Queen City Soul Kitchen closes after five years, multiple locations

Queen City Soul Kitchen LLC told its fans last week in a social media post that yesterday would be the restaurant’s last day of business.

“We have accomplished what we set out to do!” co-owners Lyle Foster and Francine Pratt posted to Facebook on Friday afternoon. “Our team has given their best to provide quality service and delicious made from scratch cuisine using the recipes of Ms. Francine Pratt who has prepared great food all over our nation.”

Reached this morning by Springfield Business Journal, co-owner Foster said in a provided statement, “It's been a great honor to bring the first soul food restaurant to the Springfield area, but it is now time to turn the chapter.  Since we have announced our closing we have heard from so many customers who we have been privileged to serve and they have all reminded us of exactly why we brought this concept forward.  We can only thank them for the opportunity to meet them and make them part of our Queen City family.”

Pratt’s recipes included myriad dishes such as meatloaf, fried chicken wings and catfish, green beans, candied yams, East Coast-style macaroni and cheese, collard greens seasoned with smoked turkey and other items, according to past SBJ reporting and online menus from Queen City Soul Kitchen.

Reached by SBJ this morning, Pratt said that a few major factors made now a good time to say farewell to the Queen City Soul Kitchen business, which launched in 2020 following a series of conversations between Pratt and Foster that hashed out the concept some 12 years ago. The two business partners discussed the need for Springfield to have a restaurant venue for soul food, which she said the community lacked at the time. (Today, Pratt said soul food offerings are available at MaMa Jean’s Natural Foods Market LLC.)

Current U.S. economic uncertainty was a factor in closing Queen City Soul Kitchen, Pratt said, particularly in terms of rising food costs in connection with local Health Department compliance. “You can only have food on the shelf for so long,” she said, “so you’re constantly having to replace food. … Because of the area, we did not want to raise the price much more, because then it’s no longer affordable.”

The prospect that “our community really couldn’t afford to pay much more if we raise the prices” also weighed on Pratt’s and Foster’s decision to close the business, Pratt said.

Nurturing family life and keeping up with remote work at Community Partnership of the Ozarks Inc. during semi-retirement were important considerations as well. Two years ago, Pratt said, she got extra-busy when her two sons’ families each welcomed a new baby, each infant born two months prematurely. “So, for the last two years, I had been literally living between three states. And with us trying to keep the restaurant going and trying to keep everything going, we just came to the reality of, you know what? We did what we set out to do. We gave a lot of people job opportunities where they were able to go on to other jobs.”

Missouri’s increasing minimum wage – set by law to climb to $15 per hour on Jan.1, 2026, according to the Missouri Department of Labor and Industrial Relations – “wasn’t bothering us at all,” Pratt said. She had Foster had hired staff above minimum wage from the outset of the enterprise.

“We created an environment for people who would not normally get hired in other places to be hired,” Pratt said. “We built the whole concept around that and had the most loyal employees.”

According to past SBJ reporting, Queen City Soul Kitchen began in 2020 as a pop-up restaurant at Big Momma’s Coffee on Commercial Street. Pratt said that as demand grew for the pop-ups, in 2020 she and Foster opted to relocate the eatery to 2006 N. Broadway Ave in the Woodland Heights neighborhood.

In January 2023, Queen City Soul Kitchen relocated to a roughly 800-square-foot space at 1626 N. Boonville Ave. shared with Big Momma’s to reduce costs, allowing takeout-only with coffee and pastries.

The same year, a Queen City Soul Kitchen location opened up at the 14 Mill Market food hall in Nixa, exiting that venue Dec. 10, 2023. Meanwhile, Queen City Soul Kitchen operated at Mercy Hospital’s main cafeteria “every other Monday until this month,” Pratt said, with positive response. And for roughly three years, Queen City Soul Kitchen had a space at Missouri State University’s food court on the first floor of Plaster Student Union.

“Something that was just supposed to be a pop-up to help get other restaurants started morphed into four locations and a lot of fun, a lot of cooking, a lot of good ideas, and then recognizing mainly that I needed to be with my kids and my grandkids,” Pratt told SBJ. “So, we had to slow things down and cut back.”

In April 2025, according to past coverage, MSU announced that a Queen City Soul Kitchen location on the first floor of its Plaster Student Union would close at the end of the semester, with summertime construction planned to expand the nearby Chick-fil-A location into space formerly occupied by the soul-food restaurant.

Pratt acknowledged that some of the strongest consumers of soul food are also some of the strongest makers of soul food – or they’re related to such a person in their family.

“It’s not so much race, but culture,” she said. “What was really cool, we would have a lot of people who are Euro American from the South that would say, ‘Oh, this is how my grandmama made collards.’ But when you look at the African American culture, they’ve got these recipes. They’ve got how they make them, how their family brought up. So, it wasn’t a matter of trying to establish, ‘This is going to be the soul food.’ It was like, ‘Well, what about when you don’t feel like cooking?’”