CLINTON HILL — Myrtle Avenue’s classic soul food joint Ruthie’s fried its last chicken wing, braised its final batch of collard greens and closed its doors for good Sunday, according to its owner.
“It was time,” John Monroe told DNAinfo New York. “Just time to do it.”
Monroe, the third child of restaurant founder Ruth West, said Ruthie’s is not leaving due to a rent hike or neighborhood changes.
“Nothing negative,” he said. “When the spirit tells you to move, it’s time to go.”
After three decades in the food industry, Monroe, 57, has finally bought himself time to write.
“I’m a writer,” he said. “It’s just in me, and I just don’t do it.”
Monroe mostly writes short stories with a historical bent, he said, set in the 1930s and '70s. He planned the closure a year ago for when his lease expired so he could strike out on his creative path.
“I fed theirs,” he said of his neighborhood fan base. “Now I need to be fed.”
Ruthie’s, which used to have another location on Dekalb Avenue, was known for smothered chicken, ribs, collards, yams, and mac and cheese with genuine down-home flavor imparted by Ruth West’s Southern roots.
When West was 9 years old, her mother died, leaving her and her twin sister to cook for eleven siblings at the family farm in Bayboro, North Carolina, Monroe said.
“They would come home and eat after a long day in the fields,” he said.
West’s Southern hospitality made her restaurants a favorite of locals, especially “church people,” Monroe said.
“They always felt like they were at home with their mother or their grandmother,” he said.
Monroe was born and raised on St. Felix Street in Fort Greene, but instilled in him were Southern taste buds.
“Of course I knew her recipes, ‘cause I ate them since I was a baby,” he said.
From the '50s to the '70s, Monroe's father would ferry people between North Carolina and New York “like a Greyhound bus.” The family has a food truck, Ruthie’s of Charlotte, there now, he said.
But Ruthie West belonged in Brooklyn, according to Monroe.
“She found the best place for her life,” he said.
