Food for and from the soul, for any nationality

Gud Cooking is a new family-owned restaurant that opened on December 19, 2020. It is located at 715 Giant City Road, Carbondale, Ill. 

“[Soul food] is just a fancy word for southern-style cooking,” Kimberly Collins, Gud Cooking employee said.

When opening Gud Cooking, Collins wanted to create a place where locals could go to get some home cooked southern food. Collins said that they felt that there was a need for a restaurant that could provide this experience to the area. 

“We wanted something more like a home cooked meal. Sometimes you work a lot and don’t have an opportunity to cook for your family and so a place like this you can just drop in and get basically a home cooked meal,” Collins said.  

Collins was proud to say that they specialize in not having greasy food and that most of their dishes are meat free.

Collins said that when planning the dine-in experience, they were leaning toward a five-star quality restaurant “and for everything to be excellent and not only taste good, but to look good also.”

Being a new restaurant, Collins voiced her concern that a lot of new customers would come in and say that they didn’t realize that had just opened. She said that right now, they are focusing on getting the word out to the community that they are there. 

For Valentine’s Day, they are taking RSVPs as well as accepting dine-in. There will be a Valentine’s Day special and co-owner, Latoya Collins said that she expects the most popular dish to be the seafood boil and steak dinner. 

 “To me, even African Americans are all mixed with something. Even I have a mixture in my family so really, we can’t say soul food is just for ‘Black people’ because a lot of families are mixed with different nationalities and everything,” Kimberly Collins said. “To me, soul food is about food from the soul, from the heart, no matter what your nationality is.” 

For more information, please visit their website at https://www.restaurantji.com/il/carbondale/gud-cooking-llc-/.

Photo Editor Leah Sutton can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @LeahSutton_

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