Florence's Restaurant is a restaurant in
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma City (), officially the City of Oklahoma City, and often shortened to OKC, is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, it ranks 20th among United States cities in population, a ...
. In 2022 it was named one of
America's Classics by the James Beard Foundation.
History
The restaurant was opened by Florence Jones Kemp, a
sharecropper's daughter from
Boley, Oklahoma, in 1952 when she was 22 years old.
She recalled "I decided that I needed a job and I didn't like working for other people."
The first location was on 4th Street near
Deep Deuce
Deep Deuce historic neighborhood is a district in Downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was home to Zelia Breaux's Aldridge Theater and Dr. W. H. Slaughter's Slaughter Building his Cove Pharmacy and Slaughter's Hall in it. Author Ralph Waldo El ...
in a single room with a single table and a second-hand stove.
Within two years Kemp had saved enough from her profits to send her sister to college.
After several moves, at least one caused by
urban renewal
Urban renewal (also called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address urban decay in cities. Urban renewal involves the clearing out of blighte ...
projects, by 1969 the restaurant was located at northeast corner of NE 23 and Fonshill in Oklahoma City, where it stayed.
Kemp had decided she didn't want to rely on landlords and bought her own property.
As of 2022 she owned most of the block.
As of 2022 she continued to operate it with her daughter Victoria Kemp.
Menu
The restaurant serves
southern specialities including fried chicken,
chicken and dumplings
Chicken and dumplings is a soup that consists of a chicken cooked in water, with the resulting chicken broth being used to cook the dumplings by boiling. A dumpling—in this context—is a biscuit dough, which is a mixture of flour, shorten ...
, braised
oxtail,
chicken wings, ribs,
candied yams, cornbread,
peach cobbler
The peach (''Prunus persica'') is a deciduous tree first domesticated and cultivated in Zhejiang province of Eastern China. It bears edible juicy fruits with various characteristics, most called peaches and others (the glossy-skinned, non-fuz ...
, and pear pie.
The television show
''Diners, Drive Ins and Dives'' featured one of the restaurant's dishes, Yammed Fried Chicken, in its fried chicken episode.
Recognition
In 2022 the restaurant was named one of
America's Classics by the James Beard Foundation.
It was the first James Beard award for an Oklahoma entity.
''
The Oklahoman
''The Oklahoman'' is the largest daily newspaper in Oklahoma, United States, and is the only regional daily that covers the Greater Oklahoma City area. The Alliance for Audited Media (formerly Audit Bureau Circulation) lists it as the 59th larges ...
'' called Florence's "The Grand Dame of all local restaurants."
References
{{coord, 35.4934, -97.4866, type:landmark_region:US-OK, display=title
Restaurants in Oklahoma
America's Classics winners
Black-owned restaurants in the United States
1952 establishments in Oklahoma