How family recipes and a community spirit have earned Zeeland Street local—and national—love
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Taste of history: Each month across our 20th year, 225 will revisit restaurants from our past coverage. From Capital Region classics and award-winners to trendsetters and hidden gems, these businesses have helped shape our dining culture.
Making friends in a new place can be difficult. When Stephanie Phares moved to the Capital City in the early ’90s, she felt like a “Mississippi girl in a Baton Rouge world.”
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Phares and her then-husband were the new family on Zeeland Avenue. They didn’t know any of their Garden District neighbors and were the only Black household. So Phares decided to introduce herself by doing what came naturally: She cooked.
At the end of each month, Phares hosted a potluck, pulling from memory recipes that her grandmother had taught her and the skills she had learned as a teenager when she started a hot dog and burger stand.
Her husband noticed the growing crowd, and in 1992, they purchased the former convenience store on the corner of Zeeland Avenue and Perkins Road, naming it Zeeland Street Market and adding breakfast and lunch counter service.
“We started to build a clientele,” Phares says. “We knew we wanted to grow it into a neighborhood restaurant. Slowly, it became something I could be proud of.”
Phares planned on attending law school in Baton Rouge. But in the first years after opening the restaurant, she had two daughters and decided to focus on her family and the business. More than 30 years later, Zeeland Street (which eventually dropped Market from its name) is a local institution with national draw.
Last year, The New York Times named it one of the 50 best restaurants in the country, putting it on the map for soul food dishes like its savory pot roast plate lunch, sandwiches named after nearby streets and hefty breakfast omelets paired with buttery biscuits Phares makes from scratch each morning.
Zeeland Street helped Phares find her community. It also made her a trailblazer in the food scene.
“I was a Black woman going up against a lot of white men who are the chief restaurant owners in this town,” she says. “There was no one to mentor me or a woman in the business I could talk to.”
What Phares proved early on was her ability to respond quickly to the community’s needs. She served utility crews after Hurricane Andrew and weathered COVID-19 by adding an outdoor patio. Among several one-off ventures, the restaurant partnered with Dyson House Listening Room in 2019 for an evening concert series and briefly introduced an elevated dinner concept, Beloved, in the space in 2023.
That ambitious evening service launched just before Phares was diagnosed with lung cancer, contributing to its unfortunately short lifespan. Her two sisters pitched in to help keep the restaurant running for breakfast and lunch service. And her extended Baton Rouge family responded as well—a fundraiser organized by nearby Varsity Sports helped pay Phares’ medical bills.
She’s doing better now, and still shows up every morning at 6 a.m. to bake her famous biscuits, delivering on the consistency that’s kept locals returning to Zeeland Street’s slatted wood booths.
“What I think they keep coming back to is my homemade cooking, my heritage, my grandmother’s recipes,” she says.
Three decades in, Phares still believes cooking, like life, is about connecting with people.
“They go hand in hand,” she says. “One of the highlights for me is meeting and serving so many Baton Rougeans. Some of these families that come in, I’m on the third generation. … I realized it’s a privilege to be known as Miss Stephanie to so many people here.”
Zeeland Street
2031 Perkins Road
This article was originally published in the June 2025 issue of 225 Magazine.
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