It’s 9 a.m., the morning after a late-night flight from L.A. and Alexander Smalls has a full day of remote meetings and calls.
The pioneer of Afro-Asian-American cuisine has restaurants and food-related projects on four continents.
In the past few years, Smalls has developed Alkebulan, a food-hall concept in Dubai and soon to open in London and New York. It features African cuisine from many regions of the continent.
He has authored cookbooks, one of which won a James Beard award; in 2022 he released an album of African American spiritual and jazz music. He has plans for more of each.
He’s traveled the world while continuing to own and run a top restaurant in Harlem.
There’s a lot on his plate.
But before his culinary renown, before his time as a world-traveling, Grammy- and Tony-winning opera singer, before he arrived at Spartanburg High School in 1968 as one of a handful of Black students and lit up the stage with his voice and his personality — they called him “Bernie.”
His father, Alexander Leonard Smalls, wanted his son to have his name. His mother, Johnnie Mae Shaw Smalls, refused, insisting “my son will be junior to no one.”
Alexander Bernard was a compromise choice, though it was a name he seldom heard as a child.
“My mother’s friends would call me ‘Little Johnnie Mae,’” he said. “With dad, it was ‘look at Little Alex coming.’ And for some people, it was just ‘here comes Smalls,’ because your name was so unimportant as a child in the South, particularly in the African American community.”
When an aunt came from Philadelphia to meet her only nephew, she declared that Bernard was too much name for such a little child.
“Call him Bernie,” she said. It stuck.
From Lowcountry to High Street
High Street and Woodview Avenue was the epicenter of Spartanburg’s Black middle class in the ‘60s and ’70s.
“That was the place where young black professional people lived, the teachers, the…
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