This Bayview mom craved a cozy neighborhood restaurant. So she opened one

Vanessa Lee never thought she’d own a restaurant on Third Street. When she was growing up in the ’90s, her mother warned about walking along the Bayview’s main corridor. “Make sure you keep your backpack with you,” Lee remembers her saying, “and if anyone asks you for it, you just give it to them.” 

By the time Lee became a mother, in 2019, the neighborhood had taken a turn for the better. She’d put her son in the stroller and go for a walk. She’d have liked to grab a cup of coffee and sit while he napped, “but there was nowhere for me to go,” she says. So when the nonprofit Economic Development on Third asked her to parlay her catering experience into opening a restaurant on the strip, she couldn’t say no. “I wanted to be able to give something to my community,” she says, “and I know what I’m capable of, so I knew the level that I could do it to.”

Lee opened Smoke Soul Kitchen in February, taking over the space where April Spears ran her legendary fried chicken and waffle spot, Auntie April’s, for more than a decade. Like that restaurant before it, Smoke Soul Kitchen serves crispy fried chicken and waffles, shrimp and grits, and mac ’n’ cheese. But Lee is conscientious about how she describes her restaurant. “It’s soul fusion,” she says. “The foundation of all of our dishes is soul food and Southern cooking, and some of the recipes are passed down — but there’s a twist to them.” 

Take the fried chicken and waffles. Lee, a self-taught cook, says her recipe uses no buttermilk, just a secret blend of spices that make each oversize wing simultaneously salty, savory, and nearly impossible to put down. Underneath, she serves a sweet-cream waffle with a side of cinnamon and brown-sugar-infused compound butter, plus a ramekin of maple syrup. Her shrimp and grits veer from tradition; the creamy porridge is buried under not just a pile of jumbo shrimp but bacon, diced tomato, green onion, and cheddar cheese. To her smothered chicken, she adds microgreens and tomatillo hot sauce.

The subtle details tell you a bit about Lee, who incorporates aspects of her life story in both food and presentation. On every plate, she includes a dark-magenta Dendrobium orchid blossom. “We do it because it looks nice — but my brother also went to the University of Hawaii. His wife is Hawaiian,” she says. “Everything that I’ve experienced, we try to put it into food.” 

Though the restaurant is open only Thursday through Sunday, for breakfast and lunch, the space is far from underutilized. Lee subleases the front of the building; the back houses Bayview Makers Kitchen, an incubator for small businesses that Lee also manages. These include Baby & Boy Pastries, which bakes Filipino-inspired empanadas; Nixta, a plant-based pupusa maker; and the pop-up Frank Grizzly’s, known for slinging some of the city’s best breakfast burritos. The coffee Lee serves at Smoke Soul Kitchen is roasted in the back on a commercial machine that may be used for classes down the line. 

This is also where Lee bases her catering business, which is, in some ways, the heart of the whole thing. Lee spent two decades working in local government (including 13 years with the Alameda County Transportation Commission), but cooking was always a passion. She and her dad held informal barbecue cookoffs at their house for years. When her grandfather died in 2018, they cooked a funeral repast for 200 guests. It was a turning point for the talented home cook. “I remember thinking, maybe I can do this, you know?” she says. “Maybe this is something that I love doing.” She incorporated Smoke Soul Kitchen not long after and spent the next few years taking business courses, doing pop-ups, and even giving away food while she built up her clientele. 

The Smoke Soul Kitchen space, which had been dark for four years, now has cherry-red walls and abundant greenery. On one side wall, Lee installed custom wallpaper. It’s a medley of five works of art: Mickalene Thomas’ “Baby I Am Ready Now,” Jacob Lawrence’s “The Migration Series,” Annie Lee’s “Blue Monday,” Jean-Michel Basquiat’s crown motif, and Ernie Barnes’ “The Sugar Shack,” which appeared on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s album “I Want You” — all iconic works from Black artists. Customers usually recognize at least one component of the composition. 

Lee says she didn’t want to have to advertise that, just like Auntie April’s before, Smoke Soul Kitchen is a Black- and woman-owned business. “I just wanted it to feel that way when you walk in.”