I never expected to discover a funky soul-food joint during a rush to catch a plane to Nashville, Tenn. But that’s how it happened, confirming a long-held suspicion that some of the very best culinary discoveries are made on the way to someplace else.
Occupying a spiffed-up corner of a tired strip mall at Newark Street and East Montview Boulevard in original Aurora, Soulicious just looked like a place that required a visit.
Since the beginning of the summer, Lori Fontenot, her four sons and a cousin have been serving classic soul food to anyone who happens by.
Older couples huddle over a box of hot links. Hip teens mow through their orders of fried chicken. Singles grab their catfish dinners and go. Folks from all over the city line up for the Friday-only gumbo ($4 cup, $6 bowl.)
And now that Lowry is a stopover for Southern families driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina, I expect that folks looking for a little taste of home will find their way to Soulicious too.
Fontenot is a Colorado native, but her family’s Louisiana roots show in the menu of Southern staples – pig-ear sandwiches ($3), pig feet and neck bone dinners ($6-$7), barbecue ribs ($8), and oxtails ($8) on Saturday and chitlins ($9) on Sunday.
Yankee palates will naturally gravitate to the dishes served daily, like the fried chicken dinners – pick from dark meat ($6), white meat ($7) or a mix ($6.25), two sides and a slab of sweet corn bread. The dinner portion of spicy, smoky hot links ($7) swimming in a satiny barbecue sauce are enough for two.
But you can safely take a pass on both and settle down with a catfish dinner ($9), prepared so perfectly by Fontenot’s 19-year-old son, Lonnell Frierson, that you won’t want to share.
Firm, fat fillets of silky catfish are fried into perfectly crispy planks and served with a little container of thin hot sauce. You also get to pick two from a list of seven, or sometimes nine, sides. The day we lunched at Soulicious, we gobbled up black-eyed peas, mac-‘n’-cheese, green beans prepared with tiny bits of potato and just-right fried okra and might have ordered more if we hadn’t been worried about the fatness of our own fillets.
Of course, Soulicious will never replace the beloved low-country recipe boxes lost when Katrina struck. But a generous helping of the Fontenot family’s Louisiana-inspired cooking might help folks finding their way in unfamiliar culinary territory to make do for a while.
Soulicious
OLD-FASHIONED SOUTHERN | 11601 E. Montview Blvd., Aurora, 303-344-1526 | $2.50-$9 | Lunch- dinner 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday, MC, Visa, Discover, AmEx; off-street parking behind the building.
Front burner: Generous portions of simple but soulful food.
Back burner: Although the food is served in Styrofoam containers fast-food style, production is slow, so expect to sit a spell.
