Column: A soul food revolution takes root in North Lawndale, at one small restaurant with big plans

What can one business do for a community? Someday, you might ask Quentin Love.

His restaurant, The SoulFood Lounge, was the place to be on a recent, bitterly cold night in the North Lawndale neighborhood. The ambitious establishment generated its own warmth, a dining room packed with both people and good intentions on the West Side.

Good intentions mean nothing, though, if no one shows up. It means everything that they have.

Love, executive chef and owner, opened the restaurant in the Dr. King Legacy Apartments building four months ago. Already, reservations tend to be booked about two weeks out.

That’s remarkable with any new business in Chicago, but notably so on a street lined with vintage brick two-flats and three-flats punctuated by vacant lots where their neighbors once stood.

When Love first told me his big plans for the small restaurant, I was skeptical. Developers had promised a restaurant for the space for over a decade. Then he revealed a signature Grand Tasting menu priced high for the neighborhood, at $59.

Somehow, it’s working.

Five nights a week, the modern and minimalist 30-seat room fills with “the people from the neighborhood,” Love said. “The elders from down the street. They grew up in the area, they live in the area and they just talk about how proud they are to be able to come in to an establishment in their neighborhood.”

People come from all over the city too.

There’s a lot of value in that $59 dinner, which includes a nonalcoholic drink and your choice of three entrees. The tasting menu portions are big, but one-third the size of a la carte dishes so large, I can’t help but think of family-style platters served on a Chinese restaurant’s lazy Susan.

Your server will perhaps recommend the Marsala-braised pot roast, and its side of fried Brussels sprouts. It’s a good suggestion to take. The deeply delicious bowls of tender, sauced beef and crisp cruciferous greens will tempt you to eat too much, before you remember they’re just one course. There’s much more to come.

“I want you to take food home for your family, or for you to have some food to eat tomorrow for lunch,” said the chef. “That’s the whole purpose of the portion.”

The skilled servers time each course with wave after wave of carefully plated dishes, until your table is covered in abundance.

“It becomes a moment,” said the chef. And he’s right.

The couple on a date night at the table next to me couldn’t help but turn their heads together every time a dish arrived on my table. I nearly burst out laughing when a young boy, seated with family behind the couple, received what looked hilariously like his own personal casserole. It felt like we’d all ordered exactly right.

The fan-favorite dish so far remains the lobster macaroni and cheese. The familiar comfort dish is generously studded with perfectly poached seafood and gilded by a judiciously truffled parmesan breadcrumb crust.

This is Love’s second restaurant. At TurkeyChop Gourmet Grill, the casual restaurant he opened in Humboldt Park in 2014, the chef gave away food to people in need every Monday, with lines stretching down the street. He continued when the pandemic and protests hit.

“We fed over 400,000 people,” Love said. “I wouldn’t say it was a great thing. That’s an unfortunate thing. We’re feeding different people for different reasons, for free, at a number almost close to a half a million.”

Last year, after projects involving vaccine awareness events and COVID-19 testing, the chef realized he was ready to do something different.

In June, TurkeyChop named Marissa Terry as the new chef, and she introduced her stuffed turkey legs to the menu.

As for Love, he found himself asking, “What’s the next work? What’s the thing that’s also connected to the mission of really healing people through food?”

That’s how The SoulFood Lounge began.

“I just want to make sure you understand the journey of how we went from one thing to the other,” said the chef who grew up on the South and West sides, and now lives in West Humboldt Park. “So you get the intentionality of why my restaurants would be smack dab in the hood.

“I can only speak about the African American experience,” Love said. “And from the Chicago perspective. The violence has been overwhelming, especially in this area. So when you open up businesses on the thoroughfare, it instills a high level of pride from all the people in the community. I’m talking about the young person too, the guy who may be affiliated with the streets.”

This is his first time going upscale, which was also done with intention, said the chef.

“I’m always learning about cultures and cuisine, and how to properly run a restaurant of this magnitude,” he said. “It’s evolving every single day coming off COVID.”

Perhaps paradoxically for a chef who now offers spicy maple-glazed fried chicken served with grilled housemade pound cake, Love also owns several gyms, where he leads intense classes himself.

“I love helping to transform bodies that way,” he said. “But it’s nothing like having it done through food.”

It’s not just bodies. He’s hoping to transform communities. The chef said he’s seeing change already.

“‘Oh so we care now? Is this what we’re doing?’” Love said, laughing as he imagines the questions people in the community might be asking.

“That’s what we’re doing.”

That care comes through with charred and buttered bounty within the catfish, crawfish and crab dish. Do note the side of fufu candied yams come mashed silky smooth, a lovely tribute to the chef’s grandmother’s recipe, but not the stretchy texture of the traditional West African dish I wished they’d been.

You should also try the lush Korean-inspired short ribs, more yielding than grilled galbi, served with garlicky mashed potatoes; and a smoky blackened salmon garnished by fat shrimp scampi; as well as the golden grilled pound cake finished with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and fresh berries.

The wonderful cake of the day might be caramel cake from Brown Sugar Bakery, the legendary Black woman-owned business based in the Chatham neighborhood on the South Side. Here, on the West Side, it gets dressed up with drizzles of chocolate and caramel too.

I almost couldn’t get enough of the aromatic lemonades and herbal teas infused in spa water dispensers displayed across the open kitchen window sill. A sip reveals berry and basil, mango and mint or another delicately sweetened drink. Every diner seemed to hold a cup, refilled freely, from the couple to family to a table of teens, as if raised in a communal toast.

The SoulFood Lounge might be just a restaurant anywhere else, but here, it feels revolutionary.

“It’s so much bigger than the cuisine,” said the chef. “It’s a healing time.”

3804 W. 16th St.

773-799-0620

thesoulfoodlounge.com

Open: 4-8:30 p.m. Wednesday to Friday; noon to 8:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; closed Monday and Tuesday

Prices: Entrees, $29 to $39; desserts, $9; drinks, $5

Noise: Conversation-friendly

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restroom on single level

lchu@chicagotribune.com

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