When chef and artist Nia Lee was 12, she wrote in her journal of feeling “impossible.” “I have all these jeopardies—I’m Black, I don’t have a mainstream body type, I’m not rich, and I’m queer,” they recall thinking. “That’s impossible. It’s too much.”
Today, as the founder of Los Angeles’s Stormé Supper Club, which aims to create a safe, healing space for Black queer individuals, her gatherings prove her younger self wrong. “As much as the events are for the community,” they say, “they’re also for that little 12-year-old, showing her, ‘No, you are possible.’”
Her latest event was Friday’s “Red Drink and Respite,” a wine and spirits tasting in celebration of Juneteenth—the holiday commemorating June 19, 1865, when the enslaved people of Texas were proclaimed by Union forces to be free more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation became law. Celebrated for years in Texas and across the United States, it became a federal holiday in 2021.
A mainstay of Juneteenth celebrations is red drink, which refers to sweetened, tart berry-flavored red beverages whose roots go back to West Africa’s red hibiscus teas. Enslaved people adapted the drink when they arrived in the Caribbean and the American colonies. It’s a symbol of perseverance and resilience along with other red-colored foods, which are said to represent the blood shed by enslaved ancestors; the hue is also emblematic of strength and spirituality in many West African cultures.
In collaboration with the LA arts nonprofit Feminist Center for Creative Work, some 30 guests at the Black- and Filipinx-owned Thai Town coffee shop Obet and Del’s enjoyed inventive takes on red drink, paired with snacks inspired by traditional Black American culinary traditions.
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