Kathy Leslie (left) and Sandra Austin
Radley Balko is a journalist who covers criminal justice and more for The Washington Post. He is author of the books The Rise of the Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. With his ongoing series Nashville Byline, he’ll profile fascinating characters, businesses and other parts of Nashville.
“In my family, we’ve always equated food with love,” says Kathy Leslie. “Our mother was a full-time nurse. She worked long hours. But every night when she came home, she’d cook a full meal, including dessert. That’s how we grew up. And we wanted other folks to feel that — to feel that love we felt growing up.”
In 2016, Leslie, an attorney, and her sister Sandra Austin, a banker, left their jobs to start Shugga Hi, a cafe and bakery near Cleveland Park just east of the river.
The cafe is a quaint but modern spot with wooden tables, a glossy black bar with orange vinyl chairs, and large, Jazz Age-inspired paintings along the walls. Depending on the day, the bakery display might feature a selection of cocktail-inspired cakes, a towering strawberry or Neapolitan cake or a lemon-blueberry bundt, along with daily offerings like bourbon pie and a selection of doughnuts, fritters and cookies.
The cafe menu is heavy with Southern soul food, including staples like biscuits with pepper gravy, a fried pork tenderloin sandwich, a rich waffle topped with tater tots and smoked barbecue rib tips.
Before the pandemic and ensuing citywide stay-at-home order prevented dining in, the “Jazz & Eggs” brunch would wake the place up on Sundays. Well-dressed patrons fresh from the pews would pick at a buffet bustling with rib-stickers like potato casserole, shrimp-and-grits, and collards and cabbage, while a musician — or two, or three — grooved from a small stage in the back corner of the dining area.
“What do Nashvillians do?” Leslie says. “We love to eat. We love our live music. So that’s what —”
Her sister interrupts: “And we love to drink!”
“Yes, that too! So we decided that’s what we’d give them. Good food. Good music. And lots of alcohol.” The two women chuckle.
Leslie and Austin — who are 63 and 65, respectively — grew up in northeast Nashville. They’ve watched much of the city flourish as large swaths of their own neighborhood were left behind. “When we decided to do this, we wanted to locate the business in a place the rest of the city had forgotten,” says Leslie. “This area was blighted when we set up shop. Prostitutes walked up and down the street. But we saw what it could be.”
The sisters originally planned to open a small neighborhood bakery featuring Austin’s sweets.
“I’ve been baking since I was a girl,” Austin says. “Every year around Thanksgiving, our mother and I would bake eight, 10 cakes or more. It was way more than our family could eat. But it was about the experience. It’s just what we did. I kept that up. Even when I was in banking. Some people come home and watch TV or exercise to unwind. I’d come home, pour some wine and bake.”
“My sister’s the master baker,” Leslie adds. “I’m the master eater.”
But when the two found the 4,000-square-foot building on a pie-slice-shaped plot of land between Whites Creek and Dickerson pikes, their plan grew more ambitious. “We just had all this space,” Leslie says. “Way more than we needed for a little bakery. So we decided we’d serve up some of our mother’s savory recipes, too.”
The women put together a business plan, made their projections, and began to look for financing. That’s where they hit a wall.
“It was really discouraging, I’ll be honest with you,” Leslie says. “We both came from the business world. My sister was a banker. We know how to write a business plan. We knew what we were doing. I don’t know if it was because we were African American, or because we were women —”
“Probably both,” Austin interrupts.
“Yeah. Probably both. But the banks would just look at us with this blank stare. It was like, ‘No, y’all can’t do that. Y’all should just go home.’ ”
The sisters eventually financed the venture themselves, along with getting some help from friends and family. After a year of planning, Shugga Hi opened in July 2017, featuring Austin’s boozy cakes (her favorite: a Bailey’s Irish Cream cake) and a limited lunch menu.
It was the brunch that put the place on the map, turning the sleepy cafe into a bouncing, post-church destination. They began with the obligatory selection of scrumptious, artery-choking breakfast foods — chicken and waffles, cheese grits, made-to-order omelets. But the sisters then added a second table of salads and lunch options, along with bottomless mimosas and bloody marys.
By the time the cafe hit its two-year anniversary, Shugga Hi had garnered neighborhood buzz, glowing reviews, a perfect score on TripAdvisor and 4.5 stars on Yelp. When Metro Councilmember Sharon Hurt won re-election last year, she held her victory party at the cafe. The NFL chose Shugga Hi as a caterer when the city hosted the league’s 2019 draft.
Kathy Leslie (left) and Sandra Austin
As the cafe raced past its second anniversary, business was bustling. The sisters were doing well enough to start giving back to the community that supported them, including hosting an annual fall harvest dinner, open to anyone in the community. Last year they fed 400 people. “That’s another thing our parents instilled in us,” says Austin. “If there’s enough for one, there’s enough for two. If we’ve got it, you can get it as well.”
They also mentor and aid other minority-owned businesses, including other restaurants. “We don’t consider other minority-owned businesses to be competitors,” Austin says. “When a new restaurant opens, we go dine there. We tell our customers to go there. When one of us is successful, we’re all more successful.”
Then came March. And the tornado. The massive twister somehow danced an unlikely trajectory that not only destroyed the neighborhoods of many Shugga Hi customers, but also struck three of the city’s main restaurant suppliers — Best Brands, Sysco and Restaurant Depot. It was a hell of a blow.
“We lost a lot of volume after the tornado,” Leslie says. “That was bad enough. But also our main food supplier was totally destroyed.”
“It was really difficult,” Austin adds. “We had to quickly adjust and source our food from other places.”
The tornado also temporarily shut down the Jefferson Street Bridge, a main artery into the neighborhood. “It was already hard,” says Leslie. “But all of that then took us straight into COVID. It was just overwhelming.”
As with pretty much every other restaurant owner in the city, when Nashville closed down dine-in service, Ausin and Leslie faced an existential decision: pivot or shut down. They chose to pivot. “When you’re a minority, you learn how to adapt to adjust to hardship,” Leslie says. “So that’s what we’re doing. We’re adapting.”
Shugga Hi now offers curbside takeout as well as delivery through Uber Eats, and every Saturday they hold a “Cookout Takeout,” offering to-go boxes of breakfast staples, bakery items and new items like a grilled watermelon-and-pineapple salad. They’re also continuing to give back, preparing meals for medical professionals and first responders.
The cafe isn’t exactly thriving, but it’s surviving. “Some days you ask if it’s worth it,” Austin says. “But then I think about the staff who stayed on. They could have gone home, applied for benefits. But they stayed true to us. So we owe it to them to keep going.”
I ask the sisters if they’d received any aid from the federal COVID-19 relief packages. They laugh.
“Oh, we applied,” Austin says. “And we were immediately told that the money was gone. But at least we got that far. I’ve read about all of these huge businesses that got millions. But I know places in the city, catering businesses who have been around for 25 or 30 years, and they never even received acknowledgement of their application. There’s a lot of frustration out there. I think the feeling is that if you aren’t connected to a big bank, you got nothing. The mom-and-pop places were punished.”
Still, the sisters have no plans to close down, and they’ll reopen on their own time. “We aren’t going to reopen as soon as the city lets us,” Austin says. “I have an underlying health condition, so I need to be extra careful. We’ll reopen when we think it’s safe for our staff and our customers.”
But they’re also confident they’ll survive to see another jazz brunch buffet.
“This too shall pass,” Leslie says. “You beat hardship by being flexible. By being patient. And adapt, adapt, adapt. We’ll get through this. We’re used to making bricks from straw.”
