Sweet Home Café

Sweet Home Café

By: Zachary Blumberg

Sweet Home Café is located inside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C. The name comes from the song “Sweet Home Chicago,” a blues standard by musician and songwriter Robert Johnson.

The café is situated on the bottom floor of the museum, underground at the furthest point from the above-ground entrance of the building. This unusual layout is by design. The food at Sweet Home Café offers a small sampling of Black culture and history. This layout guides visitors through the exhibits, providing context and knowledge about the culture behind the food and the history behind that culture, before they arrive at the café. So, when they do finally sit down and enjoy the food, they can appreciate it from an enriched perspective.

Executive Chef Ramin Coles provides a steady, guiding hand for menu development at the café. A graduate of Maryland’s L’Academie de Cuisine and a restaurant industry veteran, Chef Coles uses his knowledge to help lead the restaurant through the unique challenges of running a restaurant within a museum. The menu itself is an ever-rotating mix of foods from African American history, current trends within the community, and possibilities for the future of the community. It also changes when the time of year coincides with a holiday or historical event.

Seafood makes up around one-third of the menu. Each day, Sweet Home Café offers a different fish of the day, as well as a wide variety of other seafood-centric dishes. The restaurant makes full use of the knowledge base at its disposal to help support this diversity, ranging from the complex layers of flavor found in jambalaya to simpler dishes like mussels. The menu has also included shrimp and grits, crab quiche, oysters, fried bass, catfish, and more. The café also offers off-premise catering.

For guests looking to recreate Sweet Home Café’s menu at home, there is The Sweet Home Café Cookbook (A Celebration of African American Cooking). Boasting an impressive 109 recipes that the restaurant has cooked over the years, the cookbook also provides the histories and people behind the dishes.

Sweet Home Café feeds not only the body but also the mind. It is a great place to enjoy delicious food, learn about the history that shaped that food, and understand the culture that shaped that history.