Nikki’s Place: The Carter Street Soul-Food Room That Refused to Close

On Carter Street in Parramore, Nikki’s Place Southern Cuisine does something rarer than reinventing soul food: it refuses to let soul food disappear. The restaurant at 742 Carter Street has served under its own name since 1999 — but the room’s story starts half a century earlier, and the family will tell you so themselves. This is a profile of a survivor, and of the plate of smothered pork chops that carried it through.

From Roser’s, 1949

The restaurant’s own history, as the family tells it, reaches back more than 70 years to Roser’s Restaurant on Carter Street — opened in 1949 and run by Roser Mae Jones, remembered in the family as Grandma Rose. Nick Aiken began learning the business in that kitchen, in his aunt’s restaurant, as a young man. In 1999, Nick and Elaine Aiken took over the business and renamed it Nikki’s Place, after their daughter Shannea — Nikki — Akins, who now carries the restaurant’s story as its next-generation chef and public face. Three generations, one Carter Street kitchen: that is the whole recipe, and it is enough.

The fire, and the return

In March 2015, a fire that started in an apartment above the restaurant caused extensive damage to the building and the kitchen, closing Nikki’s for two and a half years. For a small family restaurant in a neighborhood that had already lost so much, that should have been the end. It was not. With assistance from the City of Orlando’s Community Redevelopment Agency — support that later earned recognition as an outstanding rehabilitation, renovation and reuse project — the Aikens rebuilt, and Nikki’s Place reopened in August 2017 to a neighborhood that had been counting the months. The restaurant has described the years since as exceeding its own goals for customers served. Parramore keeps its institutions the way it keeps its promises: stubbornly.

What to order

The family describes its cooking as the finer side of soul food, and the menu is the classic Carter Street canon, cooked with patience: fried catfish, smothered pork chops, baked chicken, liver and onions, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, candied yams, black-eyed peas and cabbage — the dishes, as Shannea Akins puts it, that people remember growing up eating at their grandmother’s table. Breakfast is a real service here, not an afterthought, with shrimp and grits among the morning draws, and the sweet finish is sweet potato pie or peach cobbler. Catering — weddings, church events, colleges and corporate rooms — is a serious part of the business, which tells you how the wider city actually uses this kitchen.

There is also the matter of who Nikki’s feeds when nobody is reviewing anything. This is the room Parramore uses for the ordinary ceremonies of a neighborhood: the after-church table, the family gathering that needs feeding at scale, the weekday lunch where the staff know the orders. The family’s own telling of the restaurant’s history keeps returning to the same word — family — applied not as branding but as a description of the customer base across three generations. Shannea Akins, speaking for the restaurant’s next chapter, frames the kitchen’s work as tradition deliberately kept: recipes and techniques passed down, seasoned with intention, cooked with patience. In a city that reinvents its dining scene every eighteen months, a Carter Street kitchen measuring its life in generations is making a different and stronger claim.

Nikki’s is unranked in our citywide lists, and we are not going to pretend otherwise; what it is, is foundational. Read it alongside the neighborhood’s ranked tables — Jesse’s Rib Shack and Sweetie’s Ice Cream — in our where to eat in Parramore guide, find it on the Orlando Top Spots Map, and go on a weekday if you can. The lunch crowd is the neighborhood itself, and there is no better review than that.

Filed under Parramore · Restaurants · Soul Food · Southern Food

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