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Local Restaurant Initiative Addresses Inequities for Black Restaurateurs, Envisions South Side Corridors as Culinary Destination

Meredith Francis
A man washing bell peppers in a restaurant kitchen

Like countless restaurant owners, Aretha Davis was worried about how her business would survive the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“You’re not really prepared, or you don’t foresee it, or the preparing that you had done ends up not being adequate enough to support the situation,” Davis says. “I wasn’t prepared.”

Davis owns a soul food restaurant and catering business in Chatham called Aretha’s Dream, which opened in 2016. She has loved cooking soul food since she was a kid, when she cooked for her brothers and sisters at home. Opening a restaurant had always been a dream for Davis: hence the name of her business.

“I actually started from humble beginnings, selling food from my house. From my house, I ended up earning enough money to get a food truck, and from the food truck, I ended up earning enough money to get the restaurant,” Davis says.

Once the pandemic hit Chicago in March 2020, Davis’s sales took “a huge dive.” But a resource in her own neighborhood gave her the tools to help her stay afloat.

That resource is FoodLab Chicago, a program from the Greater Chatham Initiative designed to uplift Black-owned restaurants on the South Side. FoodLab Chicago, which is modeled after FoodLab Detroit, provides restaurants with educational workshops, training, and a support network.

“A workshop could range from bookkeeping to plate costing, with the intention that if every plate is profitable, then the restaurant then becomes profitable,” says Tamieka Hardy, program coordinator at FoodLab Chicago.

One workshop might be on “menu engineering,” which helps restaurants set up their menu to increase purchases of their top-selling items, to make it more appealing to diners, or to eliminate some items that may be unintentionally creating waste. Davis took some of FoodLab’s workshops on budgeting, plating, and inventory.

“Their classes offer the most knowledge on how to be successful, if you’re entry level or even if you are a multimillion dollar company,” Davis says.

One of the most important parts of the program, says executive director Nedra Sims Fears, is providing restaurant owners with a network of other restaurateurs who have the same goals.

“They really inform each other,” says Sims Fears. “They work from sunup to sundown in these restaurants. To be able to talk to people who are living their experience, particularly during the pandemic, where everybody just needed to hold on, was really invaluable.”

New challenges for restaurants caused by the pandemic forced FoodLab to adjust its mission.

“We switched to stabilization mode of helping people keep up with the myriad of grants and loans that were coming out, which was really very important – helping sift through all of the operational changes that had to happen so that they could pivot basically to online ordering and delivery,” Sims Fears says.

Davis said that FoodLab took the time to help her understand the grant process, and helped her determine what she was eligible for and how to fill out applications. Aretha DavisAretha Davis always dreamed of having her own restaurant. Now, her business is named for that dream. Image: Provided

“That has been just a blessing for me, to tell you the truth. It's helped me to sustain my business,” Davis said. “A lot of my colleagues had to close down and you know they couldn't sustain themselves. But through God and through FoodLab, I've been able to sustain myself and still make a profit through the most difficult times.”

According to Sims Fears, none of the restaurants who were part of FoodLab Chicago’s cohort went permanently out of business during the pandemic. Some even expanded to other locations. When grocery stores shuttered during civic unrest or permanently closed neighborhood stores, people turned to neighborhood restaurants.

“The restaurants really became utilities. [People] went there because that literally was where the food was,” Sims Fears says.

After the initial pandemic recession, restaurants then faced other issues, like inflated food costs or a smaller hiring pool. Plus, Hardy and Sims Fears say, restaurants on the South Side are still trying to address inequities that have been around since long before the pandemic. One 2015 study from the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, which focused on fine dining establishments in California, found that Black restaurant workers made less than their white counterparts on average.

“The other big juggernaut is benefits,” Sims Fears says. “Benefits are hard to come by in the restaurant industry. We are really pushing [that issue] hard because we're seeing some people lose their trained chefs to go work for Uber or some other platform to make $2 an hour more.”

Hardy says one of FoodLab’s goals is to make the food service industry more appealing and more livable. That’s important, she says, because restaurants are such a big source of jobs in the community.

“We’ve been doing a deep dive on the food ecosystem on the South Side,” Sims Fears says. “We are the epicenter for soul food, Caribbean food, and West African food.”

They envision South Side economic corridors, like 75th Street – which is home to local favorites like Brown Sugar Bakery, Five Loaves Eatery, Lem’s BBQ, and others – as “Black food cultural hubs,” where people have several restaurants to choose from, as opposed to just one or two. FoodLab Chicago has been working with the city’s tourism website, Choose Chicago, to develop a Black cultural heritage trail through food. Hardy wants to see the South Side as a “recognized food destination.”

“The lauding of Black diaspora cuisine and the rich culture behind it [would be] a major selling point to both locals and tourists, as well as being celebrated for our contribution to the culinary arts and culture, both in Chicago and nationally,” Hardy says.

With her business growing, Davis says she hasn’t forgotten where she came from. With a big family to support and having struggled herself in the past, her goals for her restaurant go beyond feeding customers. When the income from the restaurant allows it, Davis leads back-to-school fundraisers and lunches for kids, and she works at church events to feed the homeless once a month.

“Once you make it,” Davis says, “I think it's so important to look back and always try to catch those who are in the same position as you were in to help carry them along the way.”