Henderson said the path to Gabriella’s was unconventional at best. Upon graduating from Brashear High School in 1980, Henderson found himself as a cook at the old Cotton Club on Webster Avenue in the Hill District. After the Cotton Club closed as a bar, he later remodeled it and opened the location as a restaurant and named it Chace’s, after his son. However, his son took ill, Henderson said, and he focused all his attention on Chace.
“He had what is known as interrupted SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), so I closed the restaurant and took care of him for eight years,” Henderson told the New Pittsburgh Courier. Chace passed away in 2010.
After some time, Henderson opened another eatery, Chace’s Barbecue and Catering, on Wylie Ave. He then took over a food bus in Oakland near the Hillman Library. “Once I bought it, they decided we couldn’t sell food in Oakland, for reasons I don’t know,” Henderson revealed. “So what we did was, we’d drive around to the neighborhoods that didn’t have a restaurant —the Hill, Garfield, North Side, Homewood, and we would sell food out the food bus.”
Henderson later closed his Wylie Avenue location, and began barbecuing on a hot dog cart in the Hill.
“One day, Mistick construction told me and Morgan (Diggs, who also works with Henderson) that we could come up to his job site and sell our food, so we started selling food up there while they were rebuilding the Hill,” Henderson said.
Henderson said this event jumpstarted his business, and it hasn’t slowed since. Henderson and Diggs later set up a portable location in Hazelwood, where they were approached by Uber about catering for their employees. Since last year, they’ve been delivering lunches to nearly 130 employees at the new Uber facility three times a week. But they needed a larger space to prepare the meals.
“So we went looking for a facility to cater in, and we found this place, Gabriella’s,” Henderson said. “It was up for lease.”
Henderson took over Gabriella’s on March 1. He and Diggs’ intentions were not to start a walk-in restaurant, rather larger space to cook their meals for the Uber employees. But so far, “It’s been amazing,” he said. “We all know when we first start a business, especially a restaurant, you have to build up a fan base, and sometimes that’s what hurt us. But here, we walked into (an already established) base. Now what we have to do is keep that base and add to it. So each day we see ourselves increasing in sales and having repeat customers.”
Devon Jacobs, a newcomer to Pittsburgh and on her lunch break May 22 during her first day of work at Dollar Energy, walked into the nearby Gabriella’s for the first time on a recommendation. She ordered the Chicken Quesadilla. “Really good, really good,” she said as she took a few bites. “I didn’t know they put peppers in it, it’s real good.”
Diggs, who is the first face one sees when they walk into the establishment, said new menu items include barbecue ribs, barbecue chicken, barbecue corned beef sandwiches, etc. “A lot of people have been coming in asking for the fried wings, and fries, and the fish sandwiches they like as well,” she said.
Henderson said it’s been a long, winding journey that’s led him to his present reality—an established catering clientele with Uber, a food truck in Hazelwood, and a restaurant along the popular E. Carson Street It’s a far cry from washing dishes as a 13-year-old at Eddie’s, then being asked to step in on the front lines when the regular cook never showed up.
But that experience in the mid-1970s prepared Henderson for his never-give-up attitude.
“We have some of the best food, we spend our money on some of the best beef, and we usually get our products…from local farmers,” Henderson said. “We know this is the only place for a lot of people to eat around here with a short time for lunch, so what we do is try and provide them with that service and give them a good product.”
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