D.C. restaurant is a tribute to a literary great

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By David Montgomery

In Eatonville the town (outside of Orlando, population 2,400), there are porches where stories are spun, so naturally there must be a “porch” in Eatonville the restaurant (just off V Street NW, 250 seats) where visitors from the town might sit a spell with customers.

“This is a first,” says N.Y. Nathiri, pleasantly stunned to see this trendy urban take on her rural home town. She rocks her green wooden chair on the rough wooden boards of the porch that’s tucked beside the swanky dining area of the Washington restaurant.

She’s wearing a black T-shirt that says “Zora!” and carrying a burlap bag that says “Zora!” She’s just arrived from Eatonville, also the home town of the great Harlem Renaissance novelist with the incandescent personality, Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston used to collect yarns she heard on the porches of Eatonville, and those porches turn up in her books. She died in 1960 in such poverty and obscurity that her grave was unmarked, but today her following is passionate.

Nathiri, 60, had heard rumors of this other Eatonville. Zora pilgrims to the town kept recommending the restaurant. Nathiri had to see for herself. From her perch on the porch, she takes in the big Day-Glo murals inspired by scenes from Hurston’s work, the enlarged quotes of Hurston’s words, the painting of Eatonville itself. Nathiri, executive director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, could look around here and think her work is almost done.

“It’s an incarnation of Eatonville that is very 21st century,” she says. “It’s cultural preservation across generations and in another setting.”

Eatonville, meet Eatonville.

The Florida-D.C. nexus

“Most people think it’s a play on the word ‘eat,’ ” says Andy Shallal, the restaurant owner, who opened Eatonville in May.

What it really is, though, is a devout and profitable evocation of spirit and ideals intended to appeal to Washingtonians’ pride in their town’s contribution to the Harlem Renaissance and to national culture overall.

Hurston wrote some of her earliest stories and poems in Washington while a student at Howard University. She enrolled in 1919 at the age of 28. She also worked as a waitress at the Cosmos Club and as a manicurist at a black-owned barbershop near 14th and G streets NW, where her clients were white politicians, journalists and businessmen. “I learned things from holding the hands of men like that,” she later said.

This weekend was an excellent time to take a deep plunge into the spicy and somewhat self-congratulatory nostalgia of it all, swap stories, pull out well-thumbed paperbacks, get all confused about which Eatonville you meant when you said Eatonville. It was a three-day mini-Zora fest in Eatonville (est. 2009), a cultural appetizer for the main event — the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, coming to Eatonville (est. 1887) in January.

Although their town is often described as the nation’s first incorporated municipality founded by African Americans, Eatonvillers are used to their square-mile patch being overlooked by outsiders, dwarfed as it is by the Disney empire nearby.

So when the mayor of Eatonville, Bruce Mount, bursts through the doors of the restaurant Sunday afternoon, this Eatonville is almost too much for him, even though he’s been here before.

“This is awesome,” Mount says, waving at the crowd. “Is it always like this on weekends?”

Oh, yes, says Shallal, handing him a menu, with the history of Eatonville and Hurston chronicled among the dishes. The mayor takes the menu as a souvenir and says, “I will submit this at a council meeting Tuesday.” Then he orders the shrimp and grits.

Feasting on inspiration

Shallal works with the intense attention to detail of a historical re-enactor and the savvy of an entrepreneur with his finger, for now, on D.C.’s cultural pulse. One of the murals he commissioned for Eatonville is inspired by the Hurston play “Mule Bone,” over which she had a bitter falling out with collaborator Langston Hughes. Shallal located Eatonville across the street from his flagship Busboys and Poets restaurant — founded in 2005, its name inspired by a line from Hughes — as a kind of poetic architectural reconciliation between these two Harlem Renaissance writers with Washington roots. Sales are up at Busboys, he says, and he is expanding his two other Busboys in the area.

Friday night at Eatonville featured a “food and folklore” meal presided over by Valerie Boyd, the Atlanta-based author of “Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.” About 50 diners paid $45 each for a four-course menu inspired by the rent parties that Hurston and her literary friends used to throw in Harlem, where she moved in 1925 with $1.5o in her purse. Guests would chip in a few coins and eat and dance all night.

“I don’t think we’re helping Andy pay the rent,” Boyd said. “I think he’s doing all right.”

Eatonville’s upscale Southern kitchen produced versions of the fried shrimp and okra that Hurston used to serve. But for $45, it wouldn’t do for the chef to be too authentic to penny-pinching Harlem cooking. So the fried green tomatoes, for example, came with red pepper aioli. And in the main course of crispy catfish, the presence of shrimp took the fancy form of rock shrimp creole sauce, with fried okra as a garnish delicately deployed in threes at the top of the pile.

Dessert? The self-described “Zora-heads” sitting around the tables could guess. Cinnamon tea cake, of course! Tea Cake is the nickname of the beloved third husband of Janie Crawford, the groundbreaking strong black female protagonist who discovers her sense of self in Hurston’s most famous novel, published in 1937, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

As they ate, the diners retold Hurston stories. They dwelled on her singular personality. If Zora were here, she might jump up on the table and dance. Or she’d be at the center of the room, doing all the talking. The women, especially, said the fearless example of Hurston’s art and life was essential to their own growth.

“If I had been born in that era, she would have been one of my running buddies,” said Camille Giraud Akeju, director of the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum.

“We’re all Zora’s daughters,” said Jacqueline Stallworth, a high school English teacher in Arlington, who each year assigns “There Eyes Were Watching God.” “She has a lot of daughters.”

On Saturday there was a walking tour of Hurston’s Washington, and Shallal donated 5 percent of that day’s restaurant proceeds to Nathiri’s organization, which came to about $800.

On Sunday afternoon the dining room was given over to literary and historical discussion featuring Nathiri, Mount and Boyd. The speakers held forth from the porch.

Shallal announced he is organizing a $539 package tour to the Hurston festival in January. The restaurant is planning a short-story contest, with first prize being a free seat on the tour, from Eatonville to Eatonville.

David Montgomery is a writer for The Washington Post

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