By Tanya Holland, Jan Newberry
Brown Sugar Kitchen is greater than a restaurant. This soul-food outpost is a neighborhood accumulating spot, a spot to fill the stomach, and the thrashing center of West Oakland, a storied postindustrial local around the bay from San Francisco.
The eating place is a pleasant beacon on a tree-lined expressway, nestled low and cushty subsequent to a scrap-metal backyard during this Bay zone rust belt. Out entrance, consumers congregate on lengthy benches and sprawl within the grass, absorbing the light, sipping at steaming mugs of Oakland-roasted espresso, ready to snag one of many tables they glimpse throughout the swinging doorways. bargains are performed, pals are made; it is a group in motion. in brief order, they'll get their desk, their pecan-studded sticky buns, their meaty hash crowned with a quivering poached egg. Later within the day, the road grows, and the orders for chef-owner Tanya Holland's well-known chook and waffles or oyster po'boy fly. this can be while delight arrives.
Brown Sugar Kitchen, the cookbook, stars 86 recipes for re-creating the restaurant's favorites at domestic, from a thick Shrimp Gumbo to celebrated Macaroni & Cheese to a show-stopping Caramel Layer Cake with Brown Butter-Caramel Frosting. And those aren't all stick-to-your-ribs recipes: Tanya's interpretations of soul meals famous person in the community grown, seasonal produce, too, in crisp, inventive salads reminiscent of Romaine with Spring greens & Cucumber-Buttermilk Dressing and summer time Squash Succotash. Soul-food classics get a contemporary spin in terms of B-Side BBQ Braised Smoked Tofu with Roasted Eggplant and an aspect of Roasted eco-friendly Beans with Sesame-Seed Dressing. Straight-forward, unfussy yet encouraged, those are recipes you'll flip to back and again.
Rich visible storytelling unearths the foodstuff and the folk that made and make West Oakland what it really is this day. Brown Sugar Kitchen really captures the sense—and flavor—of this richly textured and scrumptious position.