A WAR REFUGEE JUST GAVE BROWNSVILLE ITS FIRST SIT-DOWN RESTAURANT IN DECADES

Cornbread Farm to Soul opened on Oct. 28 at 82-84 Belmont Avenue in Brownsville, Eater reported, in a building it shares with a movie theater that hasn't opened yet. That made news on its own, because for years the people who live here have told every reporter the same thing: there was nowhere in the neighborhood to sit down to a meal that didn't come from a fast food chain. The restaurant is the newest store of Cornbread, a soul food brand co-founded by Adenah Bayoh, who fled Liberia's civil war as a girl. Here's who put the money into Belmont Avenue, and why there.

In January 2025, CBS New York walked Belmont Avenue with La'Shawn Allen-Muhammad, executive director of the Central Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation, who grew up in Brownsville. When she was a kid, she said, the only places to sit down for a meal were "McDonald's or KFC." She pointed to the empty storefronts on Belmont, a main street for the neighborhood, and said she hoped it could become a restaurant row. She also cited a city policy brief that puts the largest concentration of public housing in the country in Brownsville. Eda Henries, a Brownsville resident, investment banker and partner in Cornbread, told CBS it was remarkable that a whole community had no sit-down restaurant. CBS called Cornbread the first one coming to the area in decades.

That claim needs one honest footnote. In 2017 the Brownsville Community Culinary Center opened at 69 Belmont Avenue, on the same stretch, as a cooking school with a café. By January 2024, Brooklyn Paper was writing about that café in the past tense and calling it, at one point, "one of the few sit-down and high-quality dining spots" around. After a hard 2020 the center cut its training program and was raising money to keep serving the neighborhood. Cornbread itself bills the concept as fast-casual, farm-to-table soul food. So the gap is long, the one recent attempt to close it was a nonprofit café, and the new place is a fast-casual soul food restaurant that CBS and Eater both counted as the neighborhood's sit-down restaurant.

Bayoh's own story starts a long way from Belmont Avenue. War drove her out of Liberia and into a refugee camp in Sierra Leone, Entrepreneur reported in 2015. FSR Magazine describes her family fleeing their village at night, and her grandmother, who had run a farm, a small restaurant and rental properties, being left behind for a time until Bayoh walked back alone to find her. Her father brought her to the United States as a teenager, years behind in school, and she grew up in Irvington, New Jersey, a place FSR describes as a food desert.

At 27 she opened an IHOP in Irvington and became the youngest African American franchisee in the company's history, by Entrepreneur's account. It took seven trips to seven banks to get a $2.5 million loan. "When I opened my first IHOP, seven banks turned me down," she told FSR. Customers at that IHOP asked for food the pancake menu didn't have, so she added grits, chicken and waffles, collard greens and cornbread. Some of it came off after talks with corporate. The recipes became Cornbread, a soul food counter with ordering kiosks and food sourced from local farms. Its first Brooklyn store, in Crown Heights, came with business partner Elzadie Smith.

New Jersey Future, which honored her in 2025, counted nine restaurants across New Jersey and New York: four Cornbreads, three IHOPs and a plant-based place, Brick City Vegan. She's also a developer. In 2023 she became the first Black woman in New Jersey to win a 9 percent low-income housing tax credit from the state's housing finance agency, for deeply affordable apartments in Newark's South Ward, and she's redeveloping the old Irvington General Hospital.

The building came first. In March 2025, News 12 reported that Cornbread had already bought the Belmont storefront that used to be Harry's Old School, a sneaker store, and would share it with Stuart Cinema & Café. PropertyShark's page for 84 Belmont lists a sale on Oct. 9, 2024, for $1.3 million: a one-story commercial building from 1930 on a 25-by-100-foot lot. The buyer's name is withheld on the public page. To fit a theater, the roof had to come up about three feet, and News 12 said more money was still needed.

In April 2025, BKReader put the whole project at $4 million. The money to build the theater came from several places: a $2.9 million contribution from the financial institution Momentus Capital, Cornbread itself, and $200,000 committed by Assemblymember Latrice Walker, who also grew up in Brownsville. "I wasn't even alive when the neighborhood last had a movie theater," Walker said in a statement. When Cornbread opened, Eater put the investment at $3 million. The figures come from different points in a long build and don't match, and nobody has published how the money splits between the restaurant and the theater, or whether the $2.9 million is a loan. The shape is clear anyway: a soul food brand that owns its building, Momentus Capital writing the biggest named check, and a state lawmaker's money on top.

Henries told BKReader that public help for a small business is rare, and that public money arriving next to your own changes what you can do. Allen-Muhammad said the project was built so an existing business could join it as a joint venture, and Cornbread was also looking at franchising. Henries is Cornbread's chief financial officer, and in March 2026 she was the co-owner who presented the restaurant to Community Board 16.

The city had circled Belmont long before Cornbread arrived. The Brownsville Plan, led by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development with more than 30 neighborhood groups, promised over 2,500 affordable homes and more than $1 billion in housing investment, and it listed a "commercial revitalization pilot project on Belmont Avenue." The same plan named sit-down restaurants as a theme for new development on city land along Livonia Avenue.

The deal itself started small. BKReader traced it to a cold call and an email among Stuart Cinema, Allen-Muhammad's development corporation and Henries. Allen-Muhammad had been looking for somewhere in Brownsville to screen Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed, the documentary about Shirley Chisholm, Brooklyn's congresswoman. Emelyn Stuart opened Stuart Cinema & Café in Greenpoint in 2018 and moved it to Long Island City this April. She is the first Black Latina to own an independent movie theater in New York by the project's own announcement, and she wanted to choose what people see and who gets in the door.

At the groundbreaking on June 20, 2025, Bayoh tied the bet to the block's history. "Brownsville's future is rooted in honoring its past," she said. Allen-Muhammad had said the same thing to News 12 a few months earlier: "Brownsville used to be a huge cultural hub." The neighborhood once had several movie theaters, News 12 reported, and all of them disappeared. By March 2026, Henries was presenting Cornbread to Community Board 16 as the anchor of a "Belmont Avenue Restaurant Row initiative": fast-casual soul food, no alcohol, local hiring, and on the plan it filed, open daily from 11 AM to 10 PM.

The two halves of the building didn't open together. In March 2026, both were expected by summer. Cornbread made it in October. In August, Stuart said the theater was still in development: "we are targeting an early 2027 opening." When it opens, she plans two screens, $8 Wednesdays, $5 movies once a month for the kids of SNAP recipients, a $10 senior ticket with free popcorn, and a monthly mystery screening of a Black film, according to BKReader and the board presentation.

On the plate, Cornbread's own menu runs fried or baked chicken, fried whiting, catfish, meatloaf, ribs and salmon, with sides of mac and cheese, collard greens, potato salad, yams, cabbage, yellow rice, black-eyed peas and white rice with gravy, and a slice of cornbread with every plate. The Brownsville menu and its prices aren't posted online yet.

For years people here said the same thing to anyone who asked: there was nowhere to sit down and eat. Fixing it took a refugee who learned the business at an IHOP, a chief financial officer who lives in the neighborhood, an independent theater owner, $2.9 million from Momentus Capital, a state lawmaker's $200,000, a building of its own and a roof raised three feet. The city wrote Belmont Avenue into a plan years ago. Cornbread bought a building on it. A plan names the block, and an owner puts the table on it.

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