The search for simple food

I was 5 years old the first time my mother sent me to the corner store to fetch a loaf of bread.

It was 1991 and a loaf of Stroehmann butter top wheat cost $1.49 cents. I’d only begun school at L.P. Hill Elementary School in Strawberry Mansion that year, but I was a sharp kid who could count. My mother gave me some sound advice that went something like this: “You betta not come back without my change, and count it before you leave the store, too.”

We lived in a beautiful brownstone building, the façade the color of merlot, just three houses in from the northwest corner of Diamond Street at 31st Street in North Philly. Across from us on the south side of the street was a clear, empty lot. My mother watched me through the third-floor window until I returned.

The tiny store was owned by a Korean family, in a small brick building on the corner. It had a green door with a central window that was covered by a steel crosshatched gate and padlocked at its hinge. The building actually had two windows, both covered with vinyl ads for snacks and Newport cigarettes. Inside the store was a vending machine shaped like a cage with an anthropomorphic talking parrot inside, and three or four rows of groceries, snacks, and beverages. I purchased the bread as quickly as I could and returned home just as fast.

I felt large that day. I was happy to be trusted and to feel a sense of independence. There was joy in feeding and nurturing my family, an extension of my mother’s hand.

After that, my mother would often send me to the store for breakfast cereal or last-minute dinner items like canned goods or frozen vegetables. I’d buy lunch meat and cheese, and of course plenty of bread. We also bought sodas, snacks, and juice when we could.

These are fond memories, but sometimes I wish my life was more simple. Simple, like I what was taught as a professional cook.

Simple, like good olive oil in Tuscany. Simple, like Alice Waters’ lemon trees and tomato fields, or even simpler like canned foie gras in Strasbourg.

I learned about making simple food by working in some of the most exciting and challenging restaurants in Philadelphia and New York. All of the chefs I have worked for commanded the simplest brunoise cuts of carrots next to flawlessly cooked pieces of striped bass simply cut into uniform four ounce squares. I churned out unfussy dishes night after night made from very simple ingredients sourced from local farmers.

Society never allowed me to believe that our food, hood food — Black food — was simple. Biscuits from white Gold Medal flour and Land O’ Lakes butter ain’t simple. Biscuits were made easy by Pillsbury. They became a bit more complex with Crescents, and the intricate rolling of a perfectly mispronounced French pastry.

But even that was simpler than a pan of cornbread and butter.

What I grew up on was certainly more complex. We had to decide whether to walk to Save-A-Lot or Murray’s, or much farther to ShopRite for our food. We were tasked with the long trek up Wayne Avenue from Logan Street to what was then SuperFresh Supermarket on Chelten Avenue. My brother Cassim and I plodded, heavily in embarrassment — and the weight of a jug of coins to pour into the CoinStar so that we could exchange them for cash — to buy Tyson’s chicken for dinner. A perfect dish often began with our feet and our sweat. That’s not simple.

We moved to Germantown when I was 7 years old into a three-story home with my mother who was a single parent at the time. She often chose the lesser of a myriad of overprocessed, oversaturated, overpriced evils that she jokingly called “gross-eries.”

She knew we were in a food hell, everyday she used the might of her food stamps to war with the devil. She wanted simple food, the highly nutritious kind. We ate less of it but I know we were healthier because of the quality.

She’d travel by foot or by bus with her children in tow outside of our neighborhood to places like Produce Junction to feed us.

She’d also buy large bulk meat orders from nearby halal butchers in our neighborhood. These orders would include cuts of meat one might exclusively find in the hood, like turkey chops, butter steaks, short ribs cut across the bone, lamb shoulder blade chops, and chuck steak. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I’d heard of a bone-in ribeye or knew that lamb could come in lollipop form.

None of the food that was familiar to me was simple. It was all complicated.

As a chef I learned that simple food is grown in the garden of someone’s grandmother’s provincial home — not sold over the counter at the corner store. How simple is a bag of rice exchanged for gov’ment dollars through bulletproof plexiglass, while blunt cigar-shaped bubble gum the color of Easter vibrates in your peripheral vision?

Buying a bag of rice shouldn’t be more complex than its carbs.

When I decided to open Honeysuckle Provisions as a grocery store, it was to simplify this exchange. My wife, Cybille Aude-Tate and I wanted to close the distance between simple food, necessity, and desire.

We wanted to employ sustainable food and social practices at every level of our business and to do it all with humility and gratitude to those who have laid the foundation.

We are producing breads from Black heritage ingredients, reimagining the hoagie roll, and upcycling cheddar to make Cheez-It-like crackers. We are reclaiming junk food and replacing the overprocessed groceries we were forced to choose with snacks and treats made with healthier ingredients — and care.

We are choosing vegetables that are raised by legacy farmers that we know personally, like Teddy and Faith Moynihan of Plowshare Farm, the Bartee Family of KJ Organics, and Christa Barfied of Farmer Jawn.

Our meat products are being produced from animals raised by legacy Black farmers, including Smith Poultry and Mr. James Beef, whose families escaped state-sanctioned violence in the South during the Great Migration and settled in South Jersey.

Cybille and I created Honeysuckle Provisions to be an Afrocentric grocery cafe, where children who cross the street while their parents watch can buy healthy groceries, and eat delicious food that connects them to Black growers, producers, and our culture.

What’s more simple than that?

Omar Tate is the chef and co-owner of Honeysuckle Provisions at 310 S. 48th St. in Philadelphia. @honeysucklephl

My Philadelphia Story is a column about what it means to live in and love the Philadelphia region. From distinct customs to neighborhood rivalries to iconic landmarks saturated with personal memories, it’s a column about the city we love, and the city that loves us back — in its own distinctly Philly way.