OAKLAND — Before there was a restaurant on Broadway, there was a house in East Oakland with a line of cars out front.
The cars were there for plates. Chef Edward Wooley, known all over the East Bay as Chef Smelly, was cooking Creole and Southern food in his family’s kitchen near 106th Avenue and Sunnyside Street and selling it to anybody who pulled up. So many people pulled up that, as the story goes, police wondered what was really being sold.
It was Creole alfredo with blackened prawns.
Where he learned it
Chef Wooley is an Oakland native. His grandparents came from Louisiana, and he learned to cook from his grandmother and his mother. Friday fish fries were a family tradition when he was growing up.
He graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in San Francisco in 2013 and worked in East Bay kitchens, including under Chef Tanya Holland at B-Side BBQ, before joining his mother’s catering business. Along the way he started selling his own plates out of the house.
From the house to downtown
By 2015 the operation had outgrown the house and moved downtown as a Friday night pop-up on 14th Street. It sold out regularly. The line ran down the block to Broadway, and people waited an hour or more to get in the door.
He built the following himself, plate by plate and post by post, with tens of thousands of followers on Instagram watching what came out of the kitchen.
The restaurant
Today Chef Smelly’s has a home of its own at 2430 Broadway, at the corner of 25th Street in Uptown Oakland. The menu is Creole, Cajun and soul food: garlic noodles, snapper po’boys, catfish, oxtail, loaded fries and whole crab with black pepper and prawns.
Why we are telling this now
This week San Francisco voted to legalize home restaurants, so cooks can sell food made in their own kitchens. If you want to know what a home kitchen can turn into, drive across the bridge and get in line.
If you go
Chef Smelly’s, 2430 Broadway, Oakland. Open Tuesday through Sunday, 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Closed Monday.
Photo courtesy of Chef Smelly.
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