Twisted Soul Cookhouse & Pours

Fried chicken with travel in the brine

The chicken rests for 24 hours before it reaches the skillet. Deborah VanTrece, chef at Twisted Soul Cookhouse & Pours in Atlanta, uses that wait as part of the method, seasoning the bird with red peppercorns, bay leaf, garlic, onion, and salt before flour, cast iron, and cayenne honey finish the work. At Twisted Soul, in Blandtown on Atlanta’s west side, she keeps Southern soul food in motion without loosening its root system. The grammar is familiar, but the sentence keeps changing: fried chicken beside a collard green roll, sweet potato biscuits at the table, fried green tomatoes with enough acid and crunch to carry their own argument. VanTrece has led Twisted Soul since 2016, after studying at the Art Institute of Atlanta and building a career that moved through airline work, catering, and restaurant ownership. The travel matters because it enters the plate as structure rather than souvenir. Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia gave her more than flavor references; they gave her ways to read comfort food as a shared discipline, with family recipes, migration, and technique meeting at the pass.

Modern soul food, handled as method

VanTrece calls the work modern, global soul food, and the phrase earns its place when the kitchen treats tradition as something active. Collard greens become a golumpki-style roll, trading cabbage for greens and drawing smoked ham hock into the filling. Oxtails take hoisin. Sweet tea moves toward ribs. The point is not novelty; it is calibration, the adjustment of sweetness, salt, smoke, fat, and heat until recognition and surprise can sit on the same plate. Even the dishes with the longest memory keep their labor visible. Chitlins, in VanTrece’s telling, require 1.5 hours of cleaning before 3-4 hours of cooking with celery, onion, garlic, and seasonings. She has spoken of that work as an act of love, which is also a technical statement: the dish cannot be rushed without becoming something else. The same patience shapes the fried chicken program, where the brine does quiet work long before the skillet takes over. Local sourcing sits inside that discipline, with Georgia ingredients supporting a kitchen that reads Southern food through both place and diaspora.

The room around the pass

The room gives the food enough ease to move. Banquettes hold the edges, bar seating keeps the counter in view, and the playlist gives the dining room a pulse without turning service into performance. Twisted Soul is small in scale, independent in feel, and built for a kind of conversation that can survive a plate of fried green tomatoes arriving hot from the kitchen. The pass carries the pressure point: comfort food has to arrive generous, but VanTrece’s version asks for control at every station. Sweet potato biscuits need tenderness, not weight. Collards need structure, not collapse. Fried chicken needs its crust to hold after the honey lands. The atmosphere can be laid back because the bench is not. That contrast is part of the house style, urban, comfortable, and tuned to the food rather than staged around it.

A flagship with a wider table

Twisted Soul remains the central room in VanTrece’s Atlanta work, even as her hospitality group has grown into other neighborhoods and concepts. The restaurant carries her argument most directly: soul food is not a closed canon, and its survival techniques belong in the same conversation as polish, travel, and present-tense appetite. At Twisted Soul Cookhouse & Pours, the dish is 24-hour brined fried chicken, cast-iron fried and finished with cayenne honey.