Sylvia Woods, 1926–2012

last updated 8 January 2015

Much of Harlem’s public life has for five decades revolved around Sylvia Woods’s soul-food restaurant. Sylvia’s began in the 1960s as a gathering place for African-American luminaries such as Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Jesse Jackson Sr. Since then patrons of all races and backgrounds, including tourists from Japan and Germany, have streamed in for her plates of fried chicken, melt-in-your-mouth corn bread, and collard greens. Woods’s only culinary failure was an attempt to offer lower-calorie items in the 1990s. “We had lots of salads and stuff,” she said. “And it went to waste. When people come here, they got in their mind what they want.”

Woods’s rise to the top of the New York dining scene “was all the more remarkable considering that she had never been inside a restaurant before moving to the city in the 1930s,” said The Washington Post. Born in Hemingway, S.C., to a farming couple, she learned to cook from her mother and grandmother, who taught her to roast sweet potatoes using cinders from the chimney. Woods moved to New York as a teenager, eager to escape the prejudice of the South. “I didn’t understand why people would not let me drink out of the same water fountain,” she said, “but they would trust me to cook for them.”

Woods began working as a waitress at Johnson’s Luncheonette in Harlem in the 1950s. She bought the restaurant in 1962 with help from her mother, who mortgaged the family farm, said the New York Daily News. Her first menu included fried chicken, collard greens, and a “poor man’s plate” of pig tails, lima beans, and rice. Those down-home offerings transformed the restaurant into a fixture of the predominantly black neighborhood and earned Woods “the sobriquet the Queen of Soul Food,” said The New York Times. Woods ran the business—which expanded to include a line of bottled sauces, dessert mixes, and cookbooks—until her retirement at age 80. “I have a special table where I can sit and watch everybody when they come in,” she said in 1999. “When they take a spoonful and smile, then I bow my head and think, ‘Yeah, I got it. I got it.’”