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BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - A lot of people like to claim love is the secret ingredient in their recipes, but there’s no secret about it at Zeeland Street.

”You can feel comfortable coming here knowing this could have been your aunt’s place, your grandmother’s place, something like that,” said owner Stephanie Phares.

The dining area is chic, but cozy. Large photos of Phares’s grandmother and father lookout over customers with smiles from the back wall. In fact, customers have that formidable woman to thank for many of the home-cooked recipes served at Zeeland.

”I am honoring her existence. I am honoring the time that she took me under her wing for 5 years and I was like a little Sous chef,” said Phares.

Phares learned how to cook from her grandmother, another cook, who taught her to do things the proper way: start from scratch and use real, fresh ingredients. That’s something Phares says her grandmother did in life too.

”She had the love of God and the love of community and people,” said Phares. “She was one of the top people in civil rights. She didn’t stop. She took her vehicle and took her kids to school. Her windows were smashed, eggs were thrown on her, but she waded through it and she did it for us.”

Phares calls her family her beloved. It’s also what she named her upcoming dinner service. Beloved, a high-end soul food concept complete with white table clothes, launched in November. Phares said they had to pause the evening restaurant concept for a few months for some fine-tuning, but she has plans to bring it back in the spring.

“I wanted to show that I was capable of doing an upscale southern menu and I think it works,” said Phares who described a menu that blends her Mississippi roots and the restaurant’s Louisiana location.

Beloved features things like shrimp and grits, blackened catfish, and other familiar but elevated soul food classics.

It’s just the latest evolution of the restaurant that’s sat on the corner of Zeeland Street and Perkins Road for more than 30 years. With so much love poured into a place where everyone knows your name, and your order, it’s hard to imagine a time where Stephanie Phares was an outsider.

”I was just a young girl who came to this town, and I needed friends and I needed family. So, I had to involve myself in the community and I think it worked,” said Phares.

Yet, when she and her husband first moved into the neighborhood, she says they were the first Black couple on the block and often drew the attention of police officers who assumed they didn’t belong. “So, I said you know what? I need to introduce myself to everybody. I would go from door to door and say, ‘Hello my name is Stephanie and I live on Zeeland.,’” recalled Phares. “After that I started a potluck supper.”

Phares says the last Friday of every month she would invite the neighborhood to share in the same recipes her grandmother taught her. At one point, she says they had 100 people in their yard. From that, the idea of opening a restaurant took shape. Zeeland Street is now a Baton Rouge staple for breakfast and lunch, as much for those old family recipes as the owner herself.

”She’s a lovely person. A truly lovely person. I enjoy her presence,” said regular Gabby Core.

As she continues to push her restaurant into a new era with Beloved, she also is hoping to teach the next generation to cook as she was taught, and ensure the history and lessons live on.

Phares believes Louisiana young people are losing their heritage of cooking, growing up with processed foods without learning the basics that allow them to feed themselves for life. She dreams of working with state officials to establish some sort of cooking program for teenagers to make sure recipes and stories live on.

“I am trying to preserve a way of living that is wonderful for Baton Rouge, for Louisiana. I want people to know we are here. That you can come here have a good time, have a good meal, and feel good after you walk out of here,” said Phares.

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