Even Oprah dined at this popular Overtown restaurant, but its future is uncertain
Screams made Nicole Gates spin around and soon she found herself yelling, too.
Oprah Winfrey, bathed in an aura of camera lights, walked down the center aisle of her family’s 30-seat Overtown restaurant, Lil Greenhouse Grill, toward her.
“Like the Red Sea it parted, and there she came with a glow behind her,” Gates said. “My whole body just went cold.”
Winfrey, trailed by her longtime friend and colleague Gayle King and a CBS camera crew, surprised Lil Greenhouse Grill on Jan. 3 as part of a promotion with Weight Watchers, which sponsored her world tour, Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life In Focus. Weight Watchers chose restaurants around the country, including nine in South Florida, to offer meal-plan-friendly dishes on the menu.
Lil Greenhouse Grill was the only one to get a surprise royal visit. Oprah was a little late, though.
“Oprah and Gayle were stuck in traffic coming across the causeway. That’s real talk in Miami,” Gates said.
Gates collapsed into a hug with Oprah and found herself crying — not for the first time as she and her partner, chef Karim Bryant, have fought for the last three years to keep their restaurant open in the Overtown neighborhood they call home.
They’ve faced a landlord change, a near-eviction and now a lease which may force them to leave Overtown in two years.
Meanwhile, they were the only full-service sit-down restaurant in Overtown, offering a creative fare based on soul food — by Overtown, for Overtown — that became a magnet for diners from Brickell and Wynwood to Miami Gardens.
“We’re both very invested in this community,” said Gates, who has a son with Bryant. “That’s why we fought to stay.”
They made their restaurant a destination that Oprah Winfrey would highlight — but not even a visit from Oprah can guarantee Lil Greenhouse won’t be priced out of the very neighborhood to which it drew national attention.
“It would be so disappointing, after all we’ve gone through — after a visit from Oprah — if we had to move to someplace outside of Overtown,” Gates said. “The thought of it actually breaks my heart.”
Gates and Bryant were running a food truck by the same name three years ago and took over the concessions stand at the next-door Gibson Park. Overnight, Bryant, who had been a chef at Capital Grille, Prime 112, BLT Prime in Doral and executive chef at Wynwood’s The Butcher Shop, shifted the menu from hot dogs and hamburgers to grilled shrimp or steak sandwiches and chicken and yellow rice.
Real estate developer Michael Simkins, who owned the empty restaurant next door, often watched basketball games at the park and saw the line for Bryant’s food.
“The concession was packed. There were 150 people in line, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to meet this chef,’” Simkins recalled.
He asked him, “Do you think you can bring people from Brickell and Wynwood to Overtown?”
Bryant, 47, had been waiting his whole life for that chance.
A resident of Overtown since age 5, he was raised by a single mother, attended the school a block away, Booker T. Washington, where his son Karim Jr. graduated and his oldest daughter, Korea, now attends. His youngest, Karter, 6, attends Douglas elementary walking distance from the restaurant. Overtown was his home in every way.
“That’s why it was so important for us to be stake holders in this neighborhood,” Bryant said.
Simkins fixed up the long-closed former Chinese restaurant to turn Lil Greenhouse Grill into the kind of destination he thought Overtown needed.
“I couldn’t believe there was nowhere in Overtown where you could sit down to have a nice dinner with a glass of wine or beer,” he said. “I thought there was an opportunity to bring in people from Brickell and Wynwood to Overtown.”
The response was immediate. On opening day, Valentine’s Day 2017, they had a full house when the outside power lines of the old building caught fire and lights went out. No one left. Bryant cooked with gas and diners ate by candles and cellphone lights.
“They would not leave,” Gates remembered, laughing.
Gates used her Columbus State communications background and marketing skills from her time at Lite 101.5 FM to draw diners to Bryant’s cuisine. He delivered, from chicken and waffles and seafood crab cakes to his sweet and spicy Dreamfire shrimp.
They offered happy hour long after the other nearby Overtown staple, Jackson Soul Food, had closed for the day. Live entertainment kept Lil Greenhouse’s little corner buzzing with music and life.
But in March of 2018, Simkins sold the property, swapping his building to the next-door St. John’s Institutional Baptist Missionary Church for a vacant parcel of land they owned. The new owners told Bryant and Gates they would not be renewing the lease when it expired.
In between, the church attempted to evict the restaurant when it fell three months behind on its rent. A court eventually decided Lil Greenhouse could pay the nearly $13,000 in back rent and live out their lease, court records show.
They’ve started hunting for a new location in Overtown.
“My stomach hurts just thinking about it,” Bryant said.
But Simkins, who still owns property in the area, admits there isn’t much available. Most is being redeveloped and won’t be ready for at least two years.
“If I were still their landlord, they wouldn’t be going anywhere,” Simkins said.
Meanwhile, celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson is preparing to open a long-awaited Overtown restaurant and supper club just blocks away after buying it for $1.5 million and getting a matching $1.5 million grant from the Overtown/Park West Community Redevelopment Agency to renovate it.
“We’re trying to bring some dignity to this community, which sometimes is forgotten even by its own people,” Gates said. “To think that outsiders find what we’re doing more valuable, more urgent, than those who live locally, that hurts.”
Still, buzzing from Oprah’s recent visit, the restaurant was full on a recent Monday night, filled with regulars and served by family.
Karim Jr., home from Bethune-Cookman after graduating with a business degree, ran orders to tables, learning things they didn’t teach him in college. “They don’t tell you about the long hours,” he said.
Korea, 16, waited tables and took takeout orders. At an empty table next to where Oprah and Gayle sat, Karter, 6, colored mostly inside the lines in an “Incredibles” coloring book, while Gates sat guests and Karim Sr. tossed shrimp in his spicy-sweet sauce in a blistering kitchen.
Their future here is uncertain. But they remained fueled by the hard work that’s gotten them this far — and the secret blessing Oprah whispered into Gates’ ear.
“I’d like to keep that to myself,” Gates said. “What she told me I’ll just keep in my heart.”
Lil Greenhouse Grill
Address: 1300 NW 3rd Ave., Overtown
Hours: 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Monday-Saturday. Noon-5 p.m. Sunday
Contact: 786-277-3582
This story was originally published January 8, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
