Taste of the South

Nino’s Southern Sides feeds a hankering for Southern American cuisine

BY JENNIFER ANDERSON | PHOTO BY PATRICK MANNING

Shorewood may be in the heart of the Midwest, but residents have a Southern food hook-up so good it’ll make you want a gracious plenty.

Nino’s Southern Sides, 4475 N. Oakland Ave., opened in 2015 and has gained a devoted following for its extensive menu of Southern cuisine’s greatest hits. Here, hungry locals find staples like mouthwatering fried chicken and catfish, savory black-eyed peas and collard greens, and weekend specials like barbecued pigs’ feet, seafood gumbo and pork chitterlings that sell out lickety-split.

And, bless your heart, don’t you dare leave without sampling some of Nino’s down-home desserts, including peach cobbler, pecan pie or banana pudding cheesecake.

Owner Valerie Daniels-Carter, whose family originally hails from Alabama, started the restaurant because she felt there was a hankering for Southern cuisine on Milwaukee’s North Shore. “So many people migrated from the south to the north years ago and a lot of folks who grew up here in Wisconsin were raised on foods cooked by their Southern mothers and grandmothers,” she explains.

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Daniels-Carter, who named the restaurant after her high-spirited younger brother, is the founder, owner and CEO of V & J Holding Companies, Inc., which is nationally recognized as the largest female-owned franchise company in the country, according to the company website. In 2009, Daniels-Carter made two of Essence magazine’s lists: she was among the “Top 10 Black Female Entrepreneurs” and one of the “50 Most Inspiring African Americans in the U.S.”

For Nino’s, Daniels-Carter has an all-star lineup of cooks who have added their own family recipes to the menu. “It’s all cooked fresh,” she says. “The cooks are back there peeling potatoes and shucking corn themselves.” She adds that her cooks also constantly collaborate to develop new dishes. “I have a terrific team and they have brought some phenomenal dishes to our kitchen.”

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If she had to choose her last-ever meal, Daniels-Carter says, it would consist of Nino’s fried pork with rice and gravy, a side of greens, and sweet potato pie to finish it off. However, she says, “This is authentic Southern comfort food. You can’t go wrong with anything on the menu.” n