The clock may read 3 p.m., but the lunch hour is still going strong at Café Express, a longstanding soul food restaurant located two blocks north of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Mid City. Opened 29 years ago, the neighborhood spot is the Baton Rouge Soul Food Festival’s 2023 Soul Food Pioneer, an award established to highlight the institutions and people in the Capital Region that preserve the area’s soul food heritage. The award will be presented during the upcoming festival, held Saturday, May 20, and Sunday, May 21.
“I was blown away,” says Sean “Boss Hogg” Huey, who works side by side in the kitchen with his mother, founder Marie Sanford, 83. “It really meant a lot to my mom. She’s been at it for a long time. I never remember her working for anybody else. She always had her own business.”
The popular spot stays busy. Its narrow dining room is lined with small tables on both sides that are usually filled with diners. Other patrons stand in the aisle or outside, waiting for call-in orders. Open from 6 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on weekdays, the restaurant serves rib-sticking breakfast fare like eggs, grits, bacon, sausage links, hash browns, pancakes and biscuits. The lunch menu is available starting at 10 a.m. and is comprised of bonafide soul food favorites made from scratch from Sanford’s family recipes (none of which are written down).
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The basis of soul food, Huey says, has always been about turning inexpensive, often cast-off ingredients into richly flavored dishes that could feed—and soothe—crowds of family and friends. That tether to the past is loud and clear on Huey and Sanford’s menu, where the “smothered” category is particularly robust. Chicken, pork steak, liver, oxtails, pigtails, neckbones and ribs all come smothered, a marker of soul food cooking in which meats are braised in a rich, savory gravy perfumed by pan drippings.
One of the most popular items on the menu is the baked turkey wing, a sumptuously flavored, albeit thrifty cut in which lots of tender dark meat hides between bone. The old adage, “the closer the bone, the sweeter the meat,” springs from a dish like this. The wing is served over fluffy white rice enrobed in brown gravy. Entrees are accompanied by two sides chosen from a list that includes white beans ribboned with bacon fat, green salad, sweet-spicy mustard greens, candied yams and lots of others. Elsewhere on the menu, there’s beef stew, meat loaf with brown gravy, humble, savory gravy steak, fried fish and, the workhorse of southern cooking, fried chicken. Homemade cakes and fruit cobblers round things out.
Huey has been working with his mother in the business for the last decade. He studied culinary arts at Camelot College in Baton Rouge, and is also a partner in the Creole Depot seasoning blend, produced in Opelousas. Energetic and friendly, he knows most of the folks who come through the restaurant’s door.
“They’re regulars,” he says. “I know them by name.”
Cafe Express is open to 6 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. It’s located at 2451 North Street. The 2023 Soul Food Festival is free and family friendly. It runs Saturday, May 20, through Sunday, May 21, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. at 300 S. River Road. The Soul Food Pioneer award presentation takes place at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday.
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