Stepping into Burdell feels like stepping back in time, as though you’ve been welcomed to a cheerful Sunday supper. At this Oakland, California, restaurant, chef-owner Geoff Davis cooks soul food in a bright and modern way, catapulting it into the future. Combining vintage-inspired design, heirloom recipes, reverence for local ingredients, and some serious culinary technique, Burdell radiates nostalgia like a beacon made of amber textured glass — of which there is plenty at the restaurant. With reimagined classics (like the hearty okra stew, superb smothered pork chops, or robust barbecue shrimp made with Worcestershire, brown butter, and a housemade fermented hot sauce), the food at Burdell is grounded in the past, forward-looking, and brain-meltingly delicious. Dining there feels like inhabiting a memory you haven’t quite had yet.

Davis named Burdell after his maternal grandmother and designed every inch of the space himself. The retro vibes are very much intentional — he calls it “grandma energy.” “We went all out,” he says of the bar’s avocado-and-light-pink color scheme, inspired by his paternal grandmother’s ’70s kitchen, “making it borderline ugly, to try to make it feel like a ’70s kitchen.” Old-school stereo equipment brings a warm, fuzzy sound — Davis proudly creates the playlists, ranging from ’50s to ’80s funk, soul, R&B, and beyond — and faded family photos hang on the walls. Food arrives on vintage Pyrex plates, some bearing the exact same pattern his grandmother owned.

The nostalgia isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s also a platform, a soft cover for Davis’ exploration of soul food, California cuisine, Black foodways, and fine dining, all expertly woven together. While many equate soul food with Southern food, Burdell sees it as “the food of starting over and adapting, of joy, and of family.”

Over time, as people moved from the rural South to cities throughout the country, including Oakland, as part of the Great Migration, the agricultural roots of soul food were lost — by a combination of food industrialization and Black disenfranchisement — and for many, soul food developed a basic formula of standard dishes. “It’s just boiled down to fried chicken, fried fish, candied yams, collard greens, and mac and cheese,” says Davis. At Burdell, the chef is forging a fresh path for the future of soul food by looking backward, to the past. “We’re trying to fuse a new idea of what California food is and what soul food could be if we looked for it.”

At Burdell, Davis asks: “Why can’t soul food be a little different? Why can’t it be a fresh take? Why can’t the food evolve and change with the times?” And the answers he provides happen to be tremendous. Sometimes dishes at Burdell go pretty straight, like his collard greens cooked with berbere spice for a fiery, aromatic kick. “I’m not going to interpret collard greens,” says Davis. “It’s spiced a little differently than my grandmother would make it, but it’s the same proportions of acid and heat and smokiness.”

Then there are radical, nearly avant-garde dishes, like the playful take on chicken and waffles, actually a jumble of airy chicken liver mousse and crispy chicken skin that diners smear onto a cornmeal waffle. Or the clever homage to chicken and dumplings — Davis tries to “lighten it up and make it more vegetable-forward” — with roast chicken, drippings, chanterelles, and dumplings made out of spinach choux pastry.

The food at Burdell looks simple, straightforward, and intentionally “homestyle” with no unnecessary garnishes — and a dinner here, complete with sides, feels like a family meal. But you can taste the rigorous technique Davis honed at fine-dining restaurants like Cyrus and Aqua. Even the menu descriptions are approachable by design. Instead of “granita,” it reads “shaved ice.” Instead of “jus,” it’s “drippings.” There’s no need to whip out your phone to Google all this restaurant lingo. “We wanted to use as little cheffy terminology as possible,” Davis says. “Just have it read understandable and delicious.”

By nature, Davis is a little shy and reserved, but at Burdell, he bravely puts his heart out there every day, with passed-down family recipes and traditions at the center of the restaurant. It’s bad enough when people don’t like his grandmother’s cathead biscuits — Yelpers gonna Yelp — and worse when he gets told what he’s doing isn’t “authentic” or even soul food at all. “It’s especially emotionally draining when people voice displeasure about the concept,” he says. He encounters derision and doubt: “I think it’s easy to get lost in the fact that we’re not doing replicas of food from the ’60s.” 

Given his fine-dining experience, Davis easily could have opened a fancy French bistro or a high-end Italy-meets-California concept and watched the accolades come in. But he felt compelled to do something true to himself. “I never wanted to really cook this food,” he says about the soul food at Burdell. “But it just became apparent that I had to do this food, and do it justice, and do it with the same amount of reverence that is given to European foods.” Davis is storytelling from an honest, real perspective and cooking with his whole spirit. “There’s no other way for me to tell my authentic self without it,” he says. Because when you walk into Burdell, you might be stepping back in time, into a world deeply informed by Davis’ own story. But you’re also stepping into the future.

Wine at Burdell

A self-professed white Burgundy and Beaujolais enthusiast (it says so on his Instagram profile), Geoff Davis did a stint working at Unti Vineyards in Healdsburg, California, where he helped with the harvest and learned about the winemaking process. So there’s a pretty serious list at the restaurant, with “wines that are fairly priced but that you can’t get at a lot of places in the East Bay.”

To pair with the bold flavors of the soul food at Burdell, Davis would recommend a Burgundy, but he especially likes the more rustic Italian wines. “It makes a lot of sense,” he says. “Really high acid and some tannins that stand up to it.”  

“We never say the word ‘natural,’” says Davis. But he seeks out well-made, low-intervention wines for the wine list, preferring winemakers that “stay out of the way” and make balanced wines that express terroir. After all, he says, at Burdell, “We’re trying to do the same thing with the food.”

A penchant for Pyrex

Most of the food at Burdell gets served on vintage Pyrex dinnerware that Davis has been collecting for years. Nearly indestructible, dishwasher-safe, and so lightweight that “you can carry a stack of them without a lot of effort,” Davis calls them “amazing restaurant plates.” Only one plate has broken so far.

He’s reached the point that he can easily identify the patterns by name, and he can even tell you the specific years they were in production. He’ll admit, however, that this hobby has become a “healthy addiction.” He’s become friends with a woman in Idaho he met on Etsy who has sent him huge boxes filled with them.

Davis himself ate on Pyrex plates at his grandparents’ house, amplifying Burdell’s nostalgia factor. The busy, colorful patterns impact how he plates his food, too — Davis keeps it simple, natural, and unfussy.

Best practices

The menu at Burdell is a place for some real talk, explaining that the racist history of gratuities is the reason behind the restaurant’s universal 20% service charge: “Tipping in the U.S. has an ugly past, allowing the continuation of underpaid labor … [We] pay hourly staff a consistent, livable wage that is not dependent on chance or archaic customs. Thank you, Burdell <3.” Tipping is a hotly debated issue, but Davis is no fan of the practice. “It’s something that we need to do away with as a country,” he says. “Honestly, [ending tipping is] part of our healing from slavery and continued racism. It’s the only real way to level the playing field.” He feels equitable, consistent pay across the board allows staff to be “compensated as the professionals that they are.”

Burdell strives to be an equitable workplace. From day one, the company has paid 50% of health care costs for full-time employees. No one makes six figures at Burdell, including management and ownership. The processes and work environment have resulted in near-zero staff turnover since opening. There’s also the management philosophy of empathy, care, and understanding, where mistakes become teachable moments. “We’re just human beings,” says Davis. “Sometimes the best that we can [do] is less good than we envisioned, but we live to fight another day. Everyone’s happy and intact, and we can raise a glass later.”