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reasoningdaily · 7 months

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CHICAGO - A South Side eatery is celebrating 50 years in business. They're believed to be the oldest running Black-owned soul food restaurant in Chicago.

St. Rest Country Kitchen along 87th Street and Cottage Grove has been a Chicago staple for half a century. The menu boasts a variety of dishes, including turkey legs, short ribs, smothered pork chops, cabbage, black-eyed peas, succotash, and candied yams.

Owner and head chef Daniella Coffey, along with her husband John, inherited the restaurant from her father in 2021 – the late Rev. Larry Hopkins, who founded the eatery in 1972. At that time, the business was facing significant challenges, with $600,000 in debt and foreclosure looming. Tragically, her father passed away just two months later.

Coffey said that within a year, the family managed to pay off the debt, restructure the business, and now they're thriving.

"Great customer service, sanitation and great food. Those are our pillars here and of course faith," Coffey said.

It’s beyond just Soul food – it’s a story of resilience. The restaurant has attracted the likes of NBA legend Michael Jordan.

It’s a family thing, with 77-year-year old matriarch Sophia Hopkins serving as lead waitress. When she’s not singing her southern tunes, she’s making customers feel right at home.

"As soon as you walk through the doors, everyone is family. That’s just how it is down south back in the day," said Angela Chatman, general manager.

Outside the restaurant, Coffey inspires women all over the world to walk in their purpose.

"You don’t need another person to validate you. You have everything that you need in your hands. The only thing left is for you to use it," she said.

The restaurant operates on Fridays through Sundays.

#Chicago's oldest Black-owned soul food restaurant celebrates 50 years #aoul food #Black Restaurants #Black Chefs #St. Rest Country Kitchen #Chicago South Side

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jeffcross5000 · 1 year

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Which fictional New Orleans restaurant would you like to go to: Tiana’s Palace or Sisko’s Creole Kitchen?

#star trek #deep space nine #star trek deep space nine #ds9 #star trek ds9 #the princess and the frog #tiana #disney #anika noni rose #brock peters #joseph sisko #new orleans #creole food #restaurant #black owned #tiana's palace #sisko's creole kitchen

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blackbrownfamily · 2 months

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We need more black & urban millionaires.

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paebosims · 8 months

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felt like making a male sim this morning and...this is Kai Hendrix.

#ts4 #sims 4 #ts4 cas #ts4 portrait #black simblr #showusyoursims #sim: kai hendrix #all ik is he's a d*ck slinging-c*ke slanging delinquent #also he has a cat i haven't added yet #and he wants to own a 5-star seafood restaurant #w the fish he and grandpa hendrix catch every sunday :')

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nelkenbabe · 1 year

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there was this african book festival in berlin last summer, and i still think about it every few days, checking to see if there is a 2023 date. there were so many fantastic things there, but something that stayed with me is the panel with the author of The First Woman, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

she talked about the protagonist of the novel, and especially how it took years and years to publish it. how Kirabo, the mc, had been with her for decades (?) before the manuscript was accepted. how she would do mundane tasks, like swimming in a pool, and ask herself: would Kirabo enjoy this? what kind of bathing suit would she wear? how she knew Kirabo inside and out, almost like a friend

as somebody who has had their own characters live in their brain since they were a child, this was so validating. my character Risa is the only thing that can lull me to sleep. it always felt silly, i still feel silly, bursting with all this information about this person that isn’t real. the intense adoration for a figment of my imagination, knowing dialogue that was never written down by heart

it was validating as a writer (-ish) to hear such an accomplished, impressive author talk excitedly about her character and nodding eagerly when a question about Kirabo was asked

it was just such a good day. i hadn’t even read the book yet, but i bought it there on the spot and asked her to sign it, and she was so nice about it

#it's a good book btw i finally finished it #jennifer nansubuga makumbi #nelke talks #i think about the festival all the time #the food there the panels #you could tell a good chunk of those who attended were writers themselves and the creative energy on that summer day was incredible #all the food stalls of african restaurants in berlin #independent black owned shops setting up stalls #mikie got the most beautiful sneakers she still has to wear #people proudly wearing bold patterns and bright colors and make up #i am so forgetful my brain is a sieve #but this is one of the days from last year i remember most vividly

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gardenianoire · 2 years

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not to enter my candance owens era but why are my non service industry Black folks such shitty tippers jfc I work at a Black owned business that's frequented by mostly Black people and the only people that tipped me above 15% were white and I give everyone the same level of excellent service but it's still $5 on $80 for no reason "everything was great" than what the fuck was this 10% tip latrell 10% says everything sucks and I hope you die I'm seriously gonna just put in a few months to gain experience and go work somewhere else and like the owners are fine no major complaints I just cantwith this cheap ass customers

#turn over is high for this exact reason lol #this is why I tip 30%#extra if I really like the service but I could be making twice the cash at a similar establishment with whiter guests #this is why so many Black owned restaurants go under bevause they can't keep staff #y'all gonna get mad at me for saying that but it's literally a lived experience

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deputy-ajay-ghale · 2 years

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So which one of you lovely mutuals wants to help fund my Whitney Houston jukebox musical?

#Whitney Houston #original post #I have no plot but I have part of a setting: a Filipino karaoke bar and restaurant in the US #owned by two friends who don’t know they’re perfect for each other #played by my partner and I #main character will be a black lesbian who loves singing at the bar

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t00thpasteface · 2 months

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literally so embarrassing to have someone go "i don't go here" or "what's this from?" on my art and it's a rarepair/crackship that is in no way representative of the source material... and i have to be like. well you see, the rest of the restaurant's menu is not like this. i'm doing my own thing eating black olives right out of the can in the back-of-house. whether or not you want me to throw you a can, you have to understand that's not what they serve out front

#it keeps happening across several different fandoms. got a couple curious lookyloos on my sanguine throwback comic earlier LOL #shebbz shoutz

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weaselle · 2 months

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it was too much i had to make my own post

line cook here. ACCURATE

if you don't get the hate, here's what you don't understand.

it takes up to 2 hours to close down the kitchen.

The last 60-90 minutes before closing time you do almost no cooking because the restaurant doesn't have many people in it and you've already cooked most of their diners.

So if someone walks in during, like, the last hour, the cook is in the middle of an industrial deep clean of the kitchen.

(these numbers can vary quite a bit from place to place but i have worked several restaurants with these actual times and the concept remains the same)

Say the place closes at 10. If you wait til the restaurant is already closed to start all your cleaning duties, you'll be there until at least midnight.

More than that your boss knows that on an average night you can start your clean up as soon as the last rush ends and get out of there around 10:45, even 10:15 on a slow night if you get lucky. That means there are plenty of restaurants where if you do take until midnight the manager is going to come up to you at some point that week and ask you what went wrong that night, and you'd better have an answer.

So this example restaurant closes at 10 pm. The dinner rush ends around 8:30, and shortly after that the cook is going to start getting every single dish possible over to the dishwasher because the dishwasher always gets hit hard and late, and the machine runs for 2 full minutes and only holds so many dishes, so the way that works out is if you wait an extra 30 minutes to give the dishwasher all your stuff it can mean adding like 60 minutes to the end of his shift. And you're gonna KEEP finding shit to send to the dishpit right up until you leave probably.

all these little square and rectangle containers in this cold table have to be pulled out and changed over into new containers, replaced by new full ones, or in some cases filled from larger containers in the back, which can result in even more empty containers to send to the dishwasher.

while it's all pulled apart to do this, you have to clean up all the spilled food and sauce and juices and stuff from the joints and ledges and shelves and drip trays

Once you get your line changed over in this way, and fully stocked, anytime someone orders something that makes use of a bunch of that stuff, you have to restock and re-clean it some. It might already be covered in plastic. Some of it might already be stuck in the back to make room to take apart your cutting board counter to clean. To cook a dish isn't TOO much of a problem at this point, but you're really hoping for zero orders because you still have so much other cleaning to do.

Meanwhile the salad bar and appetizer section and server station and everybody are all doing the same thing. Even the bartenders are stocking olives and lemons and sending back whisks and stir spoons and shakers and empty 4quart storage containers that used to hold the back-up lemons and olives and things. Every section is dumping their must-be-cleaneds to the dishpit as fast as possible because early and fast is the only thing they can do to to help that dishpit not absolutely drown into overtime.

The poor dishwasher is always the last to clock out, soaking wet and exhausted.

Around this time you probably scrub the flat top, which has turned black from cooked on grease and is still about 500 degrees. Line cooks are divided in opinion on water-based or oil based cleaning methods for this, but they all involve scrubbing with (usually) a brick of pumice stone using every ounce of your strength while you try not to burn yourself

you scrub it from fully blackened to gleaming silver and now if somebody orders something that needs the flat top to cook, you can either fuck up your cleaning job or fake it in a couple frying pans and pass that tiny fuck you down to your dishwasher (who usually understands, especially if you help them take the garbage out or clean your own floor drain later)

If there's deep fried stuff on the menu then the fryers have to be cleaned out, which includes straining the oil out into enormous and super-heavy pots full of oil so hot that if you spill on yourself then it's probably a hospital visit and if you slip and fall face first into it it'll be the last thing you ever do.

Then you gotta scrub out the fryer. Like you gotta take the (hot) screen out and reach your arm down into the weird rounded pipes and curved areas (so hot, burn you if you brush against them hot) and scrub off whatever is down there

Depending on your kitchen you might have to do up to four of these. Then you'll have to pour the (dangerously hot) oil back in

oh, and if you didn't dry the pipes and get ALL the water out of the trap and tank?

water reacts with hot oil in a sort of mentos and coke way that can send a tidal wave of oil past the open flame of the pilot light ...HUGE dangerous mess and/or burn down the kitchen if the oil lights up.

Unless! If the oil has been used too hard and needs to be changed, it's time to carry those open topped super heavy pots full of will-kill-you-hot oil and dump them in the barrel outside by the dumpsters so you can put room temp fresh oil in the fryers. whew!

The clean up is not just some light wiping down that can be easily interrupted, is what i'm saying.

You might have to do some kind of walk-in duty (moving around 50lb cases of lettuce and 50lb bags of onions to get to the stacks of five gallon buckets full of salad dressings and sauces to move so you can reach the giant metal pots and bus tubs full of prep and get it all organized and make sure it's all labeled and i have to stop now i'm having flashbacks)

THE POINT IS

by 15 or however many minutes to close, the line cook is doing an intense deep clean and probably has the whole stove taken apart to detail.

For some industrial stoves this means lifting off large cast iron plates that weigh like 20 lbs each and are still quite hot. Whatever metal burners are on there, you gotta take off and clean, you can see here the lines that indicate the large thick cast iron rectangles that sit on top of the burners to allow heavy pots to rest on. Those five (each has one front burner hole and one back burner hole, see?) have to be lifted off and cleaned with soap and a wire brush usually, and then the underneath area also has to be cleaned because a lot of shit falls through the burner holes on a busy night.

if you didn't do it when you did the flat top you have to do the grease trap (which can be like a full five minutes and is always disgusting).. You gotta clean out all the little gas jets in each burner with a wire or something so the burners all flame evenly, and sometimes you have to remove some of the natural gas piping that connects the burners to access where you have to clean.

you gotta clean out the bottom of the oven and the wire racks, and, oh gods, you gotta take down the filter vents from the hood fans above the stove.

See all the lined parts along the top of the wall?

those are hood vents, and as they pull air up they also pull a lot of grease and they have to be taken down and cleaned, then you gotta climb up there and scrub where they go before you put them back...

And then there's the mopping and floor drains and...

Anyway, that's what the line cook is doing when you walk in fifteen minutes before closing and order something that needs to be cooked on that stove. They are doing an entire industrial cleaning of a professional kitchen.

In some restaurants maybe one or two of these jobs will be every other night or even only twice a week, but in many, possibly most kitchens, ALL of these things happen EVERY night. You don't want to leave any food mess that might attract insects or rodents for one thing, so a really good kitchen is as close to brand new as you can get it every night.

IF YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO ORDER SOMETHING ANYWAY, HERE IS WHAT TO DO

open with an apology and ask the server to go ask what the cook would prefer you to order.

Any good server will already know what the cook is hoping for and what will make their line cook go into the walk in and scream. If it's significantly less than an hour to close and they say some variant of "oh anything is fine" they are either telling the lie their boss wants them to say, or they actually do not know what their line cook wants, and you can either use human connection and a conspiratorial just-between-us tone to get them to drop the customer-is-always-right act, or get them to actually go ask the cook.

It might be as specific as "the lasagna is easiest on the kitchen" or it might be a simple guideline like "nothing that requires the flat top" or "any of the sautés are easy" but a good line cook will probably have a system for if they have to make a couple of the most popular items after they start their close, so the answer is likely to include something most people like and you should be good to order that.

but for the love of all that's holy, please only do so at great need. Leave that last 30-60 minutes to the truly desperate and the crew's duties.

#long post #sorry #i just have a lot of DO PEOPLE UNDERSTAND feelings left over from all my years in restaurants #restaurants #line cook #service industry

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