They drove from as far as Cheyenne and Walsenburg.
Some skipped work. Many ignored their doctors’ orders. Two ducked out of jury duty.
They all ate until it hurt.
Such was the lure of one last meal at Ethel’s House of Soul.
Ethel Allen fired up her stoves before dawn Monday, closing day, as she has most mornings since opening in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood in 1971. She cooks what she knows: smothered neckbones, pig-ear sandwiches and a dozen other down-home dishes done up fresh and slow and fine.
Invariably, her regulars use the same two words to describe her cooking: “Like home.”
Home for Miss Ethel — as her customers know her — was Chicago, where she helped her own mother cook for a soul-food concession. She brought the recipes by memory to Denver, following a man here at age 19.
Eventually, she set up shop in a shuttered Chinese restaurant on Welton Street, where her sign reads, “Everyone Welcome,” “Home Cooked Meals Daily.”
Keeping that promise meant sleeping on a mattress behind her bar and waking at 4 a.m. to begin boiling all manner of pig parts into the smoky, sweet reductions that flavor most of her dishes.
It meant so many scorch marks on her forearms that she says cooking “don’t feel right no more if it don’t burn.”
Being Denver’s soul-food diva hasn’t made her rich. Still, she said, “It sure enough beats working for the man.”
Now, at 75, Miss Ethel’s legs ache. Arthritis has bent her fingers like pork cracklings. She was eager Monday to empty her icebox and hang up her apron.
She would leave the sentimentality to her customers.
“I’m gonna sit down somewhere, look at TV and go on a resting mission. I just hope I don’t fall out back here before I’m done,” she says, stirring gravy with one hand and slapping her last batch of pork chops on on the grill with the other.
The aromas wafted outside, where regulars lining up to wait for her doors to open strained to convince themselves that an old lady’s need to retire trumped their own soul-food addictions.
It’s saying something when a ham hock can summon your childhood as surely as a yellowed photo in an album.
“Sometimes you just need that feeling of being back to your roots,” said Gigi Gibson, who drove from Colorado Springs for her last fix of Miss Ethel’s smothered pork chops.
She nearly cried upon learning there was no peach cobbler on Monday’s menu.
Victor and Walter Johnson tried to sear into memory the broken vinyl booths and pink Formica tabletops where they’ve eaten oxtails most Fridays since they were kids. Some days, they served food or answered the phone so Miss Ethel could tend to her kitchen.
Denver parks worker Freddie Hillman took a vacation day to savor the dishes that have fed his soul since his aging mother scaled back her cooking. After licking clean his pork chops, he picked up a chunk of cornbread. He swabbed it over his plate, sopping up the last of his gravy, greens and yams — a combination so sublime it spurred a moan that spoke of happiness and loss.
“Mmm, mmm, Miss Ethel, you put your foot in it again, baby,” he told her.
Having spent decades looking for a woman who can cook like his mama, Hillman had settled on the next best thing: $8 for Miss Ethel’s weekly specials.
“If only I could turn back the hands of time to have Miss Ethel feed me for another 11 or 12 years,” he said.
Hillman gathered his go-boxes of chops and hot links, then headed out the door like a man leaving a woman he loved.
Miss Ethel needed her rest.
Susan Greene writes twice weekly. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
