Newer Harlem restaurants like Raw Soul offer a healthy twist on traditional soul food served at places like Louise’s, below.

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

The white Formica counter at Louise’s Family Restaurant in Harlem is the original, and is more than 40 years old. Southern dishes like pig’s feet with black-eyed peas and candied yams cost $8. Sweet lemonade is still served in a plastic foam cup.
The restaurant seats 18, about the same number it always has, but it is rarely full. The menu makes few concessions to modern eating habits. The food is heavy, fried, salty and fattening, with nary a fresh fruit or vegetable. Many dishes are considered incomplete without a dollop of brown gravy, a clump of butter, or both.
Louise’s is among a handful of culinary survivors of an older Harlem, when inexpensive, family-run restaurants operated by black Southern transplants dominated the streetscape. “People are used to eating soul food the way we make it,” Julia Wilson, 63, Louise’s owner and the daughter of the restaurant’s founder, said . “A lot of people like it how I keep it, old-fashioned.”
But Louise’s is on the wrong side of several trends. Soul food is dying in Harlem and elsewhere in the city, and not being able to fill 18 seats is as good an indication as any. The reasons can be ascribed to the vagaries of contemporary city life: Changing tastes; health consciousness; the fast-food culture; and an influx of wealthier young adults - including African- Americans, long a customer base for soul food restaurants - who are more comfortable eating Indian or Thai dishes.
A recitation of the names of the vanished Harlem soul food restaurants - where the waitress/owner called everyone “Baby,” and the temperature in the room was determined by the amount of lard in the skillet - would be longer than the menu at most of the places.
Among soul food restaurants now out of business are: 22 West, where Malcolm X used the pay phone in back to do radio broadcasts; Adel’s, popular for its fried chicken; Pan Pan, which burned down in 2004; Wilson’s, known for its breakfasts; Wimps, revered for its smothered chicken and red velvet cake; Singleton’s, which was among the last restaurants to regularly serve pig tail stew, hog maws, and pig ears; and Wells Supper Club, best known as the restaurant credited with putting chicken and waffles on the same plate.
“There used to be two or three soul food places on a block,” said Johnny Manning, 67, who has lived in Harlem since 1966 and for the past eight years has operated a Web site, eatinharlem. com, focused on the neighborhood’s culinary options. “Now you’ve got to look for them. When I came here, Harlem was predominantly black, so you had a predominantly black cuisine in restaurants.”
Charles Copeland, 83, who closed his landmark soul food restaurant Copeland’s last summer after 50 years because of declining business, said gentrification and accelerating prices for basics like cooking oil and collard greens may doom many of the rest.
“The transformation of Harlem snuck up on me like a tornado,” he said. “I don’t expect many of those places to last. Soul food was supposed to be a cheap type of food that black people made at home. What we used to call cheap isn’t cheap anymore.”
Louise’s, on Lenox Avenue, was opened in 1964 by the sister of Sylvia Woods, who started Sylvia’s two years earlier. But while Louise’s has resisted change, Sylvia’s has become a soul food temple, expanding into grocery stores and onto the Internet .
More recently, restaurants serving dishes inspired by soul food have also arrived in Harlem. Their food is lighter and tends to be more healthful. They include Mobay, Cafe Veg, Native, Revival, Melba’s, and Raw Soul, a raw food restaurant. Mobay, on 125th Street, for instance, serves collard greens with a vegetarian flavoring, instead of pork or turkey.
At Louise’s, Ms. Wilson said she might like to update the restaurant’s menu with salads and baked goods, and perhaps give the place a makeover. She is reluctant to make too many changes though, she said.
In the meantime, health issues have led to a situation that she has kept to herself for years. “The doctor said I’m not supposed to eat fried food anymore,” she said, chuckling, as fish and bacon sizzled in oil on the grill. “How am I supposed to give up fried food?