Josh Schrock

Feature Story

Among the businesses on Blair Avenue are a 7-11, an antique store, and a white house with a red roof. This house isn’t a normal house. There is normally a flock of people waiting on the front stoop of the house. A rich smoky aroma emanates from its doors and windows. This house has soul.

People file out of the house with a glazed over look in their eyes and smile of satisfaction stretched across their face. What was once a tiny house has been transformed into Eugene, Oregon’s very own house of soul.

Papa’s Soul Food was started in 2006 by Theodore “Papa Soul” Lee. The restaurant serves Southern style food in a relaxed blues house atmosphere. It is one of only eight soul food restaurants in the state of Oregon; the other seven are in Portland, according to Urban Spoon.com.

Lee, who passed away in 2009, was born in Long Beach, California, in 1966.  Lee moved to Oregon to attend college but dropped out and moved to various parts of the south in order to pursue his interest in the culinary arts.

A wooden easel sits on the front stoop of the house announcing the specials. On this Wednesday it reads, “Chicken and Waffles $9.95.” Malcolm Wilson, 24, waits outside to be seated. Wilson, a Georgia native, has found a place where he can get a little taste of home on the West Coast. “The food here is so authentic, it makes me feel like I’m home. You know, kind of like mom is cooking,” Wilson said.

“Papa Soul” came back to Oregon in the early 1990’s after finding his culinary background. Upon his return he worked in a variety of different restaurants in Eugene, before starting up his own business at the corner of 7^th Avenue and Polk Street, then to a storefront on West 11^th street before the business relocated to its current location in the Whiteaker neighborhood.

After walking through the white window-paned door patrons are immersed in a world of slow cooked meats and southern seasoned sides. D’Angelo Lee, son of Theodore, now helps run the restaurant with his mother and brother. “My grandmother owned a soul food restaurant in California when my dad was growing up and he always wanted to own a restaurant of his own,” Lee said while preparing to seat patrons on a busy Wednesday night.

Customers sit at one of the small wooden tables that line the dimly lit interior or at one of the picnic tables in the backyard, “It’s the perfect place to have a restaurant like this. My dad thought it gave that quiet Southern feel, with the small bar up front and the porch area in the back,” D’Angelo Lee said after pouring three mint juleps at the bar.

The menu is decorated in large, hand-drawn artwork depicting the different menu items. From a sketch of Fried Chicken to a graphic of a live chicken in between two buns depicting the “Six Dollar Jerk Chicken Sandwich,” the menu adds to the atmosphere of this Southern style blues joint.

The food arrives with freshly cooked steam rolling off of it. From the crispy skin on the fried chicken to the rich and creamy yellow sauce that covers the mac and cheese, what is a quaint house on the outside is transformed into a personal tour of southern delicacies.

Theodore Lee learned a majority of his recipes from his time on the road. “Grandma gave him a few recipes but most of them he learned either in his travels or through trial and error in the kitchen himself,” D’Angelo Lee said.

The unique taste of the dishes is part of the intrigue and popularity that has swirled around Papa’s Soul Food over the past few years. Michael Lyon, 21, has been coming to Papa’s since he moved to Eugene in 2008. “Everything about this place just draws you in. Affordable, unique, delicious food, you really want to know how they make some of their food,” Lyon said.

“If we told you, then you might not come back,” Lee says with a side smirk and a chuckle. Lee recalled his father’s dreams to further the business, “He talked about catering and expanding the business more but most of all he just wanted people to enjoy what he enjoyed.” Based on the nightly lines on the corner of 4^th and Blair, he did just that.