Brown Suga Cafe Daily Oklahoman Revue

Published: July 22, 2009

Whether Brown Suga Cafe is named after its signature dish or the dish was named after the restaurant, Brown Suga Chicken is a meal you should know.

Shlonda Holland owns and operates Brown Suga Cafe with her mother and two sisters, serving soul food.

They feature comfort food of the Deep South, including classic dishes such as collard greens, cornbread, meatloaf, fried chicken and pot roast. All fine choices but all found at menus around the state.

The Brown Suga Chicken, however, can only be found at 36 W Memorial.

Holland starts with a whole chicken. After a quick wash and dry, the chicken is seasoned with one of her 32 different secret seasoning blends.

After a 90-minute spin around the rotisserie, the chicken is glazed with another blend and cut into quarters for service.

You can order the Brown Suga Chicken white or dark, but either way, the meat doesn’t hold to the bone for long.

It arrives on the palate a moist morsel of salty and sweet — the brown sugar staving of its salty competition just enough to deliver a balanced bite.

"Every dish is about seasoning and execution,” Holland said.

Holland keeps her seasoning blends secret, and if you ask what it is, you will get the same answer every time, "It’s brown sugar and some other things.”

Almost every item on the menu has the cafe’s trademark of brown sugar in the dish. The corn bread is made fresh from scratch daily and served with a butter and a brown sugar rub that supplies a subtle crunch.

Brown Suga Cafe is a tribute to Holland’s grandmother, Ruth J. Fuller, who taught Holland to cook soul food. The restaurant is all about family. Everyone who works there is family, and everyone who eats there feels like they are part of a family.

Holland plans to sell her seasoning blends and four cookbooks in the future.

Brown Suga Cafe opened in Oct. 2007 at NW 122 and May Avenue. July 1, the cafe moved to the Memorial Road location. The new space allowed Holland to expand the menu to include traditional fried chicken, and the increasingly popular fried chicken and waffles.

Holland and her family are doing their best to elevate a cuisine that easily gets lost in mass-produced form: old-fashioned Southern cooking.

Copyright(c) 2009 Brown Suga Entertainment. All rights reserved.