[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 135 (Thursday, October 2, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1914-E1915]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       HARLEM'S HISTORIC SYLVIA'S RESTAURANT IS GOING ON THE ROAD

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                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, October 1, 1997

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, not long ago, I was honored to present to 
Herbert and Sylvia Woods an award as New York State's Parents of the 
Year. The owners of Harlem's world-renowned Sylvia's Restaurant had 
earned the accolade as a married couple who had raised four children 
and had been blessed by many grandchildren.
  I said then that the Woods' had demonstrated what life is truly 
about: nurturing, educating, and inculcating in their children the 
values that had allowed them to carry on successfully in their own 
lives. But in addition, the Woods', who came from the humblest of 
backgrounds in South Carolina, have made a huge mark in the world of 
business, building a small family-owned restaurant in Harlem into a 
national operation in the culinary industry--restaurants in several 
cities and a line of bottled spices.
  Recently reporter Michel Marriott chronicled their story in an 
article in the New York Times. That inspirational story of hard work, 
perseverance, and determination follows for the edification of my 
colleagues.

                [From the New York Times, Sept. 3, 1997]

          Queen of Soul Food Taking ``Down Home'' On the Road

                          (By Michel Marriott)

       The scene on the broad, cracked sidewalk outside Sylvia's 
     Restaurant in Harlem looked like the opening of a department 
     store sale, as tourists from around the world, in sneakers, 
     shorts and T-shirts, along with other diners in waiting, some 
     in their Sunday best, anticipated the moment when they could 
     surge inside.
       When the door opened at 12:30 P.M., about 100 customers 
     pressed forward, eager for fried chicken, salmon croquettes, 
     collard greens, candied yams, black-eyed peas and the live 
     music of Sylvia's Sunday gospel brunch.
       For those for whom soul food has literal meaning, the 
     weekly four-hour feast, in which hundreds gather, was a 
     reaffirming evocation of down home. For other toe-tapping 
     diners, it was a plateful of black culture, a taste of church 
     suppers, backyard cookouts and old-fashioned, black 
     hospitality.
       The only thing missing was the queen of soul food herself, 
     the owner, Sylvia Woods. Mrs. Woods doesn't work on Sundays 
     anymore. After 35 years of 15- and 16-hour days to establish 
     her restaurant, on Lenox Avenue near 127th Street, as a 
     temple of black Southern dining up north, Mrs. Woods, 71, and 
     her husband, 72 Herbert, are taking it a little easier.
       They may need the energy: from modest beginnings in rural 
     South Carolina, they are on the cusp of national success.
       Mrs. Woods's mother mortgaged the family farm so that her 
     daughter, than a waitress, and son-in-law, then a cabdriver, 
     could open the restaurant in 1962. But now, investors led by 
     the J.P. Morgan Community Development Corporation are helping 
     to take the Woodses' vision of a cozy place to break 
     cornbread and transplant it across the country.
       Mrs. Woods, a round-faced women with outsize eyeglasses and 
     a generous smile, finds that prospect pleasing.
       ``We've come such a long ways, but in a sense it feels like 
     it was just yesterday,'' Mrs. Woods said, with her husband at 
     her side. ``I put my life in this restaurant.''
       Her regulars enjoy the couple's success.
       ``I have watched their development,'' said Percy Sutton, a 
     leading Harlem businessman and former Manhattan Borough 
     President. `I know of no two more deserving and gracious 
     people than the two of them. I am deliriously happy for 
     them.''
       The expansion began in February, when the first Sylvia's 
     branch opened in downtown Atlanta. Others are planned for 
     Brooklyn, St. Louis and Baltimore.
       Another arm of this food empire is being masterminded 
     by their eldest son, Van DeWard Woods, 52: a Sylvia's line 
     of bottled spices, sauces, dressings and canned seasoned 
     beans, greens and peas--with Mrs. Woods's smiling face on 
     the front. The products are appearing on the shelves of 
     specialty shops and supermarkets chains in New York and 
     nationally, including D'Agostino, Pathmark and A.&P./Food 
     Emporium.
       The Woodses are at the leading edge of a new interest in 
     soul food. This fall, 20th Century Fox is set to release the 
     feature film ``Soul Food,'' a sentimental homage. The 
     cuisine, born on slave plantations and relying heavily on 
     cast-off cuts of meat, fried foods, gravies and spices, is 
     being reimagined, often for diet-conscious customers, at 
     popular restaurants like George's in Los Angeles and the Soul 
     Cafe and Motown Cafe in midtown Manhattan.
       In recent years, Mrs. Woods has given a nod to the calorie-
     conscious by offering a few items on her menu that are baked 
     and grilled, not fried. She also seasons her collard greens 
     with smoked turkey, rather than the traditional ham hocks, 
     after some customers asked if they could get their greens 
     sans pig.
       Even with these accommodations, it's still the same 
     restaurant that has become world renowned.

[[Page E1915]]

       Its very walls pronounce its fame. The central element of 
     the decor, which Mrs. Woods describes as ``comfortable, 
     decent and clean,'' are photographs of many notable visitors.
       The former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Jack 
     Kemp, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, the media mogul Quincy 
     Jones and the actor Denzel Washington in the role of just 
     another diner are among scores of those whose pictures are on 
     display in the three cobbled-together rooms that make up 
     Sylvia's.
       Winnie Mandela dined there three times. Diana Ross asked 
     for seconds of Sylvia's Sassy Rice. Muhammad Ali used to roam 
     along the steam tables fetching his own biscuits. Spike Lee 
     filmed a scene of his 1991 film, ``Jungle Fever'' in a corner 
     of the restaurant now memorialized with a huge autographed 
     poster for the movie.
       It has long been a favorite haunt for uptown's power elite. 
     Mr. Sutton remembered how over the years he held meetings at 
     Sylvia's with figures like Robert F. Kennedy and Jesse 
     Jackson.
       But whenever one of her customers asks Mrs. Woods who was 
     the most famous star to dine there, she responds with a 
     rhetorical question and then answers it.
       ``Who's the most famous star to come into the restaurant?'' 
     she asks warmly. ``You.''
       Mrs. Woods says the success of their $3 million-a-year 
     restaurant is due as much to its unshakable sense of Southern 
     hospitality as to the food itself.
       ``You got to make people feel like they're at home,'' Mrs. 
     Woods said. ``You got to make people feel like you appreciate 
     them. That love and affection and caring will carry you where 
     money can never carry.''
       If she is not going over menus and day-to-day details in 
     her closet of an office--``Sylvia's Room'' is burned into the 
     door--she is minding the steam tables or ``talking up 
     customers'' in a voice from her South Carolina roots.
       ``I walks the floor,'' Mrs. Woods explained. ``If a person 
     is not eating the food, I want to know why. `Well, I'm not 
     hungry,' I say, uh-uh, you have to bring it better than that. 
     You wouldn't come in here, if you wasn't hungry.''
       Her accessibility, says Anthony Bowman, who operates a 
     Harlem-based tour company, has helped make her ``an icon.''
       ``Most people who have gone there have at least once seen 
     Sylvia,'' Mr. Bowman said: ``She gives the place an 
     identifiable face.''
       The couple say they are determined to maintain the personal 
     touch in their new branches.
       So, soft-spoken Herbert Woods, with his broad, gentle face, 
     slides behind the steering wheel of their 1988 Rolls-Royce 
     Silver Spur and drives with his wife 14 hours--nonstop--from 
     their home in Mount Vernon, N.Y., to look in at the Atlanta 
     restaurant, which is owned by their daughter Bedelia Woods, 
     49.
       ``We prefer to drive,'' Mrs. Woods said.
       ``I don't mind flying, but I prefer not for both of us to 
     fly together,'' Mr. Woods noted. ``Just in case.''
       Mrs. Woods disagreed, ``If we go, we go together.''
       Their visit doesn't mean they don't have confidence in 
     their daughter or their other three children and the five 
     grandchildren who work in the family business. But Mom and 
     Dad's ``guidance'' is always helpful, they note.
       None of Mrs. Woods's success surprises Vicky Johnson, the 
     Belgian war bride of Andrew Johnson the black entrepreneur 
     who gave Mrs. Woods her first job in Harlem, as a waitress in 
     his Harlem luncheonette.
       ``She was a hard worker,'' Mrs. Johnson, 69, recalled by 
     telephone from her home in Summit, N.Y. ``I worked side by 
     side with her. She wanted to get somewhere. Believe you me, 
     nobody gave her nothing. She earned it.''
       Mrs. Woods was reared by her mother, Julia Pressley, on 
     their 35-acre farm in Hemingway, S.C., a patchwork of small 
     farms with more wagons than cars when she was growing up.
       Her father died two days before she was born, Mrs. Woods 
     said, a victim of gassing during World War I. ``I've never 
     seen his face, not even a photo.''
       While picking beans for extra money for the family, she 
     said, she met Herbert Woods. His mother had died, and he was 
     being raised by his step-father in Hemingway. She was 11, and 
     he was 12. By their early teens, both recalled, they were 
     falling in love.
       Their affection was so strong, Mr. Woods said, that when 
     she went to New York with her mother, who worked as a 
     domestic to buy more farmland back home, he joined the Navy. 
     He thought that as a sailor he might sail to Brooklyn and see 
     his sweetheart, he said.
       ``As close as I got was Norfolk, Va,'' Mr. Woods said with 
     a soundless chuckle. He soon found himself in the middle of 
     the Pacific Ocean and World War II as a cook on light 
     cruisers and transports. ``When I was in the Navy, that's all 
     you could be,'' he said of the era's segregated armed forces.
       Eventually, they married and moved to Harlem. He drove a 
     cab; she worked for the Johnsons.
       In 1961, Mr. Johnson, who owned three restaurants, turned 
     to Sylvia Woods when his plans to build an upstate resort for 
     blacks overextended him financially.
       ``He wanted me to buy the restaurant from him to raise some 
     money,'' Mrs. Woods recalled. ``I said: `Johnson, are you 
     crazy? You know I don't have any money.' ''
       But the mortgage from Mrs. Woods' mother provided the down 
     payment on the $20,000 price for the restaurant, the start of 
     an empire now worth $20 million. In 1988, Mrs. Woods bought 
     the upstate resort to prevent Mrs. Johnson, by then a widow 
     and in financial trouble, from losing it on the auction 
     block.
       Looking back to the early days, Mrs. Woods recalled, ``It 
     was really a struggle.'' But her success, she assured a 
     visitor, was part of ``God's plan.'' She paused and folded 
     her hands.
       ``God is so good to me that I truly, truly know that He 
     would not bring me this far and leave me alone,'' she said. 
     ``No.''

     

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