6978 Soul Food

6978 Soul Food

On Valentine’s Day, we had a bottle of Barons de Rothschild Champagne in the refrigerator but nothing special for dinner. So I went to 6978 Soul Food to pick up some southern cuisine. Fried chicken goes notoriously well with Champagne, and I was interested in trying this place, which we’d driven many times.

Groupon had a deal that cut prices in half: it was around $15 for two dinners or around $30 for four dinners; I wanted to try a lot of different things, so I got four dinners: two fried chicken, one jerk chicken and catfish.

I had few preconceptions about what 6978 would be like on the inside, but it turned out to be much more like a pleasant restaurant and much less like a carryout counter (which is kind of what I had in mind). And it was packed; I had to wait only 10 minutes or so for my dinners to be wrapped up, but in that time, I saw a lot of people coming in and heard the server say it would be a 20-minute wait for a table. This is a popular place.



• The fried chicken was very good, with light breading, crunchy but not too hard. We also liked the jerk chicken, though neither had much spice, which is not a total shock: most soul food seems to get by on minimal seasoning (that’s what hot sauce is for).
• The catfish was fine, not overdone, with light breading, good flavor and for this particular subspecies, relatively firm texture.
• Black-eyed peas were fantastic: nicely seasoned with big chunks of flavorful pork throughout. This was probably the standout side. Some places just boil the beans and add butter or (ugh) margarine, but these seemed to be basically just the beans and pork. One could actually make an entrée out of these.
• Stuffing, made with bread crumbs rather than crotons, was kind of like a puree; tasting mostly of sage, which is not a bad flavor but pretty much the only flavor: not awesome.
• Cabbage was largely flavorful, and was not cooked to mush, which we appreciated. The leaves were firm; somebody was paying attention when they made this.
• Yams were extremely sweet, but that’s not too surprising: a lot of southern food (sweet tea, chess pie, etc.) is too sweet for northern palates. These sweet potatoes (not, technically, yams, let’s not get picky) were also cooked just right – and this may seem like a small point, but a characteristic of southern vegetables is that many are boiled to an almost liquid state.
• Muffin turned out to be pretty good, using corn meal and not at all greasy, which is a common problem with muffins.
• Mac n’ cheese: I was ready not to like this, but it was a darn good version. It had been baked, which helps all the flavors come together, and it was crisp on top. Carolyn, who makes a wonderful mac n’ cheese, said that although she preferred a tangier cheese, this was a very good version of the classic, mild cheese preparation.
• Banana pudding and peach cobbler: both credible renditions of soul food classics.

Overall, pretty damn good and a huge value.

6978 changes the menu slightly every day, switching the sides and even the entrées, which is probably a good idea: a constantly changing menu means people will be okay with going to the restaurant more than once a week, and I have a feeling 6978 has a lot of repeat customers.

Will I be one of those repeat customers? Maybe, but I have to say, soul food is not in my top 5 favorite world cuisines (those would be Mexican, French, Italian, Indian and Thai). I like simply prepared foods, but most soul food is heavy on the carbs (beans, yams, rice, bread), and tends to put me in a mild food coma. Still, it is undeniably comfort food, whichever side of the Mason-Dixon line you grew up on.

And how’d the Champagne go with it all? This was a good bottle, but it didn’t get along all that well with the food. It wasn’t bad; it just didn’t add much. I should have had a beer, but it was Valentine’s Day.

6978 Soul Food
6978 W. North
Elmwood Park, IL
773.237.6090

David Hammond wrote:6978 Soul Food
6978 W. North
Elmwood Park, IL
773.237.6090

Nitpicking here, but North and East of Harlem/North is Chicago, not Elmwood Park. That intersection is a four corner intersection of Chicago, Oak Park, River Forest and Elmwood Park (in clockwise order).

Vital Info and I had a dinner here a couple years ago. Not bad at all. Simple comfort food.

teatpuller wrote:Vital Info and I had a dinner here a couple years ago. Not bad at all. Simple comfort food.

Teat, "not bad at all" is pretty much my response to most soul food, I am not proud to say. Aside from exceptional proponents of that culinary tradition, most of it seems under-seasoned and not all that wonderful (there are exceptions, of course: Carolyn and I are still talking about those black eyed peas and fried chicken is almost always something I want to eat). Part of this might be due to the fact that this is a way of eating built to some extent on privation and scarcity: there was probably just not that much raw material to work with, so in another sense, practitioners of that tradition have perhaps done very well with the limited resources they had. It is, however, undeniably comfort food, which in my experience is usually simple.