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RUTH TAM
Chef Edward Lee runs Succotash, a fancy Southern restaurant in downtown D.C. But he’s not
originally from the South.

EDWARD LEE
I knew nothing about Southern food. Probably the extent of my Southern food knowledge was
fried chicken, KFC.

PATRICK FORT
He was an adult the first time he went to Louisville. Edward was there for the Kentucky Derby,
mint julep in hand, taking in the city and the South - and he was immediately hooked.

RUTH TAM
He loved it - the pageantry, the culture, and obviously, the food. Edward grew up cooking
Korean food with his parents and grandma in their Brooklyn home. But he realized the flavors,
textures and cooking techniques he found in Kentucky reminded him of the food he had back in
New York.

EDWARD LEE
Collard greens reminds me of a seaweed soup I ate as a kid, grits remind me of congee.

PATRICK FORT
Edward loved Louisville so much that he moved there, opening one restaurant, then a second
and a third, putting his own spin on southern food.

RUTH TAM
Except, Edward says there’s some debate over whether Louisville is really the South at all.

EDWARD LEE
Louisville lives in this sort of borderline existence. Some of its the South - and even people in
Louisville will tell you - some of its the South. Some of it’s kind of the Midwest. Some of it’s a
little bit Pennsylvania Dutch. Some of it is international. And so, it has an identity crisis.

PATRICK FORT
And he felt the same confusion when he moved to D.C. to open Succotash. He’s even
developed his own litmus test for D.C.’s identity.

EDWARD LEE
If I’m in a room full of people, I always go, say, “Hey, how many people think this is a Southern
city?” A third of the people raise their hand. And then I go, “How many people think this is a
Northern city?” And a third of the people raise their hand. And I go, “How many people have no
idea what I’m talking about?” And a third of the people raise their hands.

PATRICK FORT
I get it! D.C. has kind of a split identity. It’s south of the Mason-Dixon line for example, but we’re
part of the big Northeast megalopolis.

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RUTH TAM
Yeah. We’re missing a lot of the stuff people recognize as Southern, even if it’s a bit of a
stereotype. Sure, you can order grits at a local diner, but where are the Waffle Houses? Where
do people start drinking sweet tea and saying “y’all”? This is Dish City from WAMU. I’m Ruth
Tam.

PATRICK FORT
And I’m Patrick Fort.

There are a handful of foods in D.C. that feel Southern. We love blue crabs and fried fish in a
way that reminds me of how New Orleanians love crawfish and gumbo. But I personally don’t
think of our city in terms of its relationship to the Mason-Dixon line, or the way history has gifted
D.C. a pretty complicated legacy.

RUTH TAM
On this episode: what can D.C.’s Southern and soul food tell us about how we deal with the
city’s heritage and history?

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PATRICK FORT
We start with a field trip to Succotash, Edward Lee’s D.C. restaurant. I think the place “feels”
Southern, at least to this Pennsylvanian. It’s inside an old bank so it’s got these high ceilings
and wrought iron railings. Super historic looking.

SERVER and RUTH TAM

S: Any sides for the table?
R: Can we get the collards, kimchi and country ham?

RUTH TAM
We order fried catfish, and two types of chicken to share with our friend Gabe.

GABE
I am a big fan of fried chicken in general. Because it is a sort of like, special treat food to me. It’s
really hard to beat fried chicken that is done really well, I think.

RUTH TAM
Gabe moved to D.C. from Louisville, where he lived for years. He often writes about Southern
culture for Bitter Southerner.

GABE
It’s really difficult to say, I think, what is or isn’t Southern.

PATRICK FORT
Some of Gabe’s first impressions of what was quintessentially South came from history books.

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GABE
I remember there was a moment when I got really into history and really into Civil War history
and really confused about the celebrations of the South based on everything that I had read.

PATRICK FORT
He grew up in the “Land of Lincoln,” in Miscoutah, Illinois, the part of the state that’s closer to St.
Louis than Chicago.

GABE
I remember being in high school and there being lots of Confederate flag bumper stickers on
cars. And I always thought that was kind of funny, that you’d have a “Land of Lincoln” license
plate and then a rebel flag right next to it. In my mind, that identification with, not with the South
as a region, but with the sort of the rebels and the Confederacy, was really really discomforting.

RUTH TAM
I grew up in northern Illinois. Slavery and racism certainly aren’t limited to the South, but the first
time I remember learning about the South as a region, it was in reference to the Constitutional
Convention and how the Southern states fought for the Three-Fifths Compromise -- using
enslaved people to boost their representation, all the while denying them basic human rights
and holding onto slavery for nearly another century.

PATRICK FORT
For people that grew up outside of the geographic and cultural South, the region is defined
exclusively by slavery -- despite the fact that its legacy affects us all.

GABE
I feel like when I first started seeing Southern restaurants, like cool Southern restaurants rising
up, I got really upset because I was like, “What are you trying to do here? Like are you trying to
completely, are you trying to celebrate the South which has a lot of baggage and is gonna take
a whole lot to unpack here? Or are you trying to separate the food totally from the South?”

RUTH TAM
At Succotash, Edward Lee’s menu reflects his hazy, overlapping idea of what “the South” is. His
food highlights ingredients native to the region or dishes tied to newer Southern communities.
His food isn’t strictly “white Southerner,” it’s intersectional

PATRICK FORT
That’s in stark contrast to celebrity chefs who remove the context from Southern cooking so
they can make it part of their personal brand instead.

GABE
Like who’s to say if we look like, hundreds of years from now, would people look at what Paula
Deen does and think, like, “That was Southern food.”

RUTH TAM

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Perhaps it’s easier for someone like Edward Lee, someone who’s not from the South and
doesn’t necessarily claim it, to experiment with traditional food. It kind of makes sense? I mean,
moving someplace new doesn’t mean you assume all responsibility for all the legacy and history
that a place has.

PATRICK FORT
But the thing is, D.C.’s Southern legacy isn’t exactly distant history. Let’s go down a bit of a
rabbit hole into the wide world of sports.

This is Ralph B. Young of the Washington Redskins, introducing “Hail to the Redskins!”
(“Hail to the Redskins” plays)

PATRICK FORT
It’s 1965, Washington’s football team is six-and-eight. And James Blackistone sits down to write
a letter to Edward Williams, the team’s acting president. Here’s his son Kevin, reading the letter.

KEVIN BLACKISTONE
I am writing this letter to you on behalf of the thousands of Negro supporters and fans of the
Washington Redskins.

PATRICK FORT
James Blackistone was a big fan of the team, but the team’s marching band, he said, was a
major problem.

KEVIN BLACKISTONE
Sunday after Sunday they include in their repertoire “Dixie,” a song that is most repulsive to
Negros.

(“Dixie” plays)

PATRICK FORT
The performance also included Confederate flags, instead of the American flag.

KEVIN BLACKISTONE
Their rendition of this composition is greeted by boos and catcalls from the Negros and in the
stands sometimes causes racist epithets to be made.

PATRICK FORT
Washington was the last team in the NFL to integrate, only a few years before James
Blackistone wrote his letter. They held out because the team’s owner openly did not want black
players on his team. The N.A.A.C.P. protested over the team’s lack of integration, and then neo-
Nazis counterprotested its integration. But “Dixie” --and the flags-- remained. And Blackistone
had had enough.

KEVIN BLACKISTONE

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Let’s make the Negro patron feel really welcome in 1965 and not accept his $6 admission fee,
and then publicly insult him. Very truly yours, James B. Blackistone.

PATRICK FORT
The team still embraced symbols of the Confederacy long after the Civil War had ended.

RUTH TAM
I mean, I knew the team’s name was problematic, but I didn’t know the specific ways D.C.
fought civil rights and integration like other parts of the south.

PATRICK FORT
Williams, the acting team president, responded to James Blackistone’s complaint. The team
stopped playing “Dixie” in their fight song, but even now, the city’s connection to this part of
Southern history is still very present. Here’s James’ son Kevin, who read the letter for us.

KEVIN BLACKISTONE
Oh, D.C. Is definitely the South. I mean look, you can go to Georgetown University, right on M
Street before you go across the Key Bridge, there’s a small liquor store. Dixie Liquors. It’s still
there. This is very...this is the South.

PATRICK FORT
It’s part of D.C.’s old connections to the South that are not as nice to talk about or acknowledge.

PSYCHE WILLIAMS-FORSON
I think, in recent history, people forget D.C. is the South, is what I would say.

RUTH TAM
University of Maryland professor Psyche Williams researches food and the history of African
American migration in the 19th and 20th centuries. If someone tells her D.C. is not the South,
she’s got one response.

PSYCHE WILLIAMS-FORSON
Well what are you eating in D.C., comes the question. Right? And where are you eating?

RUTH TAM
If you grew up in parts of Black Washington -- you may have eaten at a meat and three. You
may have dug into fried croaker or whiting at your corner diner, and it may have called itself soul
food, for decades!

PATRICK FORT
But white Washingtonians might’ve had a different experience. Food historian Michael Twitty
saw this firsthand when he was growing up in D.C.

MICHAEL TWITTY
Well we were in the home ec class and our teacher asked us, “What do you eat for dinner? what
do you eat for dinner what do you drink with dinner?” All the black kids go, “Oh, Kool-Aid, iced

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tea.” And the white kids were astonished, they were just like “Oh, well we have milk and we
have this.” And we were just sitting and it was kind of almost self-segregated. And we were just
kind of nodding in agreement that we had never touched veal. We never ate brussels sprouts.
What the hell is that? You know, we didn’t eat these things. And they just started saying all
these foods that we just looked each other like, “No! No one eats that! No human eats that!” I
mean, and it was, it was the most ethnocentric moment I had ever had, outside of being in the
middle of it in Northeast D.C.

RUTH TAM
Michael wrote a book called “The Cooking Gene,” about African American culinary history.

MICHAEL TWITTY
Black migrants don’t often get enough credit for being the bearers of Southern culture and
Southern mores and values and ideas about what is good, what is bad, what’s tasty, what’s not
tasty.

RUTH TAM
What we know as Southern food has deep roots in African cooking traditions. Sweet potatoes?
Early enslaved people needed a substitute for cassava from West Africa. Once in America, what
varied most among cooks were the ingredients and preparation. The fancier ingredients --a nice
cut of meat, or the flour needed to bake a cake-- those were reserved for white plantation
owners, while enslaved African Americans and poor white Southerners made do with the foods
seen as “inferior” -- fattier cuts of pork, sweet potatoes, black eyed peas.

PSYCHE WILLIAMS-FORSON
Food becomes very divisive, right? And it presents histories that are very ugly and histories that
are very revealing in ways that we often don’t want to confront.

(Southern guitar music plays)

RUTH TAM
After the Civil War, many African Americans migrated out of the rural South and into cities like
D.C. They brought a lot of elements of Southern cooking with them, but retrofitted some of the
recipes for small apartments and hectic city life. Restaurants and street vendors started serving
“down home cooking” in the early 1900s, offering a taste of the rural South to anyone who didn’t
have space to prepare like a whole fried chicken, or perhaps didn’t own an oven to bake a pie.
Most of these businesses were owned and operated by African Americans.

MICHAEL TWITTY
I mean we have to jump right into it. The idea of Southern is often held captive by white people.

RUTH TAM
“Down home cooking” became fashionable just as the civil rights era began, in the 1950s and
60s. And by then? It was time for a new name: soul food.

PATRICK FORT

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After the break, we go out for soul food at one of the oldest diners in D.C.

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PATRICK FORT
The walls of the Florida Avenue Grill in Northwest D.C. are covered with so many photos that
they might as well be wallpaper -- the faces of everyone from former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry
to soul singer Jesse James.

IMAR HUTCHINS
Well, we’re sitting at the booth that Martin Luther King used to plan the March on Washington.

RUTH TAM
We’re talking with the Grill’s owner Imar Hutchins, and we’re in a booth in the middle of the
restaurant where a little plaque notes Dr. King’s historic visit.

PATRICK FORT
The Florida Avenue Grill opened in 1944, and claims to be the longest-continually open black-
owned business in the United States.

PATRICK FORT
The grill serves soul food, a term that originated during the black power movement in the mid-
twentieth century. It was used to reclaim the role Black Americans played in forming Southern
food.

IMAR HUTCHINS
It’s basically the food that was the food that was eaten by the slaves. That’s what it’s known as.
The food of the African American historical cultural experience.

RUTH TAM
On the menu there are plenty of foods that you could classify as both soul and Southern: sweet
tea, grits, collard greens, fried chicken. But there are a couple that feels distinctly “soul” -- like
pig’s feet and chitlins.

PATRICK FORT
Chitlins became a defining feature of “down home” and later soul food. But to understand why,
you have to understand that chitlins are a lot of work! You have to clean each pig intestine
meticulously, soak them, boil them. The whole process does not fit neatly into a small city
apartment. So if you lived in a city and you wanted chitlins you probably had to go out to eat.
And the restaurant you went to? Was probably a soul food spot like the Florida Avenue Grill.

IMAR HUTCHINS
We lose on every plate that we sell. And we just still sell them...we may be the only place that
still sells them in town. We had a problem getting them at all. We thought we were going to have
to organize a truck and go down South to buy a pallet or something of them because people

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stopped carrying them. And now it’s, you know, so we have supply chain issues that nobody
else has.

RUTH TAM
Serving chitlins is a conscious choice for Imar. It’s part of preserving the Florida Avenue Grill’s
identity as a soul food joint.

IMAR HUTCHINS
And that’s what our ancestors did, they took things that didn’t necessarily taste good, or like the
worst cuts of the meat and the less desirable foods and put their soul into it and made it taste
good anyway. You know I just see us kind of like stewards of that tradition.

RUTH TAM
Imar sees himself as a steward of the neighborhood too. When he bought the Grill, he took its
parking lot and turned it into condos. The grill needs reinforcements if it’s going to last for years
to come. But when it comes to what it looks and feels like, he keeps it the same.

IMAR HUTCHINS
But it was important to me to keep the Grill. And too, because of its importance in D.C. history,
Black history, the continued source of employment for people and you know, I think it’s kind of
an example of the fact that development doesn’t have to mean destruction of what was there
before.

RUTH TAM
I think it’s easy to forget when you look at the food on your plate how many people have been
cooking the ingredients and the dish. And in the case of Southern and soul food? They’ve both
been through a lot. D.C. has this split Southern identity because even though it’s Southern
through its history, it’s now more seen as global and metropolitan -- and therefore removed from
a regional identity.

PATRICK FORT
Living in this city allows us a certain amount of distance from the slavery and racism that a lot of
people think of when they think “South” -- because that definition is based on the rural South
and plantations. But the South --the region and the food-- has always been more nuanced than
the narrative people assign it.

EDWARD LEE
Southern food is the convergence of three big cultures: European culture, African culture, and
the Native American culture. Only one of those cultures got to write the history of it.

PATRICK FORT
Chef Edward Lee, who owns Succotash.

EDWARD LEE

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So when you talk about an accurate history, there is none. And I think that’s what we’re trying to
do right now, and I think that’s what people like Michael Twitty are writing about right now.
They’re trying to revisit history.

(Southern music playing)

How are we coming to grips with the fact that there was no accurate history? There’s so many
things that were left unsaid, undocumented, unwritten. And that’s a huge part of food writing
right now is to go back and say “Can we now go back and tell a more realistic story?”

RUTH TAM
Food historian Michael Twitty, author of “The Cooking Gene.”

MICHAEL TWITTY
I love it when tour guides say that the, that the bridge from the Potomac to Northwest D.C. is the
divide of north and south, as if! You know you cross the river and things are amazingly any
different! You know, when you clearly you can go through Georgetown and people who are
novices will walk through Georgetown, “Oh! This is so quaint!” Not realizing the little houses and
buildings behind the big houses were the slave quarters. I think it's erasing the experience of
millions of people and it’s absolving responsibility for something that impacts food culture.
People don’t get it.They don’t understand that the food culture goes hand in hand with other
social factors.

PATRICK FORT
You can’t split D.C.’s food and culture neatly into “Northern” and “Southern” parts-- but when it
comes to soul food, that labeling is important.

RUTH TAM
Especially in Chocolate City, or what’s more like Chocolate Chip City now. Plus, as D.C. gets
wealthier and pricier, it kind of feels at odds with soul food, which was born out of making the
most with very meager ingredients.

MICHAEL TWITTY
Black spaces go poof! And then somehow someway someone else will come in and say “Here’s
the barbeque, here’s the remastered cuisine of the South!” As if it’s someplace else.

RUTH TAM
But I think there’s also room for the food to grow and evolve, regardless of your relationship with
“the South.” I mean, look what Imar is doing to keep the Grill open for the future.

I mean, look at what Edward Lee’s trying to do, integrating Korean dishes with southern
techniques! Historian Psyche, said it’s important to pull at the threads that have gotten lost
throughout history.

PSYCHE WILLIAMS-FORSON

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We have completely left out of this conversation those who were interned. Those who are from
Asian countries, those who are from South American and Latino countries, you know who
identify as Latino. We have completely left out portions of people as if they never existed. It
comes down to a black and white conversation which I think is unfortunate.

RUTH TAM
I feel like once you get into food history, and in particular Southern food history at least for D.C.,
there’s a lot of really important backstory but it can get really weighty really fast.

PATRICK FORT
Right, because so much of Southern and soul food was created out of this really horrible thing
that happened in history. But that you kind of have to accept what comes with like eating it and
knowing that history without kind of glossing over everything that happened.

RUTH TAM
Right, I think we’ve discussed a lot over this season that food doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s
not delicious just for tastiness’s sake. You know there’s history and legacy behind everything
that we consume. And I think for this region, Washington D.C., the surrounding states,
Maryland, Virginia, we’re all kind of having this ongoing conversation about what it means to
grapple with history and we’ve seen that with roads being renamed, highways being renamed,
statues coming down.

PATRICK FORT
Maybe that’s what we’re seeing with Southern and soul food.

PATRICK FORT
Dish City is produced by me, Patrick Fort.

RUTH TAM
And me, Ruth Tam.

We did a lot of research for this episode. In particular, Michael Twitty’s book, “The Cooking
Gene” was an invaluable resource. We also read “Soul Food” by Adrian Miller.

PATRICK FORT
Kevin Blackistone reads his father’s letter to the Washington football team in the documentary,
“Dixie.”

RUTH TAM
If you wanna talk to us online, we’re on Twitter and Instagram at dish city. And our email is
dishcity at wamu.org. And if you wanna talk to us in person, we’ll be hanging out at local bars
and restaurants around the District the Tuesday after each episode drops. On Tuesday, October
22nd, we’ll be posting up at Busboys and Poets in Anacostia from 6 to 8 p.m.

PATRICK FORT

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Shout out to our team at WAMU and beyond. Our editor is Poncie Rutsch. Our associate
producer is Julia Karron. Our theme music is by Daniel Peterschmidt. Ben Privot mixes the
show. WAMU’s general manager is JJ Yore and Andi McDaniel oversees all of the content that
we make here.

RUTH TAM
If you love our show, share it with a friend! And rate us in your favorite pocast app. It’ll help new
listeners find our show.

PATRICK FORT
We’ll be back next week with our last episode, so hit that subscribe button. See ya!

RUTH TAM
Bye!

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