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Feeding soul, body, mind

Alluette's Cafe offers Southern cuisine with a healthy twist

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

Alluette Jones-Smalls serves lunch to Renee Gaters and Henry Wigfall at her restaurant.

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

Jones-Smalls uses fresh local produce, such as tomatoes, carrots and zucchini.

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

The daily specials list at Alluette's Cafe on Reid Street says the food is 'fresh, local and the best in Charleston.'

I grew up like most Southerners, enjoying fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, meat-seasoned and cooked-until-soft vegetables, mac 'n' cheese, sweet tea and banana pudding, among other Southern delicacies. As a son of Eastern North Carolina, I especially loved a plate of vinegar-and-pepper pork barbecue, Brunswick stew, coleslaw with a basket of hot hush puppies nearby, and a Coke on ice to finish it off.

My mouth waters as I write this.

But having a grandfather die of a heart attack at age 53 (five months after I was born), a father who has increasingly struggled with diabetes and heart disease for the past 30 years, and older and younger brothers who have taken cholesterol-lowering medication for the past decade, I've also been keenly aware not only of my family medical history but of the pitfalls of the Southern diet.

We Southerners know that our high-fat, meat-heavy traditions contribute to high rates of disease in our region. Yet, on a daily basis, we still indulge in comfort food.

It's another example of American culture living in denial in the 21st century. We continue to succumb to foods, and food preparation, that leave us more vulnerable to costly medical bills and a dependence on prescription drugs.

Why? Besides the instant (and legal) gratification our traditional food gives us, it is a part of our family and community. It is communion.

Even if you want to change, you will face peer pressure and the risk of being perceived as trying to be "above" others.

I often turn to "experts" — doctors, dietitians and health advocates — for stories on health and nutrition that appear on this page, but sometimes wonder if their message becomes muted over time with its seeming repetition.

A new advocate

Sometime in May, I met Lucy Hill, a server at Alluette's Cafe, who told me about the new restaurant's focus on soul food with a healthy twist. I was curious, went to check it out myself the next day, ordered lima bean soup and a tomato sandwich and observed the place.

It's one restaurant that I couldn't stop thinking about — as a healthy eater and a reporter.

Alluette's Cafe is at 80-A Reid St. (between Meeting and King streets) in downtown Charleston, which just happens to be about three blocks south of The Post and Courier building.

The restaurant promotes serving fresh, local, seasonal and organic produce and food.

While it openly welcomes vegans and vegetarians on its menu chalkboard, it serves fish and chicken dishes, but emphatically does not offer pork. The salmon is wild-caught, the shrimp is local, and the chicken is hormone- and antibiotic-free. No meat is used in the lima bean soup or the seasoning of vegetables, which aren't cooked until limp. Produce comes primarily from Fields Farms on Johns Island. Bread is baked at Saffron in Charleston.

It is food not only for the soul, but also the body and mind. The three, after all, are intertwined.

The woman behind Alluette's is Alluette Jones-Smalls, who is no stranger to the Lowcountry. She grew up in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant and even has owned and operated other restaurants, including the Patio Tea Room on Bogard Street during the 1990s.

Then and now, Alluette has promoted eating fresh, seasonal and organic food.

While the concept may seem new, in practice it's not. It's the way Southern food used to be when the region was made up of mostly small towns and family farms. It's the way it was before the rise of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, hormones and antibiotics and before the rise of cheap, relatively tasteless produce shipped across the country and around the world.

"We grew up with all kinds of fresh vegetables and a wonderful yard with fruit trees," Alluette recalls of life in Mount Pleasant in the 1950s.

"Back then, I never remember going to the store to buy vegetables. We went to get rice, dry beans, sugar and flour, not vegetables. My grandmother had chickens in her yard — this was before the town of Mount Pleasant said you couldn't — and we had fresh chicken and eggs."

Like many, she swayed from that lifestyle for a while, which she blames on the fast-food industry and when society "dictated that we needed to move it up a notch ... and get stuff quick, fast and in a hurry."

Unlike many, Alluette decided to eat more healthy, more deliberately, while in college and has continued since then. At 56, she has survived breast cancer (her mother, brother and first cousin died from cancer), appears youthful and aspires, like we all should, to living a healthy and long life.

"There are so many things I want to do," she says. "I want to slow my aging process. I have a 15-year-old. ... I'm grateful. I want to keep up with her. I don't want to eat a lot of junk. Because remember, you are what you eat."

Her compromise

I know how Southerners are. We don't like or embrace change. We don't like to be told what to do. Alluette obviously knows it, too.

Even though she is a vegetarian, she has no problem preparing seafood and chicken for customers. And some of her most popular dishes include fried fish.

If Alluette must fry, she tries to do so in a friendlier fashion. She adds, "I use better quality oils (organic peanut and olive oil). My batter is all organic.

"I don't encourage fried, but The City Paper says I make the best fried seafood in town. And everybody likes fried seafood," she says. "I'm trying to get people in the door. I don't want to push them away. ... I know what to do, but I can't throw it on them all at once."

Reach David Quick at 937-5516 or dquick@postandcourier.com.

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