Valerie Erwin - General Manager of Eat Café

VALERIE ERWIN IS BEST KNOWN AS THE CHEF-OWNER of Geechee Girl Rice Café, shuttered in 2015. There, she cooked the cuisine of the Geechee people—descendants of enslaved Africans living on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia—for 12 years.

Before that she worked under Philly food legends, including Judy Wicks (La Terrasse) and Steve Poses (Frog Commissary). Growing up, Erwin cooked family dinner with her sisters every night at their childhood home in North Philadelphia.

These days, Erwin manages the pay-what-you-can EAT (Everyone at the Table) Café and sits on the board of the Southern Foodways Alliance. These two roles keep her so busy, she rarely cooks at home. When she does, she sometimes turns for inspiration to her longtime favorite cookbook, In Pursuit of Flavor (Knopf, 1988), by Edna Lewis. “All of her recipes sound good, and I’ve never made one that didn’t taste better than it sounded,” Erwin says.

Erwin’s copy of the book is signed; when Lewis came to Philly for a dinner event in 1990, Erwin helped her cook. She still remembers offering Lewis a taste of a dish she made. It was Lewis’s recipe for fruit chutney.

“I told her, I don’t know if it’s right, but it tastes good,” Erwin remembers, “And she said to me, ‘Well, if it tastes good, then what does it matter?’”

It’s with that sentiment that she prepares one of her favorite Lewis recipes: pork roast cooked on the stove. It’s a West-African-influenced dish; the meat is seasoned with ginger and sage, served with peanut butter– thickened sauce. Erwin adds chopped parsley from her garden and serves it with rice to soak up every last bit of flavor.

EAT Café
3820 Lancaster Ave.
267.292.2768
eatcafe.org