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The 212

The grande dame of New York soul food, now run by a new generation of the Woods dynasty, has been feeding the city, and its most distinguished visitors, for six decades.

The family tradition continues at Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem. From left: the founder Sylvia Woods’s grandson chef Marcus Woods; her grandson, and the company’s C.E.O., K. De’Sean Woods; and her son, and the business’s former C.E.O. and owner, Kenneth Woods.Credit...Chase Middleton

A look at Sylvia's Restaurant of Harlem and the legacy that a grandmother left for her prosperity. To say that Sylvia’s in Harlem is a landmark would be an understatement. When the late Sylvia Woods opened her namesake restaurant in 1962, she put in motion a legacy that continues today.

From the Civil Rights movement to 9/11, Sylvia’s has served its customers as a place of community, gathering, and hope when they didn’t know where else to turn. Sylvia herself believed — and her granddaughter still believes — that comfort and healing are cooked right into their fried chicken.

Nov. 16, 2022

It’s a chilly gray Monday in New York and rain is sluicing down the front windows of the building at 328 Malcolm X Boulevard but inside there is an air of communal contentment. I’m having lunch with a couple of friends (one old, one new) at Sylvia’s, the venerable restaurant that has been at this location since 1962, and the buzz of amiable conversation that fills the space dims only — into murmurs of anticipation — when orders arrive at tables: Fried chicken, the meat tender and juicy beneath a crackly golden coat with just a hint of spice; macaroni and cheese as rich and gooey as in a child’s dream; deep green collards; tiny pale lima beans; sticky orange-gold candied yams. Just as the restaurant’s founder, Sylvia Woods, intended when she opened the place, it serves food not only to satiate hunger and please the taste buds but also satisfy the soul.

On a black awning that runs across the facade a purple logo announces, “Sylvia’s Restaurant, Queen of Soul Food.” Once just a tiny luncheonette, it now has multiple areas including three dining rooms and an enclosed terrace — enough space to seat about 400 people. The original counter — which will soon reopen as a full-service bar carrying locally produced wine and spirits — still stands, and arranged on a table nearby are copies of Woods’s two books: “Sylvia’s Soul Food,” published in 1992, and “Sylvia’s Family Soul Food Cookbook,” a 1999 collection of recipes that also serves as a culinary memoir of the South. “Hemingway, South Carolina, where my husband, Herbert, and I grew up and have our roots, probably has more great cooks per square inch than you would find in most cooking schools,” she writes in the introduction, referring to the small rural town where she spent her childhood. “We learned from our mothers and grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbors.” Hanging on the walls throughout the restaurant are photographs of just some of the celebrities who have come to Sylvia’s over the past six decades because they understood that Woods, who died in 2012, was herself one of those great cooks: Muhammad Ali, Diana Ross, Bill Clinton and every New York mayor going back to John Lindsay.

“For candidates interested in the blessing of Harlem kingmakers, Sylvia’s provides a welcome environment and legitimacy,” says one of my lunchtime companions, Curtis Archer, the president of the Harlem Community Development Corporation, an organization that supports local businesses and residents. “Before his first presidential election I saw Barack Obama having lunch with the Rev. Al Sharpton here.”

When our own orders of fried chicken and waffles appear — and are duly bathed in glistening syrup — the conversation turns to the origins of the dish. Accounts vary, but most agree it was created in 1930s Harlem, possibly by Dickie Wells at his club on West 133rd Street, and was popularized at J.T. Wells’s nearby supper club in the latter part of the decade. The story goes that jazz musicians and their audiences would leave the nearby clubs  too late for dinner and too early for breakfast, and so the filling, savory-sweet combination was exactly what they wanted.

Like so many culinary institutions of 20th-century Harlem, both Wellses’ are long gone, but Sylvia’s remains. According to Tren’ness Woods, 50, one of Woods’s 18 grandchildren and the restaurant’s senior vice president for development, it has lasted, in part, because it was “the largest minority employer in Harlem for many years, and always a safe space for the community — for everyone, rich or poor, Black or white, famous or down on their luck.” 

Later, Kenneth Woods, 69, Tren’ness’s father and the third of Sylvia Woods’s four children, stops by our table. The restaurant has always been a family affair: Fourteen members of the dynasty currently work at the company. Kenneth became C.E.O. in 2003, and last year he turned over the business to his son, K. De’Sean Woods, 35. A compact man in a dark blue quilted vest and blue-and-white checked shirt, Kenneth looks every bit the dedicated fisherman he’s been for decades, since learning to catch catfish, trout and tilefish in Hemingway, where he spent time with his grandparents as a child.

Sylvia Woods was born in Hemingway in 1926, and her father died a few days later. In 1929, her mother, Julia Pressley, left Woods, her only child, with her grandmother and other relatives, joining the Great Migration, the exodus of roughly six million Black Americans from the South to the North, West and Midwest between 1910 and 1970. Like so many people who arrived in New York, Pressley was looking for a better life for herself and her children — but she kept a plot of land in Hemingway and returned often, later building her own farm there.

At 18, Woods married Herbert Woods, whom she had known since childhood, and in the 1940s they settled in Harlem. She worked in a hat factory in Queens and as a waitress and manager at various places in Harlem — including Johnson’s Luncheonette, the tiny lunch counter that she bought, in 1962, with all her savings as well as a loan from her mother, who took out a second mortgage on her farm to help. (Woods was able to repay her mother just a year after opening.) During the restaurant’s early years, Herbert did the food shopping and the couple’s older children pitched in. Woods, who worked all hours, would put her younger children, when they were babies, in the bread warming drawers to nap.

It is sometimes said, though others disagree, that the writer Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) coined the term “soul food” in a 1962 essay of the same name. During the 1920s, because of the Great Migration — and because developers and landlords had pushed Black New Yorkers out of other neighborhoods — Harlem became the Black capital of the country, and newly arrived Southerners brought with them their recipes, and the skills required to make them. In the rural South, families like Woods’s cooked what they raised or fished or hunted or grew or picked: chicken, shrimp, venison, okra, lima beans, black-eyed peas, peaches, pecans, pears. And in Harlem — at home, and in the many cafes, restaurants and stands that sprang up in the neighborhood in the 20th century — Southerners kept their culinary traditions alive.

Sylvia's Restaurant in Harlem, NYC, has been an iconic soul food restaurant and cultural institution for 57 years. We learned to cook up their famous ribs and fried chicken and waffles from the grandson of the founder herself, Sylvia Woods

“Can you imagine what it was like to be a Black woman of that era?” says my other tablemate, Musa Jackson, the editor in chief of Ambassador Digital Magazine and a co-founder of the Harlem Festival of Culture. “How hard it was to run a business?” Jackson was born in Harlem and when he was a child, a trip to Sylvia’s was a great treat. “This restaurant was always in my consciousness, even as a little boy,” he says. Jackson was also, in his words, “the first successful Black male model from Harlem.” He was discovered at Area, the 1980s-era New York nightclub, and soon found himself walking the runway for Jean Paul Gaultier and other designers in Paris. Over the years, he brought his European and downtown friends to eat at Sylvia’s.

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