Here's to the local restaurants, to the chefs, owner operators, the staff the ones who love being in the weeds night after night when we go to work each morning, that's who we have in mind from where we source our food to how we deliver it Here's to them, the ones who are out there cooking for us every day.

Restaurants are the heart of everything we do.

We are Performance Food Service, Proudly supporting Food is Love.

Support for Food is Love is provided by, Wild Alaska Salmon and Seafood 100% fishermen, family owned Independent seafood sourcing, catching, processing and delivering seafood directly to the consumer's front door.

From caught to bought wild salmon direct from the fisherman.

Information at Wild WildAlaskaSalmonandSeafood.com.

When I first started visiting chefs where they cook, learning about their culture through the food they love to make I hoped that I would see new things find new techniques, ideas and of course, new insight into how other people see the world.

This show has been all of those things to me and in every way it's been more.

Most of what I hear is beautiful, stories about overcoming hardship and adversity, The kind of stories that make you feel good.

But it would be delusional for me to think that I wouldn't have to hear the hard stuff too.

Ugly stuff sometimes, but never along this journey did I expect to hear something that would affect me so personally or hit so close to home.

As a chef, I need to stay curious in order to evolve.

For me, that means looking beyond a good meal to learn more about who made it and what inspires them to cook.

"La comida es amor" Every great city has great food.

I'm going on a journey around the world right here in St. Louis.

I'm on a quest to find passionate chefs who cook from the heart, to prove that food is love and it's going to be delicious!

Food is love.

Love your food.

St. Louis has long been known as the gateway to the west but to some, it's also thought of as the beginning to the South.

You don't have to look very hard to see Southern influence in the food scene, And in no place is it more vibrant than in St. Louis soul food.

In fact, you may be surprised to know that St. Louis is considered the home of one particular soul food item, the fried Snoot sandwich.

For the long time, the snoot has been on my radar, and today finding a good snoot sandwich is my goal.

That's why I'm here at Gourmet Soul Located on Del Mar near the city museum Gourmet Soul has a reputation for nailing the quintessential soul food classics Collard greens, sweet potatoes, fried chicken.

Chef Lavinia McCoy, or LV, as they call her around here isn't exactly known for the snoot sandwich, but she has agreed to make one for me and give me a look at what they do here at Gourmet Soul.

I've been chasing this snoot sandwich for a long time, so I'm so happy I finally found it.

Do you want sauce?

I do want sauce.

Okay.

Isn't that how you eat a snoot sandwich?

Well, not everybody, you know, it's a preference.

Some people like sauce, some people don't.

Okay.

But I like sauce myself.

People use, like, potato salad with it, and you want the potato salad to get kind of room temperature, not cold.

The ideas of this have kept me away countless nights.

Oh, that's a snoot sandwich right there.

All right, I'll be snooting here in a second.

The moment has finally come.

(crunching sound) They are so good.

I love snoots .

Delicious.

Think of it as a cross between crispy bacon and pork rinds.

Sandwiched in between two pieces of white bread and covered in barbecue sauce.

Crispy, savory, salty.

Seriously, more people should seek this out.

It is so good.

I've been wanting this snoot for a long time, and I got a snoot full.

It's awesome.

With the popularity of bacon at its all time high, I think a lot of people would naturally love the snoot sandwich.

But that's clearly not all that goes on here.

These right here, I'm going to do cut them up and I'm going to do a little saute.

Okay.

A little onion and red pepper.

So are these Greens bitter?

Yes.

By nature, yes, they are.

And so that's why we're going to have to do stuff to them to.. Wer'e gonna razzle dazzle 'em.

So the idea behind the restaurant is that you are elevating.

I'm elevating soul food.

Like, even in the dining room.

Typically when you think of soul food and you think of a soulful restaurant, you think of it being in a bad part of the city.

Pretty run down building, hosh posh furniture, no flare at all.

So I'm trying to break that barrier.

There's always, like you say, this stigma about, okay, if you go to an African American restaurant, it's in a bad neighborhood.

So how do you get white people to come over here to your restaurant?

Question of the day.

Yes, questions of day.

So tell me how you're going to change that?

Changing people's mind that this is a great place to come.

Your place is beautiful, and we're introducing people that may not be familiar with anything other than Greens and what they heard or seen.

But you're taking that extra step and elevating the food.

I've been trying desperately for six years to cross over.

Yes, but I don't feel nervous about being here.

I don't feel nervous when I came here.

The city Museum is right around the corner.

So we get a lot of traffic.

We don't, because again, they come in and they see all of us and they walk back out.

Yeah, real talk.

This is cornbread dressing.

Cornbread dressing.

So what we do, first of all, is we bake the cornbread quite naturally.

So what's the difference between stuffing and dressing?

I can't tell you the first thing about no stuffing, honey.

Okay.

I think it comes out of box.

All right.

Okay.

This right here is good stuff.

So what we do is we simmer the celery and the onion, butter.

Then we add a little chicken base to it and get us a nice reduction going.

And then for this, you add a couple of eggs.

And what we're going to do, we're going to add some green, some Sage, and some poultry season and some black pepper.

Okay.

And then I'm going to let you taste it before we throw it in the oven, right?

Yes.

I want you to tell me the difference between this and stuffing.

But, I mean, this is stuff you grew up with.

This.

Yes, this.

We don't eat stuffing.

We eat dressing.

Well, I need you to educate me.

Kimmy, come help me let Chef know the difference between stuffing and dressing I'm stuck, dawg!

I'm stuck.

Well, stuffing is usually made out of those preseason crumbs And generally, Caucasians use stuffing.

And Blacks we make dressing.

We make cornbread.

We don't use the bread crumbs.

I really don't even know what all they put.

I think some people put sausage, oysters, Taste a little bit of that.

That's delicious.

That's cornbread dressing.

It's good.

Yeah, it is.

So now I'm going to tell my family, I don't want no stuffing.

I want dressing.

Let me help you.

Thank you, chef.

Now, can I get a rubber spatula?

And that's going to Cook for an hour and ten minutes.

Okay.

She might have some already done, but yeah.

Finished product.

I'm telling you what, I'm making the dressing for Thanksgiving this year.

Come hell a high water.

I might put a little Danish flare in there what do you think about maybe chopped herring in there?

Lavinia runs her kitchen like a vet.

Maybe because she is, in fact, a Veteran of the United States Air Force.

There's so much going on in here at once.

I'm just trying to take it all in.

The smell in the air right now is intoxicating, sweet, savory, comforting.

At its essence.

That's what soul food is, comfort food.

Okay.

So on the plate is our fried salmon over cocoa rice with the Cajun cream sauce.

Okay.

This is one of the elevated items I do.

And I do it on a daily special.

So usually on Fridays and Sundays, you can get this at Gourmet Soul.

So let's try it out, see what you think.

And these are the more traditional.

This one right here is the actual saute collar green with onion and tomato relish.

So that's the razzle dazzle.

Dazzle dazzle.

Okay.

This is the traditional with smoked Turkey.

And then this is your traditional sweet potato and traditional cornbread dressing.

My mom is straight out of Mississippi, right.

So they migrated from Mississippi up to Carbondale, Illinois, and planet roots there.

After a little talking with Lavinia, I'm floored to find out that her grandmother, the one that taught her the love for cooking, lives only a couple of miles from my restaurant in Southern Illinois.

And my entire family is from Carbondale.

But my mom decided she wanted more out of life.

So she decided to move to Springfield.

So we moved from Carbondale to Springfield and from Springfield to Decatur, Illinois.

So as a young girl, when we would come from Decatur, on our way to grandma's house in Carbondale, when we would come up highway 51, when I would get to Toms Yes, that's when I knew we were almost a grandmas!

And I would sit in the back window and peer out and I'm telling you the God honest truth.

I would see the cars lined up and I would often wonder, What are they doing in there?

What is it, a honky tonk?

These are the things that were going through my mind.

What's a honky tonk?

I just thought they were like, yeah!

because we grew up on Hee Haw, right?

I don't know where that is.

Hold on.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, I'm a little different.

I'm from the other planet!

Okay, I get it.

So in any event, like you said, this was supposed to happen.

I just can't believe it that you live or your restaurant is in my hometown.

When we grew up, we weren't allowed to go to a place like Tom's, not even go close to the door.

I mean, because you were a child or because you were black?

Because I was black.

My grandparents were like, we couldn't even travel up highway 51 after dark.

So if we were going to leave Carbondale coming back to Decatur we had to do it before the sun went down because it was embedded in our mind that we didn't need to be on that highway after dark because of racism, ku klux klan and all those things.

When we would leave Carbondale, going to Decatur, we would make sure the tank was on full because we did not want to stop at any gas stations along the way.

So that's the way we grew up.

That's terrible.

I'm just telling you now, It makes me feel so sad.

Can I have a hug right now?

Well, we're going to change that.

Yeah.

We have to make an effort to change.

Absolutely.

I mean, for both of us.

You want white people to come here.

Absolutely.

I want black people to come to my restaurant.

I want desperately for them to come and try this food.

It's an elevated soul food.

It's not your typical run of the mill soul food.

And it's delicious.

I don't want anybody to feel that they couldn't go to my restaurant.

I know.

That's the same thing.

When I tell people about your restaurant now, they say, well, it's over on Delmar, and it's probably not the best neighborhood, and that's stigmatism.

We got to find a way to get rid of that.

We really do.

We really got to work through this thing.

And I think the best way to do it is through food, because food is love.

Food is love.

Here's to that.

Here's to that!

Thats that cornbread dressing.

Well, I'm telling you, I'm never eating stuffing again, I'm only eating dressing Thats corn bread dressin .

So it's not dressing, it's dressin?

We call it dressin, but it's dressing.

Dressing.

Okay.

The gravy is really good, too.

Thank you.

I make that.

I do a volutte on that.

To think that as a child, Lavinia and her family would ride past my restaurant, obviously before I owned it, And feel that she wasn't allowed or didn't belong there is heartbreaking to me.

So naturally, I want to meet her grandmother and see where Lavinia got her start.

Who would have thought meeting Lavinia would lead me just a few miles down the road from my restaurant?

This is just meant to be trying to explore a part of town that I normally never go to.

And some of the history of Tom's Place and some of Lavinia's history.

Do you want me to call you Granny?

I don't care.

Everybody else calls me Granny or momma.

I got more kids than..oh Lord have mercy!

Everybody around here calls me Mama Lewis or Grandma.

Even the kids raised their around here now, They come in now they call me Grandma.

What do you know about Tom's Place?

My restaurant?

How was that when you came here?

Did you?

I never been there.

I heard talk of it.

I passed by when I was going to St. Louis or somewhere, but they told me now, I don't know, but people that lived here before me say no black people go there.

And you knew that nobody go there but rich folks But see, when I was coming, we didn't know nothing but to go to church and to Sunday school and back home How come Lavinia is so interested in food?

She must have had some inspiration from somebody.

She watched me cook sometime, but she likes to cook.

Yeah, family, What do you do for Christmas?

Yeah, I had big dinners every time.

Now I don't, I teach her how to cook.

Yeah.

We had ham, turkey, greens, candy yam and chocolate pies.

Yeah we cook all that stuff at Thanksgiving.

What about snoots?

No, I know about them, but I don't want them.

You don't want any snoots?

No.

No, see thats a St. Louis delicasy.

See, I love it.

When I met Lavinia, she talked about your biscuits.

That was the first thing she was talking about when she talked about you.

that your biscuits was the best.

And so I told my wife I was coming down here today.

And she looks at me, right?

And when I went out the door and she says, Try to see if you can get the biscuit recipe.

There's a lot of love in this kitchen.

I can feel it.

When I was young, they come in and see this kitchen.

They loved it.

All those pretty dishes hanging on the wall.

They say "My mom would like to have a kitchen like this."

Gotta see how thin it is, baby.

You don't want to make no thick buiscuts.

How thin do you want them?

Here, we'll put a little bit of this here on top.

Better roll that back before it fall in my lap!

I cooked with an apron on when I was cooking.

You sure did.

Well, your biscuits must be famous, because I've heard about them several times now, so I can't wait.

They're not as thin as those.

Im gonna roll them out Granny Im gonna cook those biscuits and make me a biscuit pudding out of it the next week.

Biscuit pudding, a bread pudding This girl can make a good bread pudding That's your thing right there.

Bread pudding made out of biscuits.

Yeah, that's a great idea.

Take these biscuits and make a bread pudding out of it.

I love bread pudding.

If you can make me about 1000 biscuits a week, I'll buy it from you.

We'll sell them up at Tom's Place.

She does not use butter.

She uses lard and buttermilk.

And that was it.

That was it.

Oh, they look good.

Yeah, they do.

They look good enough to eat a jelly biscuit.

We gonna get you some peach preserves Grandma.

I got some.

I got strawberry reserves and peach preserves, too.

You must be so proud of Lavinia.

She has a restaurant on her own now and she's carrying on the tradition.

You proud of me aint ya girl?

Yeah cause When I was able to go to St. Louis you fed me, cooked me some fish and bread pudding.

She's a special lady, this one.

So are you.

And thank you very much for allowing us in here.

We really appreciate it.

Well, I did it for her.

Where'd your Mama go?

Dipped.

Gone to St. Louis?

Yeah.

Lord, ..I though.. ..didn't even say bye.

I know!

That's a shame.

With her mother and her grandmother telling me that they weren't allowed on 51 at night.

It's kind of heartbreaking in a way, but it's also uplifting and inspiring that here we are many years later, and we're making a beautiful connection.

I can't wait to take her to the restaurant and show her everything.

Having wandered into Gourmet, Soul in search of the snoot sandwich.

I had no idea about Lavinia's ties to Southern Illinois or her impression of my restaurant.

But knowing what I know now, I feel an overwhelming need to do something about it.

I am not naive.

I don't believe that inviting LV to cook in my restaurant will straighten the axis of the tilted world we live in.

But in my own way, this is a chance for me to right and all wrong, an opportunity for me to leave something better that I found it.

It's only fitting that the first Chef I invite to cook alongside with me in my kitchen is someone who thought they couldn't or maybe weren't allowed to be there because of their skin color or otherwise.

I'm not pretending that this is going to make any difference at all in the grand scheme of things, but helping LV to create an elevated dish for her restaurant is the very least I could do in this situation.

I have as much to learn from LV as she does me, and it's fun to combine our worlds to make something new.

So here's my idea, and I want your blessing.

Yes, Chef.

No, don't say yes, Chef.

Just say yes, Lasse.

Okay.

Yes, Lasse.

We are friends, right?

I call you Lavinia.

Yes.

Okay.

And if you want me to call you the goddess of soul food, I can.

Lavinia is fine.

Lavinia is good.

Okay.

You've made the greens, right?

You brought the snoot?

Yes, I did.

A favorite at favorite at Gourmet Soul is the fried salmon, which is really good.

But I have an idea for something different today.

The fried snoop there is crispy.

Yes.

We're going to put that in the blender, and we're going to make almost like a meal, like cornmeal, but a snoot meal out of it.

All right.

And then we're going to take salmon.

All right.

And we're going to roll that in the snoot meal.

And then we're going to make some risotto, and we're going to put some wild mushrooms in there.

Okra.

And tomato.

So if you make a tomato broth with okra, and that'll be the sauce around it.

And then if we have sweet potatoes, we'll make some sweet potato chips for the garnish.

Well, that's my idea.

What do you think, sound okay?

All right.

Let's get it!

Okay.

Fried snoot crusted into crumbs and used for a sort of breading for the salmon.

As strange as it sounds, I think we actually done something special here.

The breading on the salmon.

Yeah.

Is pork.

Is pork!

Yeah.

it is snoot!

Give me a minute.

Okay.

Give me a minute.

(Deep sigh) Thank you so much.

I don't think you really realized.

You just don't get it.

Did you get some of the risotto?

Yeah, it's great.

It's such a great combination, isn't it?

Get some of that risotto.

What are we going to call this dish?

I think because it's a St. Louis speciality, The snoot.

Right.

We got to highlight the snoot.

We got to highlight the snoot.

So its a snoot encrusted salmon on wild mushroom risotto with Collard Greens and a tomato okra sauce.

Yummy.

It doesn't get any better than that.

Chef, This is delicious.

Well, all the ideas and inspiration came from you.

Now, this is definitely Gourmet Soul.

You gave me a little gourmet.

Yeah.

You gave me a lot of soul.

Yeah, I love it.

I want to thank you very much for coming down here.

It really means a lot to me.

And in light of all the things I heard your family say about the restaurant, I'm hoping that I'm changing the way people think, and I feel blessed and honored that one of the best chefs from St. Louis is sitting here with me today.

And I hope this is the beginning of a long friendship.

And you call me anytime I'll come up and cook with you.

I'd love to do that.

Absolutely.

And if I can, I'm going to introduce some herring into the soul food in St Louis.

Sure.

Sure.

Food is love.

Food is love.

This is something that I will never forget, and the irony of it all still gets me.

Lv and her family has never felt comfortable coming into my restaurant.

Just the same way that there are little to no white clientele going into Gourmet Soul.

The food is unbelievable.

Misconceptions close doors.

As restaurant owners we face similar but opposite problems.

And still, in spite of problems and misconceptions the truth remains that, food is for everyone.

It can nourish us, comfort us.

And like it has here today, it can bring us together.

I came into Gourmet Soul to try soul food and ended up finding something that was nourishing to my soul.

Though she's driven by my restaurant for decades.

If it hadn't been for the snoot sandwich we may have never met.

But because of food, now we share a bond.

It's beautiful and funny how things happened because of food.

More proof in case you needed any, that food is love.

Yeah Do you see this right here?

Chef snoot and love.

What else is ther?

H ere's to the local restaurants, to the chefs, owner operators, the staff, the ones who love being in the weeds night after night, When we go to work each morning, that's who we have in mind From where we source our food to how we deliver it here's to them, the ones who are out there cooking for us every day.

Restaurants are the heart of everything we do.

We are Performance Food Service.

Proudly supporting Food is Love.

Support for Food is Love is provided by Wild Alaska Salmon and Seafood 100% fisherman family owned independent seafood sourcing catching, processing and delivering seafood directly to the consumer's front door.

From caught to bought wild salmon direct from the fisherman Information at WildAlaskaSalmonandSeafood.com.