Soul & Smoke Opens an Art-Filled Flagship Restaurant in Evanston with a Sense of History

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Over a long career, Leon G. Robinson, Jr. built one of the country’s largest transportation companies owned by an African American. He used his success to support other Black residents of his native Evanston, north of Chicago, training and certifying employees and offering advice to other businesses, including Hecky’s Barbecue, whose owner called him “godfather” to Evanston’s Black community and hung a banner outside his restaurant in honor of Robinson upon his death in 2019. 

Just half a mile up Green Bay Road from Hecky’s, Robinson’s influence on Evanston’s Fifth Ward continued even after his death when his daughter sold a brick building that had once housed his company’s buses to D’Andre Carter and Heather Bublick, allowing for another Black-owned business to grow and flourish.

Now that building at 1601 Payne St. is opening September 1 as the flagship restaurant of Carter and Bublick’s Soul & Smoke, with expanded dinner offerings, a full bar, table service – and a sense of history. Above the host stand – reached after walking past a chain link fence that calls to mind backyard barbecues – hang two artworks that reference the tenacity of the Fifth Ward, into which many of Evanston’s Black residents were segregated by zoning laws and housing practices decades ago. Guy Philoche depicts a young Black boy on a gold background wearing a shirt that reads “Do You See Us Now,” while Raspy Rivera uses an unbroken line to connect a crowd of faces, an illustration of the sort of community it takes to win the return of a neighborhood school after decades without one. 

“D’Andre loves the neighborhood kids. They come around every day after school,” says Bublick, who is both Carter’s business partner and wife. “He’s always been a big proponent of changing the neighborhoods. He grew up on the South Side [of Chicago], where it’s not necessarily a lot different from here, in that it’s a liquor store or a vacant space and then a funeral home. [We want to try] to make this more of a community for the people that are currently living here, and want to be good stewards of the land.”

Carter and Bublick have been preparing food in the building for a decade and selling barbecue from it for years. But the casual, picnic table counter-service they’ve been offering there will be replaced by an expansive restaurant where you can order a draft cocktail from servers and try plated dishes like oysters with green tomato chow chow, housemade pasta, and a halibut collar. Of course the brisket, pulled pork, and St. Louis-style ribs that have made Soul & Smoke’s name will remain, infused with flavor over hours in the hulking smokers visible in the open kitchen. And that meat will continue to go out to Soul & Smoke locations at Rockwell on the River and the Accenture tower in the West Loop, as well as in a food truck for events. Bottled sauces and spice mixes for sale at grocery stores will also eventually be made in the facility.

Barbecue “is so labor intensive, it’s such a craft, and then people throw it on paper and treat it like it’s this casual thing,” Bublick says. “I think it deserves to be served on a plate and presented in a certain type of way.” So eat your ribs with a glass of red wine from a winery owned by a person of color – Bublick’s beverage menu highlights such producers – surrounded by name-brand, site-specific art, while hip-hop plays and families from the neighborhood relax in the space.

That mixture of playfulness and seriousness is also evident in the presence of a root beer float and a homemade Swiss roll. (Pastry chef Casey Doody consulted on desserts.) It was a hallmark of Moto, the mind-warping Chicago restaurant where Carter and Bublick met that served edible menus and the flavors of a Cubano sandwich in the form of a cigar presented in an ashtray. 

The cigar makes a comeback at the new Soul & Smoke, now with smoked oxtail rolled up in collard greens and garnished with “ash” made out of sesame seeds. It’s another reference to history both personal and communal in the restaurant. The tradition of Chicago barbecue is honored through hot links and rib tips – which were developed, as so many Black dishes were, to turn cheaper, unwanted ingredients into succulent bites. Other Black foodways that established themselves here during the Great Migration are present in the form of banana pudding and Carter’s own sweet potato pie, topped with a towering peak of toasted meringue. Soul & Smoke’s story is referenced in a second piece by Raspy Rivera that incorporates spice rubs, ash, and branded butcher paper. A barn door original to the building features a mural by Dwight White that includes a milk bottle as a reference to the building’s origin a century ago as a dairy.

All of this information will be accessible in the restaurant’s menus, even while you can also order via QR code or call a server over by placing a card on top of the paper towel holder. (It is a barbecue restaurant after all.) “We want people to feel knowledgeable about the intention behind everything,” says Bublick. 

Not that you have to know that the repeating design of wood slats running around the walls represents a soundwave of someone saying “Soul and Smoke” or that the portraits in the stylized bathrooms were chosen because Carter and Bublick appreciated artist Paul Octavious’ ennobling of under-represented people. You can just enjoy your rum punch and barbecue shrimp in a welcoming space. But if you do notice some earnest hearts in the bottom corner of the large Hebru Brantley Flyboy mural, that’s because the popular muralist allowed one of Carter and Bublick’s daughters to paint them into his art. The floral wallpaper in the bathrooms by Rello? It's similar to prints by the artist in the playroom of the Carter-Bublick household.

It’s all a way to bring an entire community into a sort of family, whether through the meals Soul & Smoke gives away in the community fridge outside the restaurant and at the holidays; through Carter and Bublick’s frequent appearances at the Chicago culinary community’s fundraisers and events; in their support of longtime employees, to whom Bublick wants to eventually offer training so that they can open their own Soul & Smoke outposts; and in inviting neighbors into a space that feels like their home.