Beautiful adds modern touch to soul food

Nation's Restaurant News, May 22, 1989 by Jack Hayes

Beautiful adds modern touch to soul food

Low-fat variations of age-old classics appeal to health-conscious clientele

ATLANTA -- Spurred by the nation's latest love affair with nutrition, a major soul food restaurateur on this city's black south side is modernizing an age-old ethnic menu.

Soul food advocates might shiver in their ham hocks at such a shift, but the Beautiful Restaurant, a three-unit operation here, is no longer simmering its collard greens with fatback, according to manager Ruddie Sims.

The move is luring a new flock of family patrons to Beautiful's 24-hour cafeteria and take-out unit in southwest Atlanta -- without discouraging loyal customers who prefer ethnic "soul" entrees, such as oxtail and neck bones.

Meanwhile, the clientele at the Dreamland Bar-B-Que in the university town of Tuscaloosa, Ala., is still clamoring for the same ribs and bread they've been dipping in John Bishop's spicy sauce there for the past 32 years.

"Maybe they just don't eat for the rest of the day," says Jeanette Bishop Hall, Dreamland's owner, who admits that customers bring their own salads for lunch but claims the reason is simply that the restaurant doesn't serve them.

Maybe so, but in Atlanta the soul food is apparently calling for a little less spice.

"Reducing the seasoning did it," observes Sims, who serves an average 1,400 daily covers, about two-thirds from a lunch-dinner wall menu featuring baked chicken, beef stew, and banana pudding along with short ribs and turkey wings.

Soul food--a label given to the cusine of the black rural South--has survived a time of poverty when family cooks were challenged to create dishes from the most unflattering scraps of meat, vegetable, and grain.

In fact, many popular plates labeled regional Southern, such as barbecued ribs, fried chicken, boiled greens, and sweet potato pie--were influenced by the investors of what is called "soul food" today.

Beautiful Restaurant, also operating in downtown Atlanta near the Martin Luther King Center, and in Decatur, which is east of the city, caters to a large working-class clientele that has dined since birth on this familiar fare.

But the restaurant is also serving lunch to crowds of whites and many blacks who have progressive dining-out tastes and are partial to more mainstream Southern cooking. Encouraged by those demands, Beautiful's management decided to lighten up.

"We even tried a no-salt vegetable option, but people just weren't buying it," added Sims, who confessed that barbecued beef ribs at $2.97 ($3.66 with one vegetable or $4.15 with two) are still the hottest entree.

Two dishes that are admittedly mainstream--baked and fried chicken --follow the beef ribs in second and third place. But oxtails (a beef dish) and neck bones (pork) keep soul food in Beautiful's top five.

"We could sell out of neck bones every day," Sims explains. But pork chops and beef stew are no slouches either, he claims.

Macaroni and cheese, one of the steadiest side dishes at cafeteria chains like Morrison's and Piccadilly, is also a leading plate extra at The Beautiful, according to Sims.

"We're a landmark for the home-cooked meal," says Sims, whose major chain competition includes a Red Lobster and a Long John Silver Seafood Shoppe, both on nearby thoroughfares, and a Church's Fried Chicken unit two blocks away.

S & S Cafeterias, a regional chain based in Macon, Ga., also has a store nearby.

A favorite dining spot for sports and political celebrities, the Beautiful Restaurant served Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns at the same time recently, according to Sims.

Atlanta's mayor, Andrew Young, lives down the street and also dines there regularly, as do the city's police chief and council members, Sims informs us.

"All Southern people eat pretty much the same," adds the nine-year food-service veteran whose operation is owned by a Christian Holiness denomination called the Perfect Church.

As evidence, Sims reports that his ownership has had opportunities to expand to nearby shopping malls as well as to places like Underground Atlanta, an entertainment attraction that is reopening in the city's downtown this summer.

"We've even had an offer to open in Athens [a campus town, which is home to the University of Georgia, some 60 miles east of Atlanta], but we don't want to go too far!" Sims points out.

PHOTO : From left, Ruddie Sims, manager of Beautiful Restaurant, poses with line servers Dawn

PHOTO : Lemon and Marie Glasper.