Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Black-owned restaurants and other businesses need your dollars
This is mostly a space where I talk about food-related topics, often with a recipe or two—hence the name of the blog. But this week, with the streets filled with protesters chanting “Black Lives Matter!” and “I can’t breathe!” in the wake of the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman, I had to write about what’s going on—and make a pitch.
In addition to marching for change, we should all consider supporting local black-owned restaurants and other businesses that are hurting not only from extended closings due to COVID-19, but also from delayed openings because of the demonstrations.
“Voting with your pocketbook is one of the best ways to effect change in a capitalist society,” noted a Forbes headline in an article that linked to a variety of black-owned businesses previously profiled in its pages, and suggested other links worth exploring. There are about 2.5 million black-owned businesses in the U.S., Forbes said, but clearly, if you don’t search beyond your own neighborhood and comfort zone, you might not find any.
Black Lives Matter protest that drew an estimated thousand marchers to Manhattan Beach on June 2. (Photo by JP Cordero of Easy Reader News)
There was a large but peaceful march in the beach town where we live (though business owners, fearing looting, boarded up their stores anyway), but it seemed that it might be too hard to march and maintain social distancing at the same time— though later I wished I’d gone anyway.
Instead, we picked from a list of 200 Los Angeles area black-owned restaurants compiled by the LA Times (which in turn came from a spreadsheet created by a 25-year-old editorial assistant). After listening to an amazing segment on Evan Kleiman’s “Good Food podcast (from KCRW Radio) on late gospel legend Mahalia Jackson’s fried chicken restaurants, I had a yen to try what is sometimes referred to as “the gospel bird,” so we ordered some from Dulan’s Soul Food Kitchen, just about seven miles away in Inglewood.
I’d say we went whole hog—except it was a whole chicken, eight very generously proportioned pieces, plus three large sides: red beans, rice, macaroni and cheese, and a veggie—string beans and carrots (just for the pretense that we were eating something healthy), and four cornbread muffins—all for $29.45 before tax and tip. I realized later, after working our way through only about half the sumptuous feast, that we’d forgotten about dessert (peach cobbler anyone?), but I don’t know where we would have put it.
Since fried chicken is a bit of a cliche when it comes to African American cuisine, I felt a little guilty ordering it. In our defense, we’d been craving it ever since my hubby, Jefferson Graham, ate an unusual fried chicken and cornbread salad at southern-themed Tupelo Junction in Santa Barbara (now, sadly, closed, but reopened in Newport Beach). Also, it should be noted that in addition to this soul food restaurant, the LA Times list includes a wide variety of other food genres available in SoCal among black-owned restaurants: Caribbean, Ethiopian, Belizean, Creole, Mexican, French and vegan, to name a few.
But speaking of fried chicken, a little history, courtesy of the Southern Foodways Alliance podcast with Betsy Shepherd that was rebroadcast on KCRW. As Adrian Miller, author of Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, explained, the African American connection to chicken dates back to precolonial West Africa, where it was considered a mark of wealth and was used by some groups as an offering during religious ceremonies. “Some of that meaning carried over during the forced migration of West Africans to America, where enslaved cooks developed Sunday meals around poultry,” Miller said in the podcast.
In the spirit of the moment, there are myriad lists of black-owned food-related businesses circulating around the country—and undoubtedly around the globe. In fact, there are so many, there’s even a list of lists with links to businesses as far away as South Africa.
I was particularly taken with the link from Food52 to cookbooks by black authors. One that caught my attention right away was Black Girl Baking: Wholesome Recipes Inspired by a Soulful Upbringing by food stylist and blogger Jerrelle Guy. Nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award in the Best Baking & Dessert Cookbook Category in 2019, it’s a riveting read and full of recipes I can’t wait to make, like Blue Blueberry Drop Biscuits and Ambrosia Breakfast Bread. Many are vegan and/or gluten-free. I’m neither of these, but the recipes still speak to me. What I particularly like is that she writes about how she often fails several times before getting a dish right—which is the way it is with all cooks and humans.
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