Soul 2 Soul Cafe

“With hard work, you can do it,” says Ouida Cook, owner of local favorite, Soul 2 Soul Café.
Her vision is one of effort, ambition, conviction and love. Ouida hasn’t always been on the food side of business. She was a finance director under Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve for a non-profit agency in Houston, Texas just before she found herself homeless with a baby. Like others after the horrific Hurricane Ike in 2008, she found herself without a job trying to make ends meet, finally finding a temporary place to stay helping an elderly friend.

“I said to myself, I have to get up every day, I have a baby” she voiced. “Something was pulling me to stay here in Galveston. So I walked to the tax office every day and applied for jobs there. Long story short, I got a job. Every morning I would walk the baby to day care and then I would walk down to the county tax office. I did that every day.”

Ouida wanted something more – something more fulfilling. Her fondness for cooking started to trickle through as she remembered the summers she would spend with her grandmother in Mississippi.

She was nervous about starting something new, jumping feet first in almost-unfamiliar territory, so she did what she always did when she was unsure about something: she asked her father for advice.

“What are you waiting for?” he responded.

“And I was so scared.”

She went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for meatloaf and mashed potatoes to make plates of food to sell, leaving the house with 16 plates and returned 2 ½ hours later without any leftovers. She sold them all.

Ouida started looking for a place to sell her Southern cooking out of and stumbled upon a cozy beauty salon which she immediately took.
“Galveston was a place of refuge for me and I stayed here because I felt like it what was what God wanted me to do” she explained. “It’s about dreams and about some folks spending their entire life’s savings to try to make those dreams come true. We want to do everything we can possibly do to help all of them succeed.”

Ouida’s story is an inspiring tale of hard work, courage and persistence – a sort of heartfelt gumbo, if you will, simmering with the spice of life.

Come out and try her home-cooking and experience the collection of flavors that shower the dishes she is known for – and the welcoming unconditional love she radiates.
http://www.soul2soul-galveston.com/index.php/about/