Hidden gem: Former pizzeria becomes a brunch-all-day, soul food café
Some months ago, John and Sasha LeJeune dreamed up a soul food diner with a unique menu focus: Bodacious brunches, all day every day, bottomless mimosas and all.
When crafting the menu at Big John’s Eatery in suburban West Palm Beach, the LeJeunes took inspiration from their own home kitchen in Loxahatchee, where Sasha’s comfort cooking earned a cult following among friends and family. The menu’s star attraction is her weekend oxtail and grits, a hefty bowl that combines creamy white grits and slow-braised oxtail. A touch of oxtail pan gravy and a sprinkling of chopped scallions brings the dish together.
This is the couple’s love dish.
“I love oxtail and John loves grits, so we thought, ‘Let’s put them together,’” says Sasha, whose recipes drive the kitchen at Big John’s Eatery, where she steps into the kitchen Sundays to cook brunch. During the week, she manages an afterschool program at a local school.
The oxtail and grits bowl reflected their combined favorites, with Southern-meets-Caribbean flavors that hint of Sasha’s Panamanian roots, John’s Haitian heritage and their shared love of American soul food.
The dish also helped define their restaurant’s focus. Before the couple took over the space in September 2020, it had housed a pizzeria. A newcomer to the restaurant business, John LeJeune figured he should keep the pizza-and-wings concept going for the sake of continuity.
“But I kept thinking, ‘This isn’t our food,’” says John, a life coach and business consultant who calls himself the “chief taste tester” at Big John’s Eatery.
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Brunch all day is born
Earlier this year, months after he opened the restaurant, he suggested they introduce Sunday brunch at the diner, like the big, comfort-food brunches Sasha made at home.
But Sasha wasn’t so sure it would work.
“I said, ‘How does that make sense? People will be confused,’” she says. “But he convinced me. We love brunch. We love brinner -- breakfast for dinner. So we gave it a try.”
She stepped into the eatery kitchen one Sunday morning in March and went all out on the brunch offerings -- chicken and red velvet waffles, peach cobbler French toast, egg dishes galore and that LeJeune “love” dish, oxtail and grits.
“The response was crazy,” she says. “Brunch turned out to be super popular and super successful.”
After months of Sunday success, what didn’t make sense was returning to the regular pizza-and-wings menu during the week, says John.
“People would come back during the week, looking for the food they had on Sunday,” he says. “We thought, ‘Why are we trying to force something here? This isn’t us. Let’s figure this out.’”
Says Sasha: “John’s the visionary and the dreamer and I’m, like, ‘Let’s figure out how to make it happen.’”
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Together, they created a concept and menu based on their customers’ feedback.
“We added things that we love and can be proud of,” says John.
In June, he took his own business advice and overhauled the restaurant’s concept to focus on the brunch-all-day idea. That would include a daily $19.99 bottomless mimosa option.
“I coach leaders to be adaptable. I had to be my own consultant and decide that this change just has to be made,” says John, 35.
Sasha calls the shift to brunch all day “a natural progression.”
It’s a progression rooted in from-the-heart cooking and, in this sense, mirrors the early days of John and Sasha’s relationship a decade ago.
“When we got together, I worked late and all the food options would be fast food. Most days of the week, Sasha would cook me a meal and, man, she could really cook. Like, ‘I think we’ll be okay,’” says John, a Palm Beach County county native who grew up in Palm Beach Gardens.
Cooking from the heart is something Sasha says she inherited from her grandmother.
“She was always asking, ‘Are you hungry? Can I make you something to eat?’ Food for me is a love language. I’m feeding your soul and your belly at the same time,” says Sasha, 31.
She feels this every Sunday morning when she enters the kitchen at Big John’s Eatery, she says.
“I especially love to hear the laughter coming from the tables,” she says. “Just to hear people enjoying themselves as they have our food is beautiful.”
Where will the eatery go from here? Sasha says she’s in no hurry to see anything change right now.
“I just love where we are. I love the smallness of it,” she says. “It can grow and that’s awesome. But for now, I love it just the way it is.”
Big John’s Eatery
Location: 100 Sansburys Way, Suite 100 (steps from Dick’s Sporting Goods in The Shoppes at Southern Palms), West Palm Beach, 561-333-2333, BigJohnsEatery.com
Hours: Open Tuesday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Closed Monday.
Menu: Serves breakfast, brunch and lunch daily. A bottomless mimosa option is offered for $19.99.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: West Palm Beach restaurant: Big John's Eatery serves brunch, soul food
