1980s. In 1983, she established Spoonbread Catering and became one of Harlem’s best-known caterers, providing food on the set of The Cosby Show and keeping uptown’s partygoers well fed. Her catering success resulted in the establishment of the restaurant Miss Mamie’s Spoon-bread Too in 1998. Located on the West Side of Manhattan, with easy access from Harlem and from downtown, Miss Mamie’s was successful and in 2001 spawned a second restaurant, Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too.

Darden’s endeavors, like those of Smith and Smalls, played on both sides of the African American culinary divide. Her restaurant menus remained rooted in the traditional Southern fare—grits, candied yams, banana-bread pudding, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, smothered pork chops, North Carolina barbecue, and what was dubbed the best fried chicken in the city by the New York Post. Her catering menu offered African American classics but also foods more international in scope, including such items as foie gras mousse on chickpea chips with blackberry chutney, miniature biscuits with ham or turkey and honey mustard, miso-seared scallops, lamb tagine, and cornbread-stuffed chicken with rosemary gravy. However, the South rose again in desserts like miniature peach cobblers served with whipped cream and mint, sweet potato tartlettes, sweet potato soufflé, and red velvet cake. The combination suited New Yorkers who still wanted