Fried chicken among soul food satisfactions at Margie’s inside the Broadway Market

(By Caitlin Hartney – Buffalo.com) Polish, Italian and German food are all considered basic food groups in Western New York, but soul food has never gotten its due. Soul food—comprising a variety of dishes and cooking styles whose origins can be traced to the 18th and 19th century foodways of Southern slaves and freedmen— is still very much a daily fixture in Buffalo.

One credible venue is Margie’s Soul Food, located inside the Broadway Market. Its namesake, Margie Hawkins, recently opened the food counter in the space long occupied by McKenzie’s Soul Food. Hawkins served as McKenzie’s chef for 16 years before it shuttered six months ago.

Now in business for herself, the Selma, Alabama, native, whose family came to Buffalo in the 1970s, is single-handedly, and with great care, turning out the southern-inflected food she grew up eating and cooking for her family of 21 brothers and sisters.Her decades of experience makes her meals shine. Their basic format  is meat and two sides with cornbread or a biscuit. Chief among her triumphs are chicken thighs, simply fried, nearly perfectly. I won’t go into gory detail about how lustfully I manhandled my particular piece, stripping it clean of its best bits and relishing its balance of salt, grease, juice and crunch.

I will say that if you’re anything like me, be prepared to get a little sinful and a little messy. This is a dish best enjoyed with someone who will still love you after seeing you glisten with chicken fat.

My chicken dinner ($8) also came with a husky breast, its full wing still attached. It had the same crisp exterior as the thigh, but its leaner interior and higher meat to skin ratio made it a more virtuous, restrained eating experience. That’s probably a good thing. Life is about balance, after all.

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