Soul Food Icon
Hits Milestone
Second generation welcomes 40 with a new look and name
STORY BY MAGGIE HENNESSY PHOTOS BY TINA SMOTHERS
LORI SEAY WAS 39 YEARS OLD AND JUST
starting business school in 2009 when she
approached her accounting instructor for
advice on taking over the family business:
Soul Vegetarian, one of Chicago’s — and the country’s
— oldest vegan soul food restaurants.
“She said, ‘Yes. Run for your life!’” Seay recalls
with a long laugh. “I just stopped in my tracks
like, OK, and she went on to the next student. As
I got deeper into the business, I said to myself, I
see exactly what she meant.”
Seay and her brother Arel Ben Israel are the
second-generation owners of Soul Vegetarian,
which their parents, Yohanna Brown and Prince
Asiel Ben Israel, opened in 1982 where the Chatham
and Greater Grand Crossing neighborhoods
meet on Chicago’s South Side.
“After realizing there was no place in the city to
eat vegan food, they said, why not create a place
of our own?” Seay says. As Black Hebrew Israelites,
Brown and Prince Asiel followed a vegan
diet and had few dining options back then. But
they had other reasons, too; namely that opening
a plant-based restaurant could help the disproportionate
number of Blacks in their community
impacted by diet-related health issues such as
obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.
“Our parents were community builders, and
they started the restaurant where they did to educate
and support the community,” Seay says. The
restaurant’s aways been vegan, but Seay says they
named it Soul Vegetarian “because vegan was unheard
of back in the ’80s, and they didn’t want to
scare people off.”
I’m so
grateful
for the
relationship
my brother
and I have.
We were
determined
not to let it
fold.”
DINING
The couple intentionally chose a soul food menu
with mac and cheese and barbecue — the same
salt- and carb-laden fare “that actually was killing
us physically,” as Prince Asiel told the Chicago Sun-
Times in 2007. Conversely, theirs would be free from
animal products and almost free from processed
ingredients. This approach required them to
make nearly everything in-house. They developed
cheese from soy. They blended nutritional
yeast with soy sauce, water, oil and fresh garlic
to make the eventually iconic Prince dressing,
perfect for topping greens and injecting flavor
as a marinade. They used wheat gluten to create
seitan, which would become a blank canvas for
flavor. Boil it in soy sauce, then batter and fry it
to make chik’n cutlets. Season it with yeast and
spices, bake it as a roast, then slice and sauté it
with onions and peppers for gyro sandwiches. Or,
most famously, twist and bake it till caramelized,
toss it in mild, sweet barbecue sauce, then grill
it to create a confoundingly delicious, convincing
barbecue pork riff called the BBQ Twist.
Brown and Prince Asiel often heavily discounted
their food or gave it away to those who
couldn’t afford it, and much of the staff worked
on a volunteer basis, sometimes in exchange for
free meals. “Most of the staff were volunteers,
so always being at standard was sometimes a
challenge,” remembers Tsadakeeyah Emmanuel,
who spent seven years as the chef of Soul Vegetarian
and now owns Majani, a vegan soul food
restaurant with three locations.
That generosity had a price: When Seay and Arel
took over in 2012, the restaurant — which they re-
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