South Side Entrepreneur Cooks Way Out of Street Life at Chi-Raq Cuisines

Antwan Jeffries grills jerk chicken wings in front of Chi-Raq Cuisines, 1945 E. 79th St., which is causing a stir in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood. | Photos by Patch Editor Tim Moran

CHICAGO, IL -- Antwan Jeffries fans a smoking hot grill covered with chicken wings onto 79th Street and Euclid Avenue, hoping to lure passersby into his combination two-table restaurant and grocery store, Chi-Raq Cuisines.

Open just three weeks, the 21-year-old entrepreneur has already drawn a couple of visits from TV news crews and a few scoldings from neighborhood residents because of the name for his little restaurant in a South Shore strip mall at 1945 E. 79th St.

“I bought the grill, it’s not even a Weber,” Jeffries says, bent over the grill parked on the sidewalk. “I built this bad boy. It didn’t take much. I looked at the instructions and pieced it together. It came with a rack but I removed it so the smoke can get inside the chicken better.”

Jeffries grew up in the inner city bouncing around the West and South Sides with his father. He now lives in the west suburbs in the Maywood area.

“I seen the difference, like the opportunities,” Jeffries said. “There are certain things not happening there. It just makes you feel better and safer.”

Before he cooked his way out of the street life he ran around “doing dumb stuff” with a fellow student named Keith Cozart, better known as the retired rapper, Chief Keef, at Dyett High School.

Some of that dumb stuff landed him in jail. He admits to “trying to obtain money in certain bad ways,” by selling drugs and doing burglaries. He was 17 when he got arrested. After leaving the house while on electronic monitoring, he served the rest of his sentence in jail.

“It’s not on my record, it’s expunged,” Jeffries says. “Every little chance [the judge] gave me, I messed up.”

When he got out of jail, Jeffries met up with a woman he describes as his mentor, Erica Badie, then of Chicago Art Beat Studios, a program that got inner city kids off the streets by helping them find their life’s passion.

Badie took Jeffries to rap shows and encouraged him to perform on stage. She paid for classes so he could study for his GED, which he eventually passed.

“She was like, ‘you can rap but you still have to continue your education,’” he said. “She asked, ‘what are you going to do for a backup? What else can you do?’ When I said, ‘I can cook,’ she gasped, ‘Oh, I know you can cook.’”

Classes at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, which is now closed, came naturally to him. Jeffries apprenticed in mostly Italian restaurants, studying under their chefs. His favorite dishes to cook are jamaican and American cuisine.

“My business partner had this place,” Jeffries says. “He changed the name two times, from JJ’s Fish to Super Fish Plus. I ended up changing it one last time.”

He says the name Chi-Raq comes from a movement for a lot of lost teens “who grow up thinking revenge is the answer.”

“They’re abrasive, because you’re like 5-6-7-8 years old and your brother or cousin dies and they’re telling you the reason is because the person down on the next block killed them,” Jeffries said. “You grow up hating somebody you don’t know or hating a group of people you don’t know because you feel like they hurt you in some way. That’s how a lot of things happen down here and they just continue and continue.”

In addition to food, Chi-Raq Cuisines carries groceries and convenience items. The people who stroll into the restaurant don’t care about the name, they come for the jerk chicken.

Jeffries is still getting the business together. He’s run out of menus. It takes 20 minutes for the food to arrive, but when it does, the jerk chicken and jack salmon are fantastic. It comes with corn and jerk fries, which are made in the kitchen from scratch.

“I’ve been called Chi-Raq,” he says. “I know a lot of people who are known as Chi-Raq. I know people are upset.”

He wants Chi-Raq Cuisines to be a positive influence in the neighborhood, making sorbets and gelato and handing them out to the kids after school.

“I made a point of coming back here,” Jeffries said. “Maybe I reach out to the kids, let them know they don’t have to be trapped in the community. You can always relocate if you further your education. That’s how I ended up cooking.”