Where the Fish Fry Never Left: Asha Starks and the Cultural Work of Hot Grease
By Kimberly M. Parris Rent parties. Covered supper dinners in the church basement. Selling plates of food at a fête.
The community showing up for each other over a plate of food has long been a staple in Black households across the diaspora.
It's ancestral work, carrying on the traditions. It’s work that Asha Starks takes seriously.
Starks, a longtime community organizer and full-spectrum doula, found herself at the intersection of this work rather unintentionally.
It’d almost be easier to say that it was accidental, but nothing in her life has ever been accidental, she notes.
“There’s no fish fry out here,” she noted during our conversation, explaining how she wound up in this space as someone with a degree in sports and exercise science. Moving back to Orange County with her two children after a divorce brought her the revelation, surprising as it was.
She grew up in the area.
It was an area where Black Americans primarily settled during the 2nd wave of the Great Migration, but now has the smallest percentage of Black people in a large county in all of the United States.
And yet, moving back, she was shocked at how much of that food and culture no longer existed.
Fish and chips with malt vinegar, but no fish fry?
“Like, where are the cookouts? This is crazy,” she exclaimed, a sentiment that I found myself laughingly agreeing with from across the country in NYC.
And so, Starks set out to change that.
“One thing that I feel like I’ve always done was stop complaining and bring it. [So] Instead of being like, ‘Oh, well, this isn’t here and I don’t like this place ‘cuz it doesn’t have this — all right. So how do I bring it here?”
Hot Grease, her fish fry-centered pop up dining experience, was born from this very notion.
Starks’ current pop ups are in LA, in addition to Orange County. She also has Auntie’s House, a similar fish fry installation housed at a popular cannabis dispensary in the historic West Adams community.
Similarly to the work she found herself doing, the location was not accidental.
“[West Adams] is one of the Black cultural district neighborhoods…that got displaced because they built the I-10 through it,” she explains. An area that provided residency, safety, and community for countless Black Americans from the 1930s, straight through to the end of the 1960s, West Adams, is also known as “The Heights”, or, similar to Harlem’s famous enclave, “Sugar Hill”, according to the West Adams Heritage Association.
Home to the first Black woman Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, and the place where iconic singer and songwriter Ray Charles opened the first ever recording studio owned by a major recording artist, West Adams was the epitome of Black excellence, until the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10) was built in 1963, dividing the neighborhood completely, and leading ultimately to its demise.
Starks notes that bringing the cultural food staple is her small way of reclaiming the history of the area.
It’s the perfect way to bridge generational gaps, a reminder that a dinner table is often the best way to learn more about & understand each other.
She notes that growing up with her Southern family, a fish fry was one of her cultural touchstones, a memory that shapes both hers and many others’ Black American tradition and culture — even in an area where fusion cuisines are often popular on account of indigenous, Latino, and Filipino populations.
As we got to talking about ancestral roots and memory, the thing that immediately stood out for me learning more about her was connecting ancestry, what is often lost through generations and history, and why food is always the universal connector.
Starks traces her culinary footprint to the deep South of Georgia, going back roughly five generations — or more. She notes that growing up, living between the South and California, seeing Black American culture reflected back to her in a meaningful way that felt familiar wasn’t always the easiest journey.
It was partly that lived experience that set the stage for being the “culture bearer” through her food.
She bridges the gap between her Black Southern roots, and the environment her food pop-ups thrive in, by catering to dietary needs and restrictions, while never losing sight of her roots.
Fried okra in cornmeal (naturally gluten free) shares space with well seasoned snapper, rustic potato wedges, and tofu nuggets, a seemingly unconventional protein that Starks laughingly notes, "everyone should be able to have the experience (the culture) whether they eat meat or not.” Local suppliers keep her food as farm-to-table as it gets, and the entire food experience is one that has landed her in high places, like the food section of the Los Angeles Times.
Akin to her food is her activism in mutual aid. “The Potlikker Line,” Hot Grease’s reproductive justice mutual aid fund, raised thousands of dollars in its first run, with the money going to support mothers, as well as aiding in rent support for families in need. “The pot liquor is the good stuff at the bottom of the pot. That’s how you know that we have more going on for Hot Grease,” she quipped.
She’s done other things: food festivals and events, all under the Hot Grease ‘umbrella’, most notably LA’s iteration of Smorgasburg, the popular (and largest) weekly open-air festival in the country.
But festival participation, exciting as it may be for other vendors, is far from what drives Starks, who notes that she wants to continue to explore the community angle to food — cooking classes, offering continuing education on things like the vegetal sides of Black Southern cuisine.
“I feel like when people think about soul food and Southern cooking, they go directly to mac and cheese and smothered this and that and [candy yams] that sort of thing… okra succotash and turnips and other stuff would be a nice introduction to folks, you know.”
In the future, Starks sees Hot Grease as a medium with which to gather and work together for the good of the community.
“Folks have [always] used food as one of the ways to gather folks for an issue…Using a cookout, a fish fry…making political engagement fun is how you can actually make (small) change in your community.”
She sees a brick and mortar space that caters to community, allowing for alternative ideas for the gathering and unification of people.
A community hub, if you will.
There’s a historic beauty to the work Asha Starks is doing with a simple fish fry. It’s a reminder that generational and community work doesn’t require a lot of bells and whistles — it only requires commitment, dedication, and flavor.
To keep up with Asha Starks’ Hot Grease pop up, join her email list to keep up with what she’s got cooking. You can also learn about her mutual aid and community initiatives here.
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