They Left a Michelin Kitchen to Cook the Food of Home. On September 1, Soul & Smoke Finally Opens Its First Real Restaurant.

On September 1, one of Chicago's most decorated barbecue names finally does the one thing it has never done: open a real restaurant. After starting as a pandemic-era catering operation and growing into a small empire of pickup counters and a food truck, Soul & Smoke is set to open its first full-service, sit-down flagship in Evanston, with a full bar, table service, and a dinner menu that reaches well past the smoker.

The address is 1601 Payne Street, a Fifth Ward building that already served as the company's commissary. Turning it into a dining room is the culmination of a journey that began with demolition in early 2023 and a couple who left fine dining to cook the food they grew up on. To understand why this opening matters, start with the two people behind it.

From a Michelin kitchen to the food of home

Soul & Smoke is the work of chef D'Andre Carter, who was born and raised on Chicago's South Side, and his wife and co-owner Heather Bublick. The two met and fell in love while both worked at Moto, the late Homaro Cantu's wildly inventive Michelin-starred restaurant, where Carter cooked and Bublick worked the floor as a sommelier. When Moto closed, they struck out on their own with an underground supper club and a catering company before the pandemic rearranged everything.

When lockdown hit and comfort food was all anyone wanted, Carter pivoted from the avant-garde plates he had trained on to the barbecue and soul food of his youth, and it struck a nerve. What started as drop-off orders became a phenomenon. Soul & Smoke grew into three locations, in Evanston, the West Loop, and Avondale, plus a food truck, all fed by the Evanston commissary. The volume there is staggering for a barbecue operation: the team moves 800 pounds of brisket, 700 of pork, 300 of ribs, and 750 of rib tips in a single week.

That growth is the reason for the flagship. For all its reach, Soul & Smoke had never actually been a place you could sit down and be waited on: the three locations run as counters and pickup, and the truck goes to the crowd. A commissary that busy needed a front of house worthy of it, and Carter and Bublick decided to build a full restaurant around the kitchen that already anchored the block, the first room in the company's history where a guest can settle in for a proper dinner.

A building with its own history

The flagship carries a story that means a great deal to its owners. The building at 1601 Payne once housed the Robinson Bus Company, a storied Black-owned Evanston business, and the family connection did not end at the sale. As WTTW reported, the daughter of the company's founder sold the building to Carter and Bublick, passing a piece of the Fifth Ward's Black business history from one generation to the next.

Carter and Bublick leaned into that lineage rather than paving over it. They kept the original high bow-truss ceiling and brought in Kimshasa Baldwin of Deture Culsign, a designer who worked on the Obama Presidential Center, to shape the 5,500-square-foot space. The room seats 65 in the main dining area and 75 in an overflow room, with a separate cocktail bar that has its own entrance and a mural by Northwestern graduate and artist D White. A stage is built in for live performances and programming, and roughly half of the expanded patio is being given over to green space.

Two Texas smokers and a fine-dining pedigree

The cooking is barbecue run through the sensibilities of a chef who trained at one of the country's most experimental kitchens. At the heart of the operation sit two 10-foot offset smokers custom-built by A.N. Bewley of Texas, double-insulated to hold an even, gentle smoke and each able to hold 750 pounds of meat at a time, a rare sight in Illinois. A Spanish-style Mibrasa charcoal oven handles the chicken, wings, and trout.

The menu splits the difference between a smokehouse and a dining room. An all-day barbecue menu runs alongside dinner plates like a dry-aged porterhouse, Wagyu flank steak, and grilled lamb chops. Carter also folds in the story of his own career: a Moto Cigar, smoked chicken wrapped in blanched collard greens and dusted with sesame ash, nods to his late mentor Cantu, while an elevated chicken alfredo winks at the Olive Garden where he got his first kitchen job. The sides, the stone-ground grits, the three-cheese mac, the brown-butter cornbread, are the kind of thing that turns a first visit into a standing order.

The flagship also lets Soul & Smoke do the parts of hospitality a pickup counter never could. Bublick, a former sommelier, is building out the wine list alongside craft and non-alcoholic cocktails and a lineup of local beers. Dinner will run mostly on table service, though guests can still order by QR code whenever they want, and a new to-go window keeps the fast, familiar side of the business intact for the regulars who built it. It is the difference between a place you grab from and a place you settle into for the night.

A barbecue brand that keeps winning

Soul & Smoke did not slow down while the flagship was under construction. In July 2025 the team took first place in the "Good Morning America" Barbecue Brawl at Chicago's Windy City Smokeout, a win that came with a 10,000-dollar donation to Chicago Chefs Cook, a local nonprofit Carter works with that brings chefs together to provide humanitarian aid. The company has also started its own foundation focused on food security, extending the give-back beyond the smoker.

That community thread runs through the new room, too. The dessert program leans on Chicago partners rather than an in-house pastry shop, with sweets coming from the South Side's Brown Sugar Bakery and Pretty Cool Ice Cream, and the built-in stage is meant to make the flagship a gathering place as much as a restaurant. For a couple who turned a shuttered fine-dining career and a pandemic into a barbecue business that now feeds three neighborhoods, opening a room the community can actually sit down in is the point, not a footnote.

"Barbecue has always been our love language," Carter said of the work, and the line captures why this opening reads as more than another restaurant debut. Great American barbecue cities are defined by the joints people line up for: Austin has Franklin, Kansas City has Joe's, Memphis has Central. Evanston, a town with a deep soul-food history of its own, is betting it now has one too. On September 1, the couple who left a Michelin kitchen to cook the food of home finally get to seat guests in a room they built to do it. You can find reservations and hours on the restaurant's booking page.

Sources

WTTW Chicago, "Soul & Smoke Opens an Art-Filled Flagship Restaurant in Evanston with a Sense of History" (Aug. 11, 2026). Evanston RoundTable, "'Cue it up: Preview the new Soul & Smoke space in Evanston's Fifth Ward". Soul & Smoke, About. Soul & Smoke reservations, Tock. Time Out Chicago, "How Soul & Smoke became a Chicago barbecue juggernaut". Images: courtesy Soul & Smoke and the Evanston RoundTable.