Tariq Nelson

As Harlem gentrifies, the diet of the citizens change as well and the Soul Food restaurants are begining to suffer. I believe that much of this is generational as many younger whites (who are gentrifying the neighborhoods) are into healthier eating.

But even younger and more educated blacks are increasingly eating healthier (especially since many of us witnessed our older relatives live their final days struggling with diabetes, hardened arteries and blood pressure problems). You just won’t find many educated people eating pig’s feet and candied yams with a pound of sugar in it. Times change and as you learn, you do better. And if McDonald’s has to make a healthier menu, so will these Soul Food restaurants. We can’t have it both ways. On the one hand we complain that our diet is terrible, but on the other that these restaurants are struggling.

Louise’s is among a handful of culinary survivors of an older Harlem, when inexpensive, family-run restaurants operated by black Southern transplants dominated the streetscape. “People are used to eating soul food the way we make it,” Julia Wilson, 63, Louise’s owner and the daughter of the restaurant’s founder, said on a recent afternoon. “A lot of people like it how I keep it, old-fashioned.”

But Louise’s is on the wrong side of several trends. Soul food is dying in Harlem and elsewhere in the city, and not being able to fill 18 seats is as good an indication as any. The reasons can be chalked up to the vagaries of contemporary city life: Changing tastes; health consciousness; the fast-food culture; and an influx of wealthier young adults — including African-Americans, long a customer base for soul food restaurants — who are more comfortable eating Indian or Thai dishes.

[...]

Among those now out of business are: 22 West, where Malcolm X used the pay phone in the back to do radio broadcasts; Adel’s, popular for its fried chicken; Pan Pan, which burned down in 2004; Wilson’s, known for its breakfasts; Wimps, revered for its smothered chicken and red velvet cake; Singleton’s, which was among the last restaurants to regularly serve pig tail stew, hog maws, and pig ears; and Wells Supper Club, best known as the restaurant credited with putting chicken and waffles on the same plate.

Onetime staples like butter beans, country fried steak, hog maws, oxtails, chicken livers, ham hocks, neck bones, and chitterlings have become uncommon, and in some cases, unavailable, in this former soul food capital.

There is nothing wrong with butter beans and oxtails. The chitterlings don’t stank when you take the membrane out (OK, that’s an inside joke)

Each month seems to bring a new casualty: Charles’s Southern Style Kitchen closed its 125th Street location this summer after the rent doubled; and House of Seafood and an outlet of Manna’s Soul Food Restaurant will most likely be shuttered by the end of summer, the casualties of a planned shopping mall, also on 125th Street.

[...]Louise’s, on Lenox Avenue, was opened in 1964 by the sister of Sylvia Woods, who started Sylvia’s two years earlier. But while Louise’s has resisted change, Sylvia’s has bucked the trend and become a soul food temple, expanding into grocery stores nationwide and onto the Internet with items as varied as canned turnip greens and shampoo.

In addition to Louise’s, Sylvia’s, and the original Charles’s Southern Style Kitchen location on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, holdouts include several newer soul food places such as Amy Ruth’s, Margie’s Red Rose Diner, a Taste of Seafood, Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too, and Londel’s.

Mobay, on 125th Street, for instance, serves collard greens with a vegetarian flavoring, instead of pork or turkey.

[...]Restaurants, including soul food places, are also operating under increased pressure from the city to offer more nutritious meals. This summer, the city banned restaurants from using artificial trans fat to prepare foods, and also required chain restaurants to post calorie counts of their menu items.

[...]The handwritten menu above the grill includes breakfasts of fried bologna, corned beef hash and a sardine sandwich. There are more choices now, but the sign remains. Three stools at the old lunch counter are missing their seats. The juke box, featuring songs by Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, has not worked for at least 10 years.

“The guys from the phone company used to come and play it,” Ms. Wilson said, smiling at the memory. “It used to be fun. We used to play it as much as the customers did.”

During a recent afternoon, the restaurant had four customers during the lunch hour. Three other people looked at the menu, but left.