Restaurants that serve true Southern-style food are not hard to find - if you know where to look.
By RON MATUS
Published May 9, 2003
[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar]
Mattie Royal shows off a plate of her famous fried chicken and greens, one of the specialties of the New Soul Restaurant that she operates with her husband, Isaac.Click for photo gallery
TAMPA - In South Tampa, some people think sushi is soul food.
Sushi is fresh, smooth, untainted. That's good for your soul, right?
Isaac Royal Sr. shakes his head and chuckles in disbelief. "Nooooo," he says in a South Georgia lilt that conjures up corn bread and collards. "It don't work that way."
Royal would know. He and his wife, Mattie, run the New Soul Restaurant near the University of Tampa.
The building has a tin roof and is painted the color of butterscotch pudding. Customers wipe their feet on a red carpet that ambles down to a bed of plastic flowers. The screen door goes thwack! when it closes.
If the Royals made sushi, rice and seaweed would be wrapped around smothered chicken, curried goat, stewed beef and turkey wings. Instead of wasabi and ginger, the plate would be prettied up with heaps of Great Northern beans and macaroni and cheese. There'd be piles of collards, green beans and black-eyed peas.
And gravy, everywhere.
Similar menus are hard to find south of Kennedy Boulevard, but not impossible. But venture a few blocks north. Or follow your nose to Ybor.
Look for the place with the crimson awning between World's Barber Shop and the New Bright Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. Or scout around for the squat building with mermaids painted on the side.
If there's a portrait of Malcolm X near the walk-up window, you're in the right place. If you can get your car washed while you eat, or if the meal includes Wonderbread for mopping up barbecue sauce, order and enjoy.
And if the pork chop sandwich comes with the meat still on the bone, say grace: How lucky you are to be alive amid the diversity of South Tampa.
Don't get hung up on definitions, either.
Some say seafood can't be soul food, but don't tell that to the folks who buy Cajun crab and garlic lobster from Ladies of the Sea. Some insist Jamaican food isn't soul food, but Cephas Gilbert dishes up hearty plates of oxtail and lima beans.
Soul food is any food that is "going to give you some strength," says Winnie Lofton, enjoying fried fish and grits for breakfast at Fannie's Cafe in West Tampa. Soul food is going to "make you go home, make love to your wife, do the yardwork, everything."
Or put it this way:
Say you stop at Fannie's before work. It's dark and raining. And when you look out the window, you see that the rear, driver's side tire on your truck is as flat as a day-old Coke. Is sushi going to make it all right?
But when you look down on your plate, there it is: a slab of hot, fried fish next to a sea of grits. And plopped so right in the middle of those grits: a scoop of impossibly yellow butter, melting over breakfast like the rays of the morning sun.
Suddenly, even two flat tires in a hurricane wouldn't be so bad.
Need your soul food fix? Here's where to go.
Fannie's Cafe
Fannie's is named after the late Fannie James. The West Tampa matriarch raised 14 kids, all the while feeding folks up and down the block.
"There was nobody that was hungry that she didn't feed," says Joy Blocker, James' granddaughter and the cafe's owner.
Fannie's is a block east of Howard Avenue, between the church and barbershop. This is the heart of West Tampa. The walls of the cafe beam with community pride.
There's a photo of Dwight Gooden, former Yankees star.
There's one of the Blake High School basketball team, from years ago. "STATE CHAMPS," says the ball in one player's hands.
"But the Middleton people come in, too," says employee Torya Hills, referring to the rival high school. "You better not just say Blake."
Here, former rivals bond over breakfast.
The specialty: liver and onions. "Pan seared beef liver," the menu coos, "seasoned with a little love and simmered in a homemade buttery brown gravy."
The bargain: smothered chicken wings. That's three wings, with grits and toast, for $3.25.
Chloe Coney, the Eastside activist, eats here. She gets salmon and grits, with one scrambled egg.
Mayoral contender Frank Sanchez comes in now and then. He likes his grouper steamed.
Almost every morning, Gooden, the ballplayer on the wall, steps out of a black Hummer and comes in for takeout.
He digs the pork chops.
New Soul Restaurant
Isaac and Mattie Royal moved to South Tampa from Cordele, Ga.
The small town is to banana pudding and fried chicken what Tampa's Columbus Avenue is to black beans and yellow rice.
The Royals have been cooking since they were kids. Isaac was one of nine children; Mattie one of 10. On the farms they grew up on, nothing went to waste.
Once, Isaac and his brother whipped up a batch of cantaloupe custard.
"It came out good," he says, as if amazed himself.
All that cooking refined the Royals' culinary talents. After 34 years in business, customers still flock to New Soul, to the modest building with the chairs inside that don't match.
Some wear sweaty T-shirts, some wear ties
"Hi, Miss Mattie," they say after swinging through the screen door.
"I call it The Shack," says Donald Plato, a hearing officer for the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Plato regularly dines here on smothered pork chops. "It's the greatest place in Tampa," he says.
For those who live by a strict definition of soul food, this is the mecca.
Don't ask Isaac Royal if the pork chop in the pork chop sandwich still has the bone in it. Not unless you want him to look at you as if you're stupid and say, "Yeaaaass."
"You don't cut it off the bone," he'll tell you. "You eat if off the bone."
Chitterlings, smothered steak and oxtail are among the favorites. Corn bread mops them up. Homemade lemonade washes them down.
The menu changes every day of the week, but the Royals don't mind accommodating special orders. One day, a woman ordered a fish sandwich with ketchup, mustard, onion - and a fried egg on top.
Is that soul food, too?
Isaac Royal pauses to mull it over, then smiles. "Yeahhh!"
Mr. Klean's Auto Detailing and Oak Smoked Barbecue
The portable grill fires up at 7:30 a.m.
It's barrel-shaped and blackened, smudged by endless tons of combusted oak. The flames flicker along Platt Street while thousands of morning commuters race and weave to downtown. The smoke beckons.
"The smoke will almost make you wreck your car," says Mr. Klean's co-owner, Dan Mathis.
Not the thickness of it. The aroma. It does the advertising. Later in the day, the stomachs of those drivers will remind their brains what their noses experienced.
Mr. Klean's offers a combination only a soul-food joint could pull off.
Customers get their cars pampered. Workers wash by hand, dust the vents, even wipe the grime from the door jambs.
And while customers wait, palates get V.I.P. treatment, too.
Mathis learned to barbecue from his father, the pit boss at family reunions in Albany, Ga. Mathis practiced on deer, squirrel, opossum and raccoon. And when it came to turning pig into delicacies, the family used "everything but the oink," Mathis says.
For years, Mathis catered Super Bowl and Gasparilla parties when he wasn't plugging away at the carwash. In March 2002, he and business partner Adrian Wright brought two worlds together.
Is barbecue soul food?
"Once you put collard greens, macaroni and cheese and chicken on a plate, it's soul food," Mathis insists.
Add a slice of Wonderbread, and even doubters must agree.
Cephas West Indian Restaurant
Cephas Gilbert isn't a fan of pork chops and pig's feet.
"A pig is the closest thing to a human being flesh," he says in a thick Jamaican accent. "Not a monkey. A pig."
So visitors won't find any pig at Cephas' colorful restaurant in Ybor.
But they will find what Gilbert himself calls soul food with a Caribbean twist: oxtail and lima beans, curry goat and jerk chicken, plenty of rice and vegetables.
Before the main course, Gilbert insists on an appetizer: a slice each of raw onion, tomato, celery and cucumber, marinated in vinegar, set next to a chunk of white sweet potato and jerk sauce for dipping.
Veggies lay "a good foundation," Gilbert says, his voice rising, as sure as an evangelist. "If you eat vegetables, your system is moving."
You get the point.
A restaurant doesn't get more down home than Cephas'. Customers are served as if they are in Gilbert's living room.
And what a living room it is. Walls 12 feet high, covered floor to ceiling with posters, paintings and photographs, all awash in red, yellow and green. Bob Marley and Nelson Mandela. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sojourner Truth. Scenes of palmy Jamaica.
While customers wait, Gilbert shares his tips for healthy living.
Pork is out. Red wine is in. So is aloe vera juice. Gilbert drinks two glasses of the bitter stuff every week to beef up his immune system and fight arthritis.
Soul food? It works for Gilbert.
To prove it, he leaps, in two steps, from floor to table to a shelf 8 feet in the air.
Ladies of the Sea
The new location is on trendy Seventh Avenue in Ybor City.
The tables are black and sleek, the lamps, stylish and purple. Behind the counter, Coronas and Heinekens chill in a cooler.
Don't let the yuppie feel throw you off. Ladies of the Sea heats up soul food every bit as authentic as Moses White & Sons Bar-B-Que next door.
Stewed beef, smoked turkey wings, collards - it's all here. And for dessert, try the lemon-n-coconut cake winking at you from the counter.
But, if you want atmosphere to match the eats, go to the original location on Cass Street, the place with the mermaids, halfway between downtown and Centro Ybor.
Shrubs wilt on the side of the building. The parking lot crumbles.
All the attention is on the food.
Crabs boil and fish fry while a BET video plays in the corner. Malcolm X looks down from the wall.
Owner Rene Brown says she has been cooking since fifth grade, when she put on mom's apron and climbed on the stove. To this day, she makes "the meanest macaroni and cheese."
And garlic crabs. And Cajun shrimp. And conch salad.
This store is for takeout. For picking up, taking home and sharing.
On the wall: a collage of photographs of friends and family, plastered around a newspaper story. The story has a drawing of an old man's face, tired-looking and sad, as if he needs to fix a flat tire in the rain.
"Bad food," the headline says, "causes us to look old."
