Dining Out - Sunday Supper

Supper Soul Food at the Southern Café

By Stett Holbrook
Photography by Bob Kuzmeski

Oakland’s premier soul food restaurant is called The Southern Café, but in heart and spirit, it’s still Lady Esther’s. The Southern Café has been a fixture in the city’s Dimond District since 1999. But before that, the restaurant was known as Lady Esther’s, a tiny outpost for Southern cooking that occupied a 30-seat storefront on E. 14th Street for 27 years. Esther Clay, a native of Louisiana, ran the business, using recipes for fried chicken, ox tails, chitterlings, black-eyed peas and corn bread that she learned from her mother.

Lady Esther passed away in 1991, and her daughter Deimentrius Clay took over the business and later moved the restaurant to its current location on MacArthur Boulevard. She renamed the restaurant, but the menu and recipes haven’t changed. That explains why customers followed Lady Esther’s food and spirit across town to its new home at The Southern Café. A painting of the smiling matriarch hangs on the wall.The rest of the walls are covered with photos of musicians and athletes who’ve eaten there or had the restaurant cater their concerts and games. Clay, who runs the business with the help of her two sisters and brother, grew up in her mother’s restaurant.“It’s the only job I’ve had,” she says.

The hours are long, and her feet hurt sometimes, but Clay says she never tires of hearing customers tell her how much they enjoyed their meals as they push away from the table, full and happy. “That’s the highlight of my day,” she says.

She must hear that a lot. A meal at The Southern Cafe’ is like Sunday supper.Many customers know each other, and it’s not uncommon to see friends and families join hands around the table to say grace before digging into some serious eating.

The restaurant is best known for its fried chicken ($10). If there’s a better version anywhere in the East Bay, I haven’t had it. The chicken is fried to order, and the crispy, flaky crust has barely a trace of grease. Inside, the meat is moist and steaming hot and runs clear with rich juice. If you haven’t had fried chicken for a long time, it’s time to come home to the real thing.

Clay says the recipe is deceptively simple, but she isn’t about to give it away. “My mom wouldn’t like that,” she says with a chuckle.

I wanted to try the ox tails ($11.75), but they were sold out on two visits. Second to the fried chicken, Clay says the ox tails are a popular dish.

I more than made do with the fried catfish ($12). The snowy white, flaky fish is battered in a cornmeal crust that’s crunchy and light and keeps the fish sweet and moist. Like the fried chicken, it’s anything but greasy.

You’d have to travel well south of the Mason-Dixon line to find breaded pork chops with gravy ($11.75). At The Southern Café, the Texas-size portion wears a thick mantle of batter yet remains moist and tender. I guarantee you’ll need a doggie bag for this one.

The one less-than-satisfying dish was the gravy-smothered short ribs ($12). The ribs were fat and meaty but required a little too much knife work and jaw muscle for what should be a fork-tender dish.And while the dark brown gravy was artery-blocking rich and delicious, the beef itself didn’t have much flavor.

For me, what really ties together a meal at The Southern Café are the side dishes. You get a choice of three with your meal, and the table soon starts to look like you’ve sat down to holiday dinner. While my collard greens were a little on the salty side, they were still great. Even better was the smoked turkey-accented boiled cabbage. Because many of her customers don’t eat pork, Clay switched from ham hocks to smoked turkey to flavor many dishes, and the results are just as flavorful.The saucy red beans and black-eyed peas both have a meaty, smoky richness that you would never guess came from turkey.

If you can get it before it sells out, order the macaroni and cheese. With large curds of cheese and rich, buttery flavor it’s great. Then there’s the creamed corn and the buttery-rich, cinnamon-spiked yams. Although you may have trouble making room for it, don’t miss the corn bread.The muffin-shaped rolls are cooked to order from a scratch-made recipe.The bottoms of the rolls are caramelized-crisp and inside the bread is light, moist and sweet.

Dessert is probably pushing it at this point but you’ve got to do it. The specialty of the house is the apple-peach cobbler ($3.75). I liked the pecan pie ($2.75), a delicious amalgam of brown sugar, nuts and butter served in a tiny tart tin. You can order your dessert to go, but you might end up eating it in the car—like I did.

One final bit of advice: don’t come to The Southern Cafe’ too hungry, especially on weekends. The wait for your food can be long. I saw one couple get up and leave. But that would be a mistake. All the food is cooked to order so it can take a while. The restaurant also does a thriving take-out business, so if you walk in with a growling stomach, you might start gnawing your tablecloth before your food arrives. A better strategy is to gauge your hunger and come in about 20 minutes or so before your appetite hits its peak. It’s worth the wait.

“We are not a fast-food restaurant,” says Clay. “We cook with love. We don’t just rush it and get it to you.”

Lady Esther would be proud.

The Details:

THE SOUTHERN CAFÉ. Soul food. The restaurant is open noon-8:45 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday and 1 p.m.-9:45 p.m. Friday and Saturday. 2000 MacArthur Blvd., (510) 261-1404. CC $$