Oakland Town Fare’s new soul food master: “I can fill my own shoes”

Oakland’s Michele McQueen is a veteran soul food restaurateur and former Apple chef who counts Smokey Robinson, Ayesha Curry and Will Downing among her catering regulars. Could she be the one to turn a struggling Oakland museum café into a destination?

In July, McQueen, best known as the chef-owner behind Gussie’s Chicken & Waffles, the San Francisco Fillmore district restaurant that shuttered in 2014, took over the reins at Town Fare, the Oakland Museum of California eatery formerly helmed by celebrity chef Tanya Holland. Holland left in January after only seven months. Native Hawaiian Tongan chef Puaokalani Barquis was appointed as the cafe’s interim head. while the museum sought a permanent replacement.

McQueen immediately introduced clever dishes that pay homage not only to the city’s Black history, but also its Latino and Asian populations: curried spring rolls with shredded collards and Caribbean-spiced yam, “Crack” chicken wings with Asian-inspired “mambo” sauce, and deviled eggs tinged with white miso, black sesame and togarashi sriracha.

“I wanted to make sure we operated like a family and represented everyone in Oakland,” McQueen says. “I came up with this idea of cultural comfort cuisine to incorporate all of us.”

She built a 45-seat sun deck with an outdoor bar and patio couches, the ideal perch for the funk DJ-infused Sunday brunch she launched in August. And locals like W. Kamau Bell and former Black Panther party leader Elaine Brown have been popping over to show their support.

“I have been so blessed with the people I’ve been able to know and cook for over the years,” McQueen says.

She may be well-connected, but she’s also authentic and down-to-earth. She’ll be the first to tell you her new cornrows are the best kitchen hair style — “Why didn’t I do this sooner?” — and that every single thing her psychic told her since she was 18 has come true.

After graduating from Howard University, the Oakland-raised daughter of a high school principal and psychologist ditched law school to join her then-husband and business partner as they opened the first Northern California franchise of Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles, the famed Los Angeles chain.

McQueen (then Wilson) is the first to admit she didn’t know a ton about cooking at the time. As a little girl, she loved watching Julia Child on TV and remembers wanting to be a chef. But with her family’s expectation being more law school than culinary school, she watched the people around her instead.

“I learned from the people I had the pleasure of employing, the cooks,” she says. “With each restaurant I got better and read everything I could and eventually took classes with Charles Vollmar of Epicurean Exchange.”

By the time she opened Gussie’s, named after her Georgia grandmother, in 2009, McQueen was doing the kind of food that makes you feel hugged: Cajun hush puppies with jalapeño artichoke sauce, banana pudding with vanilla wafers, and sweet potato waffles with housemade brown sugar syrup. She was an expert, and the eatery drew in the crowds.

“Gussie’s served a much-needed gap of being able to get soul food in a nice, sit-down environment with food like your grandmother would make,” says McQueen, who counted San Francisco mayor London Breed among her regulars and now a personal friend.

After a flood and subsequent landlord dispute caused Gussie’s to shutter, McQueen took the plunge into corporate cooking as a sous chef for Apple. There, she sharpened her skills and helmed a new program tasked with creating 1,000 individually-packaged meals each week for campuses that didn’t have restaurants.

Every part of the meal — the protein, the carb, the vegetable — had to be delicious and reheat perfectly. You can imagine how handy that skill would become later.

“Lucky for me, I knew how to do those meals when COVID hit,” says McQueen, who continues to make meals for Eat Learn Play, Steph and Ayesha Curry’s nonprofit which fights childhood hunger in Oakland. “Their vision aligns with my vision.”