AURORA | Brian Thomas is a firm believer in the healing capabilities of a plate piled high with meat loaf slathered in gravy, collard greens and macaroni and cheese.
“If you’re mad about something,” the manager at Kirk’s Soul Kitchen said as he prepared for the lunch rush. “Once you get some of this, you’ll be alright.”
In a city where the ethnic dining scene has thrived in recent years — and turned the Havana Street corridor into a popular destination for the region’s food tourists looking for something exotic — Aurora’s soul food joints sometimes hover under the radar. But make no mistake, with places like Kirk’s on East Colfax Avenue, just east of Interstate 225, 2 Sistahs Eats-N-Treats at South Chambers Road and East Hampden Avenue and a few others, there are plenty of options to satisfy a soul food craving.
And while some of the cuisine might better fit into a box just marked “Southern” as opposed to soul food, or some dishes better labeled “creole,” if you’re looking for catfish fried to perfection or gumbo that would make anyone from south of the Mason-Dixon smile, Aurora won’t disappoint.
Adrian Miller knows this well. Miller grew up in Aurora, graduated from Smoky Hill High School and last year his book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, won the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship.
Miller’s mom is from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and his dad hails from Helena, Arkansas, so soul food was a staple for him growing up. That connection to his childhood and his family are certainly part of what he loves about a steaming bowl of gumbo at Kirk’s, but it isn’t the whole story.
“First of all the stuff is delicious, that’s the main thing,” he said with a laugh. “But secondly it’s my heritage, that’s the food I grew up eating.”
At 2 Sistahs, Renà Shead, who runs the catering business, bakery and restaurant with her sister, Deborah, said she has always shied away from the term “soul food” when describing her restaurant. Soul food to her is chitlins, pigs feet and other items that aren’t offered at 2 Sistahs. Still, even when the Shead sisters ran M and D restaurant in northeast Denver until it closed in 2011, the soul food label stuck.
Shead said the restaurant’s heat and eat options — which customers can buy from the storefront and cook at home — are primarily southern offerings like pulled pork, pulled chicken and greens. But, Shead said, the catering side of the business is happy to offer more traditional soul food options if that’s what customers are craving.
With it’s opening last summer, 2 Sistahs became one of the newer faces on the city’s soul food scene.
Miller said that’s welcome news.
“The thing with Aurora is it’s mirroring what has happened across the country, quite a few places have closed down,” he said.
But, Miller said, there seems to have been a migration of African Americans from Denver to Aurora in recent years, and that could lead to a steady boost for Aurora’s soul food scene.
“There is more of a customer base out there now, and I think that’s what is driving those restaurants,” he said. Still, in addition to Kirks and 2 Sistahs, Catfish King on East Iliff Avenue and South Peoria Street boasts a menu packed with soul food favorites, as does Chicken Shack 303 on Peoria Street north of East Mississippi Avenue.
For Thomas, whose family opened Kirk’s in 2012, the somewhat flexible definitions of what constitutes soul food — and just how it should be prepared — are a common topic at the restaurant. Customers often come in and boast that they are from Chicago, or the South or some other locale that boasts better soul food than Aurora could offer.
Thomas has a standard reply.
“I’m gonna let the food talk for me,” he said with a grin.