Lior’s Cafe is a safe space for Haitian food on the south side

From under his feathered scarlet bicorn, Jean-Jacques Dessalines looks northward with defiance from Lior’s Cafe.

The general, who kicked the French out of what they called Saint-Domingue in 1804, was joined on the restaurant’s exterior wall by other historic Haitians—including Chicagoan Number One, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—when muralist Rahmaan Statik painted it for Lior’s opening a little over a year ago.

The vivid colors signal the presence of the only Haitian restaurant on the south side—one of only three in the entire city—and the only fine-dining option within miles of this car-swept block of South Halsted in Washington Heights.

Not pictured is Dessalines’s wife, Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur Dessalines, the first Empress of Haiti, who is arguably just as important to Haitian national identity as her husband, and one whose most resonating cultural contribution simmers within.

“Most Haitians eat soup joumou on a Sunday,” says Chef Daniel Aurel. “Or they eat it on Haitian Independence Day. But we like to have soup joumou all year round, like every day.”

The key ingredient in soup joumou (aka pumpkin soup or Independence Soup) is squash, which enslaved Africans in Haiti cultivated for export by their colonizers—but were prohibited from eating themselves.

Marie-Claire is credited with establishing the tradition of eating soup joumou each January 1, when she distributed it to Haitians on their first day of freedom with a delicious “Get manman ou!” to their once (and, sadly, future) oppressors.

At Lior’s Cafe, Aurel’s soup joumou is built on a vegetable stock with squash, cabbage, carrots, watercress, and penne and simmered with epis, the peppery, garlicky, herbal seasoning blend that lays the foundation for much of Haitian cuisine. You can get it with shrimp or a beef shank in your bowl, or order it vegan, the way Empress Marie-Claire probably first made it.  

Haitian food is a synthesis of Indigenous, African, and French influences, along with a little Spanish and Arabic, but sometimes Aurel goes off script.  

Most of the traditional Haitian dishes at Lior’s Cafe start with his epis—a blend of green onion, red and green bell peppers, garlic, parsley, and thyme—which he learned to make from his Aunties Myelle and Tatie Nadine. It’s in the braised oxtails and the poule avec sauce, and the five-veggie legume stew, too. You can taste the epis in the occasional oxtail poutine special, but he doesn’t use it in his sweet-and-spicy fried shrimp bombs or the boulette smashburger special he runs now and again.

“We are Haitian,” he says, “but I tried to do a little fusion too, because I didn’t want to shy people away.”

Aurel’s father, Jean Claude Aurel, a transit safety engineer who’d always dreamed of opening a restaurant, owns Lior’s Cafe, which he named for a goddaughter. In 2019, he bought the shuttered corner store, along with two adjacent properties, and began gutting and building out a new restaurant from scratch. That was the same year his son, then 21, traveled to Haiti for the first time, and for the first time began to fully appreciate Haitian food through eating at Auntie Myelle’s Port-au-Prince restaurant.

“My dad wanted to leave me in Haiti,” he says. “He wanted to leave me with my auntie and learn how to cook.” Instead, he went to culinary school in Kentucky and graduated with a job back home making sushi at Mariano’s. It was a temporary setback. “I knew down the line we would open up a restaurant.”

Lior’s Cafe
10500 S. Halsted
773-239-5467
liorscafe.com

“The options around here are kind of slim,” says general manager Brandon Lenore, who got on board after working as the operations manager at Aurel’s engineering firm. “There are no barriers to entry into this space. As well as just having a Black-owned restaurant—people want to support their own in this community. There are a lot of single-family homes, older generation. They want to see a place like this. In regard to going out, they’re going to have to go to Hyde Park and the south suburbs. People want to stay in their own community.”

Bridgeport’s Brooke Lang Design handled the interior, bedecked by Haitian folk art that Aurel collected on his travels, while his son oversees the gleaming new kitchen, pushing out orders of crunchy malanga (taro root) fritters, and flaky chicken or spinach pate (patties) on carved wooden plates.

Soup joumou is offered as a first-course option, as well as the aforementioned legume stew, and an almost gumbo-like bowl of bouillon, a stew thick with radish, carrots, spinach, watercress, and plantains.

There are some showstoppers among the second courses, like griot, epis-marinated, deep-fried chunks of pork shoulder; or poisson rouge, a whole red snapper smothered in a reduced tomato-garlic sauce; and one of the chef’s innovations, a jaw-dropping pot pie, its buttery crust breaking over braised-and-pulled goat in a creamy mushroom sauce.

Various rice sides, most notably one stained black by the dried mushrooms known as djondjon, along with mac and cheese, greens, or little pucks of corn souffle accompany these robust dishes, whose spell can be broken with a side of pikliz, the tangy pickled cabbage-carrot-shallot slaw powered by habanero.

Lenore reckons that about 40 percent of their guests come from the neighborhood and 40 percent come from the city’s widespread Haitian community, including some from beyond: they’ve served Haitians from as far away as Florida and Louisiana. The remaining 20 percent, he says, are the food-obsessed, those willing to travel for new and rare culinary experiences.

Ironically, that’s a demographic that might have been bumped by recent events. Photos of Daniel Aurel cooking in the kitchen and Statik’s mural appeared in a September Tribune cover story after the MAGA cult’s supreme leader began lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s pets.

But as Dessalines and Du Sable watched from the wall, the response was supportive. “We’re glad to be insulated from that kind of hatred,” says Lenore. “But also we’re proud that we built such a positive environment that it doesn’t enter here. It’s kind of a safe space.”