Old School Meets New School at Chef Michele McQueen’s Town Fare

By Cheryl Angelina Koehler | Photos by Clara Rice

 

Chef Michele McQueen still pictures herself as a kid snapping the ends off a pile of green beans on her grandmother’s Jersey City front porch on a summer visit. Go through that front door to the family dining room and the table is elegantly set—no bottled condiments allowed here. The meal is handmade by an expert home cook, dishes are carefully plated, and everyone minds their manners. Her mind’s eye also holds memories of matzo ball soup and Italian sausage with fried peppers that neighbors frequently shared in her grandmother’s multicultural Jersey neighborhood.

“I cooked a lot with my grandmother when we went home every summer to Jersey, and I have very few memories of her outside of the kitchen,” McQueen says. “It was that old-school family tradition style of cooking.” By “old-school,” McQueen means the Southern traditions of Milledgeville, Georgia, where her parents and grandparents lived before moving to New Jersey.

An Oaklander for most of her life, McQueen is very much at home at Town Fare, the café at OMCA (Oakland Museum of California), which she took over from Chef Tanya Holland in 2022.

“At Town Fare, I wanted to do some things that people knew me for: my chicken and sweet potato waffles, my syrup, my mac ‘n’ cheese,” says the chef. That reputation for “true Southern home cooking” was honed at Gussie’s Chicken & Waffles, her San Francisco Fillmore District spot, which McQueen opened and ran from 2009 until a flood closed it down in 2014.

At OMCA, McQueen set a foundation for her menu: “We know it’s a museum and people will want a great burger, so our smash burger is divine. We have the best-ever fried chicken sandwich, and our fries are cut fresh from Kennebec potatoes,” she says. But since this is the Oakland Museum, she plumbed her Oakland affinities for a menu that celebrates “The Town” and what she loves about it: the vibrant Chinatown and adjacent Latino areas, abundant harvests from nearby farms and urban gardens, strong values around diversity, health, ecology, and creative expression. She made sure to add vegan options, so you’ll find jackfruit replacing meat in at least one dish each week, and there’s a vegan aioli and vegan Caesar salad.

A Walk Through the Collard Oasis

McQueen is especially proud of her collard green salad. It’s made delicious with a house-made maple Dijon vinaigrette, fresh grated parmesan, and toasted pecans, but these are not just any collards! The chef describes going to meet the farmer who grows them: Yolanda Burrell of Pollinate Farm, who tends four micro farms on urban residential sites in East Oakland.

“We walk through [this] garage, and I am amazed at what I’m seeing,” McQueen says. “You take a little path from the garage, and it just opens up into an oasis of a farm…I mean it was crazy huge. She grows an amazing amount of vegetables, and to be honest, I didn’t know there were that many different varieties of collard green.”

 

 

Asian Twists

McQueen likes to spin dishes into fusion territory. “When I think about [new ideas] they always seem to have a little bit of an Asian twist,” she says, adding that there’s some family lore about Asian ancestry on her father’s side. But it could be that she just likes spring rolls, and who says you can’t apply that concept to anything? A decade ago when McQueen set up a mobile kitchen at Oakland’s crowd-pleasing Eat Real Fest, she landed a hit by stuffing spring rolls with peach cobbler. At Town Fare, she tried stuffing spring rolls with sweet potato. “They were delicious, but you couldn’t roll them fast enough,” she says. She’s also stuffed spring rolls with Town Fare’s best-selling dessert, Ms. Pearl’s Banana Pudding.

“So, Ms. Pearl is my mother’s best friend’s mother Pearl, who will be 100 years old this August,” McQueen says. “Pearl would come for Thanksgiving dinner, and she would always bring banana pudding. She gave me the recipe and I named it after her in 2009, so it’s her recipe and it’s the same recipe we use to this day.”

Another twist at Town Fare is the gumbo ramen. “It’s as close as I get to gumbo,” she says, adding that she gets the ramen noodles from Yuen Hop in Oakland Chinatown to support that business. “We also do a fried chicken bao bun dipped in our Crack Sauce—our nod to mambo sauce.”

 

 

OK, Let’s Talk Mambo Sauce

This takes us back to Michele McQueen’s college years, back in the days when she was expecting to become a lawyer….

“When I was going to Howard University in Washington D.C., we all got a lot of Chinese and soul food carry out,” she says. “Every carry out all over D.C. has this sauce called mambo sauce. It’s like sweet and sour sauce meets hot sauce.”

When McQueen opened Gussie’s, she set out to create her own version of mambo sauce and then she gave it her own set of spins. In D.C., the sauce is used pretty strictly on chicken wings and fried rice, but she started using it on meatballs, salmon, prawns….

“I swirled a little butter in it and then I mixed it with jerk sauce. It’s such a versatile sauce, but I wasn’t exposed to that versatility in D.C.”

The experimentation led McQueen to her Crack Sauce, which she makes in original, spicy, and Caribbean versions. “It was just so addictive, hence the crack,” she says. Her sauces are now being bottled, labeled, and made ready for market as Crack Sauce, Magic Black, and Soil Spice, and should be available by winter.

Here Comes Lucy Blue

As the topsy-turvy world of 2025 America rolls on, Michele McQueen, at age 53, says she feels she is coming into her own, and her breakthrough has a name: Lucy Blue. This new bar and kitchen at 468 19^th Street in Oakland (the former Duende space) should be open by the end of August.

“It’s like a light bulb going off, like, ‘I can do this,’” she says, contemplating all the years when she was unsure of her own power.

“For a while there were events I wouldn’t take my husband to,” she says. “I needed people to see me: for the burns on my arms, for my hard work, and the money I put into this.”

Lucy Blue will have fresh cocktails and elevated bar food with highlights like McQueen’s buttermilk fried quail with a sweet potato hot sauce. “It’s so tender and crispy,” she says. “The quail are semi-deboned and so easy to eat. We serve it in bird cages with the quail on top and drop biscuits with peach jam on the bottom.”

Lucy Blue will see the return of McQueen’s fried chicken bao buns, and she’s creating another Asian-twist dish, one inspired by a cabbage potato pancake made by another Black woman chef, a fellow participant in the James Beard Foundation’s Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (WEL) program. McQueen tasted that cabbage pancake in Asheville, North Carolina, when she was there in May for the James Beard Foundation Chef Action Summit. She mentions the WEL group several times during our conversation, indicating how communing with these other entrepreneurs has been pivotal.

“You know women,” she says. “We’ve always been trailblazing everything, and there are some great women in this industry as owners and chefs and bartenders and hospitality, I mean, who are killing it as we always have been, and kudos to us!” ♦

Town Fare at OMCA | 1000 Oak St, Oakland | townfarecafe.com

 

Clara Rice is an East Bay–based commercial, editorial, and portrait photographer. Her work spans from restaurants to brand advertising, and she is always looking to meet new local faces. clararice.com