A look at two restaurants —Grandma B’s and Carmi Soul Food.
Time stands still at Grandma B’s.
Just as the clock on the wall, which shows 6:31 at 9:07 a.m. is frozen in time so is the homestyle menu featuring French toast, hotcakes, omelets, grits and sandwiches. Except for two items, it has not changed in the eight years since Dorian Moorefield opened the narrow storefront restaurant at 2537 Wylie Ave. in the Hill District. He dropped the corned beef sandwich “because another guy on Fifth Avenue was making a better one” and the tuna melt since he “wasn’t excited making it any longer.” The prices have not changed much either, having gone up by 50 cents to a dollar on a few dishes.
It remains a small twostory restaurant with just enough seats — 22 in total — that the breakfast regulars all seem to know one another and catch up on the news of the morning while watching Mr. Moorefield work the grill right behind the counter.
They also heed to the three handwritten edicts on the wall: 1. We take all orders at the front counter. 2. Please be patient. 3. Please don’t distract the cook. For the most part, Mr. Moorefield says, his customers also adhere to the handwritten “fun fact”: “If you don’t like the food, stay tongue-tied.” Those who walk in with their hoodies up are asked to pull them down. “We want all the customers sitting there to feel comfortable,” he says.
Before starting Grandma B’s, Mr. Moorefield owned a clothing store, Head to Toe, in Wilkinsburg. “But then the economy crashed and no one wanted clothes anymore,” he says. So he turned to opening a restaurant, Grandma B’s, which is named after his 95-year-old grandmother Eula Beatrice McCamery of the North Side. It was initially supposed to be a Jamaican restaurant but his friend, who was to have helped out with the venture, disappeared on him. So the concept changed and a breakfast-lunch place was born with the help of another friend.
“Ahmad [Brazil] had worked at Bar Louie, Primanti Bros. and various other places. He had been in the food business for 20 years whileI had never worked in a restaurant. I learned a lot from him and that included how to cook quickly,” Mr. Moorefieldsays.
Born in Hazelwood, Mr. Moorefield grew up in a close-knit family. He remembers his grandmother was always making pies, cakes and cookies and so decided to honor his Grandma B by naming the restaurant after her. Having grown up in a close-knit family, he also got plenty of support from his parents and 11 siblings. In fact on the menu, items such as Big Al Burger and Ahmed’s Monster Fish Sandwich are named after his brothers and half brothers and one of them, Antoine Hayes, helps out with the cooking.
Mr. Moorefield attended Brashear High School in Beechview and then went to Wilberforce University in Ohio. But after 2½ years he got kicked out of school for getting into fights, and returned to Pittsburgh.
It was around that time he converted to Islam. Before that, he was raised to believe in the political and social Black Power Movement of the 1960s and ’70s that advocated racial pride and equality for all people of black descent. However, there were tenets that didn’t sit well with him. There was no belief in life after death, he says, and so there was no belief in punishment for bad actions and rewards for the good people. Also, he was against the call for being prejudiced against whites.
“It never felt right in my heart. So I went to my parents and told them that what we learned was incorrect,” Mr. Moorefield says.
He called for a meeting in his sister’s house and the family talked about the falsehoods of what they were led to believe that evening and many more that followed. Over the span of five to eight years, his parents and all this siblings became devout Muslims. Today, he attends the First Muslim Mosque in the Hill regularly every Friday. The whole experience also has drawn his father and him closer, he says.
“It was a powerful time in my life. There were distractions and negative things going on. I wanted to do something positive in my life,” he says. “It changed me to be a good neighbor, husband, father and friend.”
Grandma B’s has been one of those beacons in his life, and he attributes that to “the grace of the Lord, hard work and good food.”
He calls the restaurant a cultural center where people from every ethnicity — white, black, Indian, Pakistani, Middle Easterners and Chinese — comes to catch a bite. Some are famous. Mykelti Williamson, who played Bubba on “Forrest Gump,” dropped by Grandma B’s when he was in Pittsburgh filming “Fences.” It was Tyler Boyd, a wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals who also played for the University of Pittsburgh, who introduced many of the Pitt players to the restaurant. And, last year, Grandma B’s got on the national radar when Anthony Bourdain featured it on his show, “Parts Unknown,”on CNN.
Mr. Moorefield is quick to acknowledge his gratitude to the locals, too, saying that Grandma B’s “had a nice buzz evenbefore they all came.”
“I love my work,” he says. “More than the money, it is the love of meeting and talking to different people from different backgrounds and cultures who have stories to share.”