It’s a few hours before sunrise in 2011 and Ashley Gooden, known to customers as Ms. Pooh, is sitting with the other dancers at Onyx strip club in Atlanta’s Morningside-Lenox Park neighborhood. They’re counting their cash and noshing on cut-up strawberries, grapes, and chocolate chip cookies just pulled from the oven by chef Kel “Kelz” Chavis.
“I gained a lot of weight,” Gooden said of Chavis’s treats. “They tried to put me on the fat girl list.” (If you exceed the expected weight for your shift, you get moved to the shift for bigger women.)
Standing nearly 6 feet tall, Chavis has a quiet authority and a calming presence. When he saw how hungry the dancers were at the end of the night, he expanded his job from feeding the strip club audience to also feeding those on stage.
“I’d rather them eat here than try to stop somewhere on the way home and get followed home,” he explained. The food was free, but he placed a tip jar beside it. Dancers always tipped. He estimates that he made more money by giving the food away than if he’d charged for it.
Within strip clubs, multiple hungers exist: For sex, clout, booze, and, yes, food. Food is usually last on the list because it’s the hunger that hasn’t always been fed in venues where nudity’s the main attraction. Most people don’t go to strip clubs to eat.
But in Atlanta, things are different. Food, not sex appeal, has become a way for strip clubs to distinguish themselves from each other. And the strip club where Gooden and Chavis both now work has done such a good job on the culinary front that it’s attracted an unusual crowd: female customers.
The Blue Flame Lounge, opened in the Bankhead neighborhood in 1983, has historically catered to straight men. Decades ago, women weren’t allowed unless they were accompanied by a man.
Things started to change within the past few years, said Gooden, who at 39 plays the role of house mom, providing dancers with hygiene products, hair mousse, snacks, and counseling. She’s worked off and on at Blue Flame since the early 2000s.
“When I first started working in a club, it was more of a taboo thing” for women to patronize the place, she said. “I did not like to dance for female customers…they tend to be more handsy, more provocative with their touching. They’re actually worse than a man.”
Within the past few years, women have migrated to the club in greater numbers thanks to its wings, salmon, collard greens, and mac-and-cheese which have gone viral on Instagram and TikTok. There are nights at Blue Flame when the audience’s gender split is about even.
“Once Instagram came about, you have women coming in here, doing their bachelorette parties, bridal showers,” Gooden said.
Some women don’t even realize it’s a strip club until they arrive.
Chavis knew the demographics had shifted when a security guard told him there were some guests at the door looking for him.
“I went out there, and there’s three girls with pajamas and head bonnets,” he said. He was puzzled. They said they’d seen his salmon on Instagram.
Blue Flame doesn’t have the same name recognition as Magic City, but it has a reputation among those in the know. In his 14 years at Blue Flame, Chavis has amassed a slew of celeb fans, including Cardi B and Lil Baby, who brought his entourage for the crab-stuffed salmon. Migos shouted him out in its 2017 song “Big on Big.” (“Pullin’ out V12, pickin’ up a plate at Kelz”)
Still, misconceptions remain. “They say, ‘Oh man, I can’t eat there, with that girl walking around with her butt out and boobs out,” Chavis told me. “Something might fall in there.”
Chavis isn’t quite who you’d expect to oversee the kitchen at Blue Flame. He’s a family man: 54 years old, married with four kids, ranging from 7 to 34. As TVs display football and lesbian porn, Chavis tells me about growing up on the 860-acre Sol Legare Island in Charleston County, South Carolina, where his grandparents farmed okra, beans, and watermelon.
“We worked the river,” he said. And what they caught—fish, crabs, and shrimp—they ate or sold.
When African Americans were forbidden by segregationist laws from visiting Folly Beach, Sol Legare’s Mosquito Beach provided them a space. In the 1950s, Chavis’s family made moonshine and ran juke joints on Mosquito Beach for Black entertainers on the Chitlin’ Circuit; he named his company, Mosquito Beach LLC, in their honor.
When he found his way to Atlanta in his 30s, his own music career had faltered and he desperately needed a job. So, when he saw an ad in an alt-weekly looking for a chef at the Pink Pony Gentlemen’s Club, he gave them a call.
Eventually he landed at Blue Flame, where he transformed the kitchen’s offerings from chicken tenders and onion rings to the cuisine he grew up eating: shrimp and grits, crab-stuffed salmon, fried catfish, his grandma’s turkey spaghetti. He proudly calls this food Coastal Carolina Cuisine—a term he invented to distinguish it from Gullah Geechee cuisine. “I’m not a classically trained chef,” Chavis said. I represent the underdog.”
Two weeks after spending a Saturday afternoon at Blue Flame, I return to see Chavis in action during a late-night rush. At 1:30 a.m. on a Sunday, overflow parking has lapped the liquor store across the street.
Chavis meets us at the door in a red Yankees cap, glasses, and black chef shirt. He escorts us through the darkened club—past a dancer in red vinyl boots twerking on a female customer, dollar bills surrounding her on the floor—to Blue Flame’s open kitchen.
As we walk through the club, sweet scents of hookah waft through the air, but when we get to the kitchen, the smell turns to soul food. Itoyna Napoleon, 40, and her co-worker are prepping wings in the small, clean space.
Napoleon came to Atlanta from New Orleans in 2018, seeking better schools for her two children. She got to know Chavis at another restaurant but was initially hesitant about joining him at Blue Flame.
Her brother shared her suspicions. He “came out to make sure that I wasn’t a dancer,” Napoleon said.
He approved of the arrangement, as did her teenage kids. Chavis even made chicken wings for her daughter’s graduation party.
Because it’s an open kitchen, with a small number of workers, regulars frequently interact with Chavis and Napoleon. One night, people started tossing dollar bills in the kitchen. “The whole floor was full of money, like we were dancing,” Napoleon said, laughing at the memory.
I couldn’t wait to try the food that had inspired people to throw cash. I peruse the menu: lemon pepper wings, salmon, ribeye, GeecheBoy Rasta Pasta.
Chavis suggests we try the salmon. I can’t resist asking if he has any of his Thursday special, the turkey spaghetti. He does. I’m thrilled to get a chance to taste a dish that usually sells out.
There are few tables in the club, so we bring our takeout to a seat at a narrow counter, a neon “Pussy Palace” sign above us. Nearby, a man gets a lap dance while an employee sweeps dollar bills into a neat pile.
Steam wafts from the turkey spaghetti when we remove the plastic top. The first thing I notice is that it’s lacquered with warm cheese: Colby and cheddar. Beneath is tender spaghetti and hunks of ground turkey, mixed with a sweet tomato sauce that I’m convinced has sugar. (Chavis assures me that it does not.) I ask him what makes it so good.
“The secret is the fact that I hate turkey,” he revealed. “So, I cook it and dry it out…take all the flavor out, and…infuse it with my flavor.”
Next, we try the blackened salmon as “Ball Forever” by Future blasts through the club. It’s cooked “in the Black style,” Chavis said, meaning well-done, yet tender and moist.
Before we leave, we hear a woman, over the din of the music, shout out to the kitchen window. “Yo, Kelz, you got that blackened salmon?” she asks.
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