South Side soul: Restaurant crosses rivers, engages new audience

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It’s just after 4 o’ clock on a typicallydreary February Friday afternoon in Pittsburgh, butinside the warm Victorian building at 1825 E. Carson St. Willie Boykin sat at a table, waiting on his supper and holding court with fellow customerswithin earshot.

Donning a Pirates windbreaker and a Penguins ball cap the elderly AfricanAmerican gentleman looks every bit the local native but his still thick Southern accent gives him away. He explains that he was actually en route to Detroit via Alabama back in 1964 when he made what was supposed to be a brief stopover in Pittsburgh. Instead, he met a girl and got a job at the South Side J&L Mill starting at $2.75 an hour, during a time when there was still unofficial segregation in the mills.

“That was long money,” he said of what roughly equates to a $22 hourly wage today.

He found his slice of the American Dream 54 years and three-quarters of a mile just down the road from where he’s having dinner at Carmi Soul Food, where Carleen and Michael King are looking to solidify theirs.

• Although they’d known each other since high school in the late 1980s, it wasn’t until a game night 10 years ago with a mutual friend where the couple hit it off. Carleen worked in corporate America as a trainer for Verizon, Michael had been a chef at mostly Italian and soul food restaurants around the city.

Michael said their mutual love of food led them to first do small catering gigs for their church, family and friends. Word got out, and they started fielding requests from friends of friends and then strangers, so they started a business, The Catering Kings (“before I was even a King,” Carleen notes), out of a spot on Western Avenue inAllegheny West.

That became Carmi (from the “Car” and the “Mi” of their first names) and it gained a staunch local following, as well as visits from scores of Steelers players, Gov. Tom Wolf and even Denzel Washington when he was in Pittsburgh filming “Fences.”

Their food is born from family recipes, but Carleen said, “We don’t have any huge secrets, the thing about soul food is that it’s very time consuming and labor intensive.”

At Carmi, the portions are generous and the fare is of the stick-to-your-ribs variety. To wit, the fried chicken dinner: three pieces of crispy-skin fried chicken in a light breading, sides of a silken five-cheese macaroni, moist cornbread with a little crunch on the ends, a slightly sweet sage-cornbread stuffing with house gravy, and bowl of a peppery tomato and fish stew. At $14.99 it’s enough to feed an army.

Other dishes include shrimp and grits, chicken and waffles, and pork spare ribs, in a mildly sweet sauce, that are smoked daily.

Soul food has had a long if greatly underappreciated spot in the Pittsburgh culinary scene, from the iconic Crawford Grill in the Hill District, to the bygone and beloved King James Court in Wilkinsburg and Southern Platter in East Hills to the Homewood institution Simmie’s. But like much of the city itself, they’ve remained largely segregated.

When the building that housed the King’s restaurant was sold in late 2016, they knew they’d have to start looking for a new home, and in doing so, they might tap into a new audience as well.

• So which sounds like a potentially riskier investment in a historically provincial city: Opening a soul food restaurant in a neighborhood that has never been anything but overwhelmingly white? Or flying in the face of a major local taboo and moving a successful business across the rivers to the other side of town?

The Kings flouted convention and did both, moving to new digs on the South Side.

“I think that they’re both risky — in Pittsburgh people do not cross bridges. We just don’t. If it’s across the bridge, it may as well be in Alaska. I get that. That was certainly a risk,” Carleen said.

“And then soul food — introducing a whole new kind of food — we even toyed with kind of tweaking the name to ‘Southern’ to alleviate the risk. We kicked the thought around just to make it more universal. But in the end we were like no, this is soul food, this is what we grew up on. Growing up, that’s what we called it and we thought we need to stick to that.”

But ultimately, it was the building that spoke to Carleen.

The building which dates to the early 1900s had been vacant for nearly four years. Once a brief second location of The “O,” it opened in 2005 as The Locker Room, and was owned by Steelers great Hines Ward. It reopened under new ownership in 2011 as Levelz Sports Lounge, and was a regular site of police activity before being shut down by the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office as a nuisance bar after a stabbing occurred there in 2013. It has been empty since, and had fallen into total disrepair and needed heavy renovations.

It was very mistreated — graffiti, broken toilets, dirty,” Carleen said, but “I fell in love with it — the wood and theexposed bricks.”

The aim was to restore the building to its original grandeur.

“We tried to pick things that would’ve been here when it was built — installed old-fashioned light fixtures, uncovered a lot of the wood, took paint off of the bricks to re-expose them.”

They officially opened for business Feb. 16, but a series of soft opening events this month have already exceeded expectations, even if the staff are still finding their way around the place.

“It’s been great. It’s been overwhelming. We’ve been selling out of food,” Carleen said. “Our old customers are flooding in telling us they’ve missed us and showing us love, and the South Side has been wonderful. The business owners all have been coming in to say hello. It’s very nice. We’ve been very welcomed.”

Drew Topping, proprietor of Piper’s Pub across the street, kept a keen eye on the work being done at Carmi and has the distinction of being the first customer in the new location. His pub is entering its 20th year, and he’s seen the ebbs and flows of business on Carson Street. He’s ecstatic about his new neighbors.

“Oh my God, to get a family restaurant across the street with its own clientele — they don’t script stuff like that,” Mr. Topping said. “I honestly never thought that [building] was going to be anything again, but it only takes one good thing to turn it around. It’s been great to see. They’re going to do just fine. You can tell how loved they are, and the first time I met them it was easy to understand why. I’m glad they took a chance on moving, I know how risky that could be, doing a complete neighborhood change.”

Barbara Rudiak, president of the South Side Community Council, said that residents she’s spoken to are excited to have soul food cuisine within walking distance. “The restaurant is a great addition to our neighborhood.”

The at-times grueling physical, mental and emotional work of uprooting and reopening their restaurant is done.

“We’re exhausted,” Carleen conceded.

Now the equally challenging — but fun — part begins, and Michael has no illusions about what it’ll take for Carmi to make its mark on Pittsburgh, simply saying:

“Get the place packed. Serve some great food and give people a great experience.”