Sylvia's Restaurant
328 Lenox Avenue | Harlem | built 1900
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1962
Sylvia Woods buys a tiny Harlem lunch counter with her savings and a loan from her mother
Sylvia Woods had worked as a waitress and manager at several Harlem places when she bought Johnson's Luncheonette in 1962, using all her savings plus a loan from her mother, who took a second mortgage on her farm. Woods repaid her mother a year after opening. In the early years her husband Herbert did the food shopping and the older children pitched in, and when her younger children were babies she let them nap in the bread warming drawers.
Source: Internet Archive
- 1979
A New York magazine critic calls Sylvia Woods the queen of soul food
Sylvia's was a popular neighborhood restaurant before critic Gael Greene of New York magazine published a 1979 piece calling Woods the queen of soul food. According to the South Carolina Encyclopedia, the piece brought the business worldwide attention. Ruth Gully, a native of Woods's hometown of Hemingway, ran the kitchen from 1975 until her death in 1995 and created many of the restaurant's simple Southern dishes.
Source: scencyclopedia.org
- 1992
At 30, Sylvia's has grown from a counter and five booths to three dining rooms
As Sylvia's marked its 30th year, the Chicago Tribune described a place that had grown from a counter and five booths into three dining rooms seating about 300, with 62 employees, many of them family. Photographs on the walls showed Wesley Snipes, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Spike Lee, who shot a Jungle Fever scene there. Franklin once rented the restaurant for a private party and left the cooking to Woods, and Mayor David Dinkins was a longtime customer.
Source: chicagotribune.com
- 2003
Kenneth Woods becomes the restaurant's chief executive
Sylvia Woods's son Kenneth, the third of her four children, became chief executive of the family business in 2003. When the New York Times visited in 2022, fourteen family members worked for the company. Tren'ness Woods, one of Sylvia's 18 grandchildren, told the paper that for years the restaurant was the biggest minority employer in Harlem.
Source: Internet Archive
- 2012
Sylvia Woods dies, and hundreds fill a church to hear Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg
Sylvia Woods died in July 2012, having divided her later years between Hemingway, South Carolina, and Harlem while her four children ran the business. By then the company included the Harlem restaurant, an Atlanta branch, cookbooks and a line of packaged foods sold in stores nationally. At one of several memorial services, hundreds of mourners filled a church for eulogies from Bill Clinton, the former president, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Source: scencyclopedia.org
- 2014
The corner outside Sylvia's is co-named Sylvia P. Woods Way
On May 14, 2014 the corner of West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, in front of the restaurant's lounge, was co-named Sylvia P. Woods Way. Congressman Charles Rangel and the Reverends Al Sharpton and Calvin Butts attended the unveiling. Her daughter Crizette said she hoped children who never met Woods would know what the name meant to the community. The family said it planned to renovate and enlarge the restaurant and hoped to break ground within a year.
Source: nydailynews.com
- 2024
The James Beard Foundation names Sylvia's one of its America's Classics
In 2024 the James Beard Foundation honored Sylvia's Restaurant as an America's Classic for New York State, an award celebrated at its ceremony at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on June 10. The foundation described the restaurant, founded in 1962, as a Harlem institution that has fed presidents, governors, mayors, heads of state and its Harlem neighbors South Carolina soul food such as barbecue ribs, fried chicken and smothered pork chops, and that the Woods family still owns.
Source: jamesbeard.org
Further reading
- Sylvia's Restaurant of HarlemWikipedia
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