Winging it
How home chef achieved sizzling professional success with Hint of Soul
Navigating the restaurant business takes resilience, flexibility and a little bit of luck. That goes triply right now, when things look bleak and we could all use a few good success stories. ● Hint of Soul is one of them. ● A plucky little soul food joint operating out of a Tempe cloud kitchen — where multiple restaurateurs offer takeout and delivery from a shared space — Hint of Soul launched on June 2, navigating a nontraditional path to bring fried chicken, wings, Cajun pasta and seafood boils to the people. It’s hard to imagine how a restaurant could open in this environment, much less achieve instant success. ● When you talk to chef and owner Lynn Minor, it becomes easier to understand.
How Hint of Soul got its start
Hint of Soul’s fast start was a bit of a surprise, even to Minor.
“It’s been absolutely phenomenal,” Minor says. “I’ve been sold out almost every day.”
Minor has no formal kitchen training and, until a couple of years ago, no professional cooking experience. But like a lot of good cooks who make the mistake of feeding their friends, she was goaded into making a business out of it.
“Everybody’s like, ‘You really need to do something,’ and I’m like, ‘You all are my friends, you’ve got to love my food.’ I didn’t really think much into it,” Minor says. “And then I just said, you know what, I’m going to go for it.”
While working as a project manager for a health care company, Minor launched Hint of Soul as a side business in November 2018, earning some of her first customers through a friend who was a dancer for the Phoenix Mercury.
“He posted about me every chance he got,” Minor says. “So then Brittney Griner reached out to me, and I would cook for her, and then I started picking up some of the other players, and this all started from me selling plates out of my house.”
The business grew so quickly that Minor started turning down gigs. So when the pandemic struck and her employer shut down, she took the bad news in stride, using the capital she’d built up catering to sign on with a cloud kitchen she found through an Instagram ad.
“You know what, I was ready for a change,” Minor says. “It fell in my lap, and it was fortunate.”
Why you have to try the fried chicken wings
The Tempe cloud kitchen that houses Hint of Soul, along with a couple dozen other tenants, would blend right into its snoozy commercial neighborhood if not for the food trucks that line the parking lot and the steady stream of delivery drivers.
Minor’s menu — available for pickup or delivery via all of the usual apps — starts with the fried chicken, and her fried chicken is great.
Wings are her thing, and the sauces are solid. A pungent, garlicky butter sauce is finished with a dusting of Parmesan cheese, and her signature peach Hennessy wings play like a sweet and fruity Asian chile sauce with a little whiff of cognac. But I find myself drawn to her Chicago sweet heat, a dry rub with a swipe of oil that’s at once salty, hot and laced with sugar.
That said, Minor doesn’t just sling wings. The deep golden crust of her fried legs and thighs might not look particularly distinctive, but sink in your teeth and you’ll find that it’s beautifully seasoned, perked up with just a hint of spice and a nice, salty tail. The fry is very good, crisp even after some travel, quickly yielding to a core of juicy dark meat.
What to expect on the rest of the menu
“My mac and cheese has been with me for a long time,” Minor says. “I won’t let go of it. Nobody has the recipe. Not even my children.”
It’s really good. I’m not going to hazard a guess about the composition of her seven-cheese blend, but the mac has some welcome texture, not to mention a chewy caramelized crust around the edges and a distinctively sharp flavor.
Her “Slammin’ Yams,” meanwhile, are stewed soft with an abundance of butter and cinnamon, and the turkey-flecked collards are straight-up excellent, a little tart and spicy with perfect bite.
Minor’s “Kickin Kajun” pasta, a decadent mess of cream and Cajun spice, is a bit of a tricky dish for travel. But I was impressed by just how well her Saturday seafood boil made the trip. Potatoes, corn, a whole link of smoked sausage and shrimp or crab clusters are drenched in a garlicky butter sauce that goes down slick and easy with a little chile warmth. Most impressively, the shell-on shrimp were tender and sweet despite a long drive in a sealed container.
If Minor has her way, the cloud kitchen isn’t her endgame. She hopes to parlay the delivery business into a food truck or a small, traditional restaurant. But for the time being, standing pat is working out awfully well.
“It’s just been amazing,” Minor says. “I really can’t complain. I’ve been blessed.”