Y’s Choice, a soul food restaurant in Uptown Oakland, specializes in braised oxtails and other classic soul food dishes.
The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.
A late-night hankering for soul food brings us to an unobtrusive building on a relatively quiet block on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, just down the street from the Fox Theater.
“Y’s Choice” reads the neon sign outside — after chef-owner “Y” Ahmed, we later learn. The restaurant stays open until 11 p.m. on weekends, and at a little past 9 on a Friday night, the bustling dining room smells of garlic, butter and spice. A steady stream of old Martin episodes plays on the flatscreen TV in the corner.
Already, we feel like we’ve made a good decision coming here. (“Make A Wise Choice,” the sign behind the bar counter reads; I finally get the pun in the restaurant’s name after re-reading it five or six times.)
On the night of our visit, the crowd is roughly 90% Black women. One big, exuberant group of twentysomethings is dressed to the nines, maybe only just kicking off their night out on the town. At the table next to ours, a pair of middle-aged ladies is having a cozy chat in sweatshirts and mom jeans.
Located about a block away from the Fox Theater, the restaurant is open until 11 p.m. on weekends.
We make ourselves comfortable too. The menu at Y’s covers a fairly wide range of diasporic cuisines — soul food classics and fried seafood, but also Jamaican dishes and African dishes. We start with a couple of the oxtail sambusas, one of a handful of East African–inspired dishes that nod to the chef’s Sudanese roots. After one bite, we know we’re in good hands. These are chonky, square-edged specimens stuffed to the brim with tender, luscious shreds of spice-tinged braised oxtail. The thin, crispy wrappers taste, improbably, just like Chinese youtiao, fresh out of the fryer.
And because we’re constitutionally incapable of resisting when we see any form of braised oxtails on a menu, we doubled up with a full entree order. At Y’s Choice, these are served like stew over a big bowl of gravy-soaked rice that tastes strongly of mushrooms — wildly delicious in its own right. The tails themselves are meaty and succulent, with soft nubs of fat and collagen we sucked clean off the bone. (The dish’s soupy, slow-cooked quality is so wonderful, we immediately make plans to come back to try the gumbo.)
All of the soul food dishes come with a choice of two sides, and as soon as we taste the green beans and the mac and cheese, I give myself a round of applause for choosing well: The savory green beans have been stewed with smoked turkey until they’re falling-apart soft; the mac and cheese has just the right level of cheddar sharpness and ooze. It’s like we’re eating some holy trinity of soul food. Alternating bites between the oxtails, the green beans and the cheesy pasta shells, everything works together in perfect, complementary balance.
It is worth noting that Y’s Choice isn’t necessarily an inexpensive restaurant. There are a couple of sandwich- and chicken wing–type options for less than $20, but if you splurge on a soul food plate or one of the big “Y’s Special” seafood or surf ’n’ turf combinations — the kind of stacked plates folks like to show off on Instagram — chances are you’ll be dropping at least $40 or $50 on the entree alone.
What you get in exchange, though, is a whole lot of food. The least expensive of the specials, the Lil Sis ($40), comes with grilled lamb chops (a bit overcooked but fatty and aggressively seasoned, just how I like them), thickly battered fried prawns and a big bed of sweet, buttery garlic noodles. Tasty as it all is, we manage to finish maybe half the plate before waving the white flag.
Y’s Choice is open Friday to Saturday 11 a.m.–11 p.m. and Sunday to Tuesday 11 a.m.–9 p.m. at 1825 San Pablo Ave. in Oakland.