Biyou
All photos by Curt Saunders for Black-Owned Brooklyn
Adele Selby, owner of Biyou restaurant, may be a Queens girl, but she’s worked in Brooklyn since 1992 as a Bed-Stuy property manager. “Throughout the years of renovating and managing properties, I got to know the people of Bed-Stuy,” says Adele, who still runs her real estate company with a business partner. “The community of tenants was organized, and they really welcomed us.”
Yet as much as she loved the neighborhood, after nearly 26 years in property management, the work got a bit tedious. “The opportunity came for this space, and I thought, ‘Do I rent it out to someone else?’” Adele says of her pivot to restauranteur. “‘Or do I take the chance?’” She chose the latter, opening Biyou, a charming New Orleans Creole and soul food restaurant (with a healthful twist), in May of 2018.
“I didn’t really have the opportunity before to be creative,” says Adele, 65. “At this point in my life I feel like, ‘You know what, I’ve done a lot in my career. And now I need to have a little creative expression. This restaurant is my first stab at that, and I really enjoy it.”
“I didn’t really have the opportunity before to be creative. At this point in my life I feel like, ‘You know what, I’ve done a lot in my career. And now I need to have a little creative expression. This restaurant is my first stab at that, and I really enjoy it.”
Decades ago, Adele visited her cousin, Earline, who’d moved to New Orleans and married a NOLA native. Adele was immediately taken with the the city’s live music, the joie de vivre of its people, and especially the food. “In determining what kind of restaurant I was going to open, I knew I didn’t want to be a strictly soul food restaurant,” says Adele, who has South Carolinian family roots. “I wanted to bring the joy that I feel in New Orleans to Bed-Stuy.” At Biyou, she has created just that experience. ⠀ The sunny, clean decor is punctuated with pops of purple and turquoise, French doors, brass instruments, a moss-draped painting of the Louisiana bayou, vintage jazz posters and photos from Bourbon Street. Bouncy New Orleans jazz pipes through the speakers. We visited in early March, a few days after Mardi Gras, so the atmosphere was even more festive than usual with beads, streamers and other signifiers of Carnival. But Adele, a health-conscious yogi, has removed one element of New Orleans from her establishment: alcohol.
“The aftermath of the partying is not so nice,” says Adele, who instead offers an eclectic menu of non-alcoholic elixirs with medicinal properties (more on that later). “I try to do everything in a balanced way to make sure people are always clear-headed.”
A fusion of New Orleans Creole and soul food, Biyou serves comfort food with Adele’s spin. “I took the authentic foods and tried to make them healthier,” she says of the menu she developed with her executive chef, a New Orleans native. “We use organic products. Our food is very flavorful, but we try to minimize salt, and we have a lot of vegetarian options.”
While Biyou does not sell alcohol, Adele worked with famed biochemist/bartender Alex Ott to create a bar menu of virgin potions with adaptogens, aromatic herbs and other ingredients to affect how you feel, whether a calming chamomile-based drink or a stimulating caffeine-infused elixir. ⠀
But Massive — don’t let this “healthy” thing throw you off! The food at Biyou is hearty, well seasoned and soulful. We started our meal with crispy fried okra with tomato and red pepper aioli, and a lemony crab salad composed generously of fresh crabmeat topped with cucumbers, tomato and blackened shrimp.
We devoured the juicy jalapeno fried chicken with a berry-studded bread pudding, shrimp gumbo, and blackened catfish steak with creamy spaghetti squash, all alongside a pile of tender, perfect biscuits of the day (rosemary garlic) with honey butter. And we had fun imbibing potions, including the sweet Gator Juice (melon, coconut, chlorophyll, mango and pineapple) and refreshing Fountain (cucumber, white cranberry, bioflavonoids and lime). Biyou also serves weekend brunch, so don’t sleep on this one.
198 Lewis Avenue, 718-928-7555, biyoubk.com
