Generation after generation of Black-owned Cleveland restaurants celebrate legacy during Black History Month

CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - Angleen Jeter, also known as Angie, says she learned to cook in her mother’s South Carolina kitchen.

She brought her skills to Cleveland almost 40 years ago.

She has spent decades building her brand, “Angie’s Soul Food Cafe.”

She wouldn’t let her son, Akin Affrica, near the stove, but she insisted he learn the business side.

Angie says her restaurant, which has moved a half dozen times, fed everybody from folks down the street to famous people, including politicians, sports figures, celebrities, and entertainers.

At 83 years old, she’s still involved.

“I like to cook everything. Greens, yams, macaroni, peach cobbler, all that,” Jeter said. “Nothing I couldn’t cook.”

There are now three generations involved in the ongoing legacy of Angie’s Soul Food Cafe.

Her son Akin Affrica.

“I laugh when you say, ‘She passed it to me,’” said Akin Affrica, Jeter’s son. “I had to take the torch from her. She didn’t want to let it go. At first, I rebelled against it for a long time because I saw how hard she worked. Getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning every day.”

Affrica modernized the business.

“We started accepting credit cards and brought in a mixer,” Affrica said. “Just trying to keep the books a little differently, because she was doing everything by hand. It worked for 30 years.”

Angie’s was the first restaurant in Cleveland to go cashless to reduce robberies.

It has worked.

Now, Affrica has his son, Marque Jeter, in the business too.

“Very proud of my dad, very proud of my grandmother,” said Marque. “I just want to hold the torch and make sure I’m handling it correctly.”

Whitmore’s is another Cleveland staple when it comes to the family restaurant business.

It was started by the father of the five-generation clan.

“He would come home late at night, because the place didn’t close until midnight,” Lance Whitmore, one in a set of twins, said of his father.

“He was up the next morning, trying to get things ready for the next day,” said Whitmore. “He taught these things. It’s hard work.”

Whitmore says over its 83-year history, Whitmore’s has had an extensive menu.

“We have the ribs and the chicken. We have fish, we have shrimp. He makes a sandwich called the Polish boy, which many people have eaten. It’s hard to find anywhere else but Cleveland,” he said.

Whitmore’s is involving its fifth generation in the family business and is still going strong.