Brian Chilson“Welcome home” is the greeting you’ll receive walking into Elnora Wesley’s H.O.M.E. Vegan Restaurant at Arkansas Baptist College. Known previously as the House of Mental Eatery, Wesley’s beloved vegan soul food spot is now housed in the college’s cafeteria, on the ground floor of the student union building.
For about six years, Wesley operated out of modest digs in the back of a small building at The Little Rock Food Truck Stop @ Station 801, a former gas station on South Chester Street, preparing her food out of a ghost kitchen at Arkitchen on West Markham Street and selling it to the lunchtime crowd downtown.
Arkansas Baptist College, a historically Black university, opened the three-story brick Community Union building in 2015, at 1523 MLK Drive across the street from campus. The cafeteria space is organized in thirds: walk-up counters with open kitchens on both ends of the space and a coffee station barista bar right in the middle. For the last few years it’s been mostly vacant. Benito Lubazibwa — founder of ReMix Ideas, an organization committed to supporting Black-owned businesses — saw an opportunity. Lubazibwa partnered with Fitz Hill, former president of Arkansas Baptist College and the current executive director of the university’s foundation, to bring three Black-owned restaurants to campus. The effort is fitting for the building; The union’s third floor houses the Scott Ford Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development.
In December 2022, Wesley told the Arkansas Times that she was hoping to find a new spot — one that would be more accessible to people in underserved parts of the community. The location at Arkansas Baptist’s First Security Community Union will allow her to serve not only students of the university, but the broader community in the historic Little Rock Central High District.
“We’re in a food desert,” Hill said. “That was a reason that we were able to get assistance funding when I was president of Arkansas Baptist College.” Hill added that bringing in three food concepts will create a safer community with more access.
Wesley’s no stranger to making pitches in the name of expanding the business; she has competed in local entrepreneurial pitch competitions in past years, initially pitching her concept as the Franke’s or Luby’s of vegan food.
“I was really stuntin,’ ” she said. The shorthand makes sense, though; like those meat-and-three ventures, Wesley’s doing buffet-style vegan soul food for a lunch crowd. In 2022 she won $10,000 at ReMix Ideas’ pitch competition at an entrepreneurship convention it hosts called the Black Founders Summit. She said Lubazibwa already had his eyes on the Community Union building when she told him she was in search of a brick-and-mortar space.
“The vision was to create a nurturing space where Black entrepreneurs could thrive through accessible resources such as affordable rent and ongoing free technical assistance from ReMix Ideas,” Lubazibwa said. ReMix went all out in anticipation of H.O.M.E.’s opening. You might’ve seen Wesley’s face on a billboard if you’ve traversed West Markham Street in recent weeks.
Lubazibwa said the billboard project is part of a broader initiative to amplify Black-owned businesses, ensuring they are “invisible no more.” Wesley estimates that about 300 people showed up to her grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony on Saturday, Feb. 17, which also featured a book signing from vegan holistic nutritionist and author Afya Ibomu.
Wesley gave up eating meat at age 15 and has been studying African-centered culture as long as she can remember. She didn’t initially set out to open a restaurant. Before she became a weekend vendor serving vegan food at the Harambee Market, an artisanal African shop in North Little Rock, she provided poultry and fish alternatives for people in “the community/village” trying to wean themselves off of beef or pork. Scott Hamilton, one of the owners of Station 801, took notice of her vegan pop-ups and asked her if she had any interest in setting up shop there. She launched House of Mental about six years ago with the help of her daughter, Nadia McGhee.
“I gotta give a shout-out to Nadia,” Wesley said. “We built this together.”
Brian Chilson
H.O.M.E. is known for its cauliflower wings, Southern greens and some of the best yams you’ll find in town. Wesley’s nachos — a mysteriously delicious combination of veggies on top of a rich, creamy cheese-ish sauce — were happily devoured by members of the Arkansas Times staff, and she’ll be better equipped in the new spot to handle high demand for her vegan street loaf and chimichanga. While you wait, you’ll find books about African culture on a bookshelf as well as a community altar where guests are welcome to leave names of deceased relatives and “give love to the ancestors,” Wesley said.
“I came into vegan thought through Afrikan holistic teaching; that’s mind, body, earth, spirit and soul,” she said in a text message one day after I left her restaurant. “What you consume, what you focus on and what you do is who you are. So I am love. I don’t got ‘beef,’ imma vegan (chef).”
Now that she’s been up and running for several weeks she said the glaring advantages are more seating, capacity and storage.
“And people can see you cooking,” I said.
“I don’t like that part,” she said with a laugh. She said her restaurant’s slogan is “Let Food Be Your Medicine” and that it’s “also a village hub for healing, education and cooperative cultural enrichment.”
Heaven McKinney’s coffee shop, The Grind Coffee Bistro, opened in the Community Union in April. An official grand opening will take place in May. McKinney opened The Grind in the Pleasant Ridge Town Center in 2018 and three years later followed with a second outpost in the Pettaway neighborhood downtown. Both locations were set on fire on the same night in 2022. The arsonist, a former boyfriend of McKinney’s, was sentenced in January to 20 years in federal prison. McKinney told KARK, Channel 4 News that the sentencing “took a lot of weight off my shoulders, and opened up a new light to the dream.”
Brian ChilsonHer original spot on Cantrell sustained damage but is back up and running and serving a popular Sunday brunch. The Pettaway store was a total loss. McKinney said the growth she had planned for the coffee shop/restaurant was stalled by both pandemic and fire. Now, she’s opened two new spots within a few weeks of each other. In addition to the location at the college, a drive-thru stand opened in Bryant in March.
McKinney said she was introduced to Lubazibwa through a mutual acquaintance in 2020 and got involved with ReMix Ideas while seeking resources to mitigate the challenges of the pandemic.
“We’ve been really good business partners since then,” McKinney said. “He’s been a great mentor and I was kind of excited that when they needed a spot they thought about me.”
McKinney’s long imagined having a shop in a college campus community and hopes the opportunity serves as a blueprint for The Grind to open more. “That’s always been a big thing about me opening these coffee shops is being able to give back to the communities we grow in,” she said.
The third business in the center is Corey Nelson’s Chicago Flamin Grill. Nelson, a Chicago native, began working at the quick-service restaurant Sharks Fish & Chicken in his hometown in 2005. He’s mostly been with Sharks ever since and moved to Arkansas in 2021, but “has been back and forth since 2010.”
He decided to branch out on his own two years ago, opening his first Chicago Flamin Grill in Beebe. Nelson said in hindsight the location might not have been ideal. “I’m not from Arkansas, so I really didn’t know and I was excited to get my brand out there,” he said. He also worked out of the ghost kitchen at Arkitchen for a while, offering pickup orders out of the back of the building, plus delivery through third party apps.
“There have been restaurants in that building that have been successful like Cheesecake on Point!, Certified Pies, but with my brand it didn’t go so well,” Nelson said.
Nelson is a beneficiary of Lubazibwa’s mentorship, too. He took classes as part of Lubazibwa’s Rock It! Lab program, a partnership between the Central Arkansas Library System and Lubazibwa’s Advancing Black Entrepreneurship nonprofit that offers mentoring, marketing advice and business education to under-resourced entrepreneurs. The idea behind the threefold venture, Lubazibwa said, is to “empower Black businesses, enrich student learning, and uplift the community, laying a foundation for lasting economic growth and prosperity.”
Nelson’s menu offers Chicago-inspired sandwiches, burgers, nachos, chicken tenders and wings, and he’s partnering with The BananaBoat Catering, who will eventually offer Jamaican food on Wednesdays.
Brian ChilsonAdditionally, Arkansas Baptist College students can receive entrepreneurship credit by interning with the restaurant businesses in the Community Union. Lubazibwa said students gaining firsthand experience in entrepreneurship has been paramount to the discussion from the very beginning. “This approach aims to equip students with the necessary skills to start and grow their own businesses, making the educational experience deeply relevant and practically focused,” Lubazibwa said.
“It empowers the three concepts to start building their own workforce right there with the students that are coming out,” Hill said. “It’s a home run opportunity for everybody involved.”
