When you visit Bishop and Bae’s Soul Food Restaurant, owners Erskine and Diona Jones want customers to leave feeling one thing — full.
“Soul food is comfort food. It’s food that your mama would cook, and especially the African American family. It’s home food where you come here and before you order, you smell it,” Erskine said. “When you leave here, you should be unbuttoning your pants, pulling back from the table … and have to sit another 15 minutes (to let it digest).”
But the owners of South Bend’s new soul food restaurant want to go beyond filling customers’ stomachs. They also want to fill their hearts.
“I want them to feel at home,” Erskine said. “What we’ve really worked on is, even though the Bishop and Bae’s name is on it, it’s really the community’s restaurant.”
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Erskine (the “Bishop”) and Diona (the “Bae”) are both active in the Sweet Home Ministries church and are behind several rehabilitation and recovery programs, reaching and helping hundreds of community members. In 2020, they opened a clothing store called The Closet that provides clothing for people part of the Fresh Start Friday program, which works to have the records for past offenders expunged. Regular shoppers also are able to shop in the store for items.
During the pandemic shutdown in 2020, Erskine began sharing his cooking online and found that people would comment and ask where they could get a plate. As businesses began reopening, he expanded the idea into the full-fledged restaurant that it’s become today.
The new restaurant opened in January at 301 Chapin St., next to the Studebaker National Museum and near the Kroc Center in South Bend.
“I can’t keep cooking at the house (for others), so why not open up a restaurant? So that’s what we did,” he said.
With help from family friend Bessie Jones, who is affectionately known as Mama Tracy, the Joneses offer such homestyle dinners as fried pork chops, fried chicken, rib tips, oxtail and catfish served with a variety of sides that include mac n cheese, candied yams, greens, pinto beans and more. Specials such as seafood and crab boils are offered occasionally, and the restaurant also serves desserts made by local vendors. But what’s offered at the restaurant isn’t necessarily limited to what’s on the menu.
“It evolves, depending on what people come in and ask for,” Erskine said. “When Mama Tracy is here, you can ask for anything.”
“You really can. Like, people ask for tomatoes and onions that we don’t have on the menu,” Diona said.
“But she’ll make you anything. She don’t care,” Erskine added.
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The quaint, 34-seat restaurant includes what owners call a “bishop’s table,” located at the front of the restaurant, where customers can congregate together and Erskine will often sit with them to create a family feel. The family extends the hospitality further by giving a warm welcome to every customer who walks in.
“We don’t want (the restaurant to become) too big and then lose our touch with everyone where we can laugh and giggle,” he said.
Currently open Thursday through Saturday for dinner, owners anticipate expanding their hours into lunchtime in the summer and adding outdoor seating. But ultimately, they simply hope to become another gathering place for South Bend to feel at home.
“We want to be a part of South Bend and bring the livelihood back to downtown,” Erskine said. “(We want to) bring some soul to our city.”
Contact Mary Shown at 574-235-6244 and mshown@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter: @maryshownSBT and @marketbasketSBT.
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