Each Sunday, Martha Buford travels via Amtrak from East Orange, New Jersey to the District to attend church in the Shaw neighborhood in Northwest.
On most Sundays, she stops by Saint’s Paradise Cafeteria, affiliated with the United House of Prayer for All People’s national headquarters in Northwest to get a bite to eat before going to church to satisfy her hunger for the Lord, she said.
“I really like coming here,” Buford, 60, said on Jan. 12. “The food is hot even though it is cold outside. The food is also pretty good.”
While most Saint’s Paradise Cafeteria customers don’t travel hundreds of miles each week to enjoy the cuisine, as Buford does, the establishment has a consistent customer base that comes by for the soul food menu items such as fried and baked chicken, turkey wings, Salisbury steak, spaghetti, fried fish, yams, collard greens, mashed potatoes, rice, and cornbread.
The Saint’s Paradise Cafeteria Experience
Saint’s Paradise Cafeteria is located on the western end of the facility in a basement-like set up.
Tables and chairs are available for customers like Buford who enjoy the in-dining experience and television monitors dot the facility.
Patrons can choose what they want to eat from a school cafeteria-style set up on the northern end of the room, and customers move from entrees to vegetables, with volunteers serving the food on reusable plastic trays.
Bottled water, soft drinks, teas and milks are offered as beverages and cake and pie slices are available for dessert.
Further, while Saint’s Paradise Cafeteria is known for its lunch and dinner offerings, its breakfast menu has its fans too. For breakfast, the eatery offers bacon, sausage or scrapple, eggs, pancakes and two sides such as fried potatoes, grits, apple sauce or baked apples.
Also offered are salmon cake, corned-beef hash, ham or pork chop, with the latter as a lunch and dinner item also.
Alicia Guy serves as the manager of Saint’s Paradise Cafeteria. A lifelong member of the church, the 60-year-old Guy said the cafeteria opened “around 1979” due to the popularity of the after-service meals.
“We had a kitchen at the church and food would be served after services,” she said. “We were serving a whole lot of people. The kitchen could not hold the capacity that we were generating. So, we decided to open the cafeteria so that people can congregate while eating.”
Guy said the cafeteria is “doing well” financially. It recently closed for renovations and upgrades but reopened on Jan. 8.
“People said we shut down for various reasons but all we were doing was sprucing up the place,” she said. “We did the same thing about seven years ago.”
Verlean Lomax is happy that the Saint’s Paradise Cafeteria has reopened. A resident of Northwest, Lomax is a longtime member of the United House of Prayer and like Buford, enjoys coming to the eatery before attending church.
“This is my church,” said Lomax, 68. “The food is good. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t. Plus, the food is inexpensive.”
She also emphasized the importance of purchasing food from a community staple such as Saint’s Paradise.
”I support my own,” Lomax told The Informer.
