For six years, the price of a plate at Miss Odell's Kitchen in Cedar Hollow has not changed, even as owner Odell Faison says her food and labor costs have climbed by nearly a third over the same period, a stubborn commitment she says is rooted in what the working-class neighborhood can actually afford.

Odell Faison, who opened Miss Odell’s Kitchen on a Cedar Hollow corner more than twenty years ago, said she has kept her menu prices unchanged for six years despite food costs rising an estimated 30 percent and labor costs climbing alongside them. She said the decision reflects the economic reality of the neighborhood her restaurant serves, one of the areas hit hardest by the city’s factory closures and the opioid epidemic that followed. “Half my regulars are on fixed incomes or working jobs that haven’t given them a real raise in years,” Faison said. “If I raise my prices to match my costs, I’m not serving this neighborhood anymore. I’m serving whoever can still afford to come in.”

Making the math work anyway

Faison said she has managed to hold prices steady through a combination of smaller portion adjustments on select sides, renegotiated supplier contracts, and accepting thinner profit margins than she said any accountant would recommend. She declined to specify her current margins but acknowledged they have shrunk considerably. “I’m not going to pretend I’m getting rich holding these prices,” she said. “I’m making it work because I’ve decided it has to work, and then I find the way.”

Longtime customer Reginald Pruitt, who said he has eaten at the restaurant most Sundays after church for close to fifteen years, said the price stability has mattered more to him in recent years as his own fixed income has failed to keep pace with rising costs elsewhere. “Everything else in my life costs more than it did five years ago,” Pruitt said. “My rent, my medication, my electric bill. This is one of the only things that hasn’t changed on me. That matters more than people who don’t live on a fixed income probably understand.”

I’ve watched restaurants all over this city raise prices every year like it’s automatic. Miss Odell decided a long time ago that she wasn’t going to do that to this neighborhood. I don’t know how she makes it work financially, but I know what it means for the rest of us that she does.

Reginald Pruitt, longtime customer

A neighborhood still waiting for reinvestment

Faison said her commitment to affordability is inseparable from her view of Cedar Hollow’s broader economic challenges, a neighborhood City Council Member Gary Petrowski has represented for years while pushing for expanded addiction-treatment funding tied to his effort to tie treatment funding to the next city budget cycle. “This neighborhood needs a lot of things the city hasn’t gotten around to yet,” Faison said. “I can’t fix the bigger problems from behind this counter. What I can do is make sure a hot meal here doesn’t become one more thing people in this neighborhood have to give up.”

Faison said she has watched the city’s attention shift toward Foundry Row’s biotech-driven redevelopment and toward proposals like the city’s plan to redevelop vacant Cedar Hollow lots for affordable infill housing, changes she said she supports in principle but has yet to see meaningfully improve conditions for her existing customer base. “I hear about all this investment happening a few neighborhoods over,” she said. “I’ll believe it’s reached Cedar Hollow when my regulars tell me their own situation has actually improved, not before.”

Faison’s daughter, Renata Faison, who has begun taking on a larger management role at the restaurant in anticipation of eventually taking it over, said she supports her mother’s pricing philosophy but acknowledged it will require difficult decisions if costs keep climbing. “I understand why she’s held the line this long,” Renata Faison said. “I also know there’s a point where holding the line isn’t sustainable anymore. I don’t know exactly where that point is, and I don’t think she does either.”

• Miss Odell’s Kitchen has held menu prices flat for six consecutive years despite an estimated 30 percent rise in food costs.
• Owner Odell Faison has opened the restaurant for more than twenty years on a Cedar Hollow corner.
• Faison said she has offset rising costs through renegotiated supplier contracts and reduced profit margins rather than price increases.

Faison said she is not opposed to raising prices eventually, but wants to exhaust every other option first, including a planned effort to source more ingredients directly from regional farms to cut costs further. “The day I raise prices, I want it to be because I truly have no other choice left,” she said. “Not because it was simply the easiest thing to do.”

Pruitt said he hopes that day never comes, even as he acknowledged the restaurant cannot hold the line forever. “I’m realistic,” he said. “Prices go up. That’s how it works everywhere else. I just hope when it finally happens here, it’s a small increase and not some sudden jump because she waited too long to make an adjustment. Either way, I’ll still be here on Sundays.”