Some of the Bay Area’s Tastiest Soul Food Is Sold Out of a Convenience Store in Oakland

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

Located across the street from a weed dispensary in Oakland’s Dimond District, the Two Star Market looks like any other corner convenience store in the Bay — bright fluorescent lights, fridges stacked with beer and wine coolers, and shelves upon shelves of chips and candy.

Well, except for this: The store also features a fully equipped kitchen that serves some of the tastiest soul food in Oakland.

“Dimond Kitchen,” the grand opening banner outside reads. “Food for the Soul.” The restaurant-inside-a-corner-store markets itself as the Bay Area’s only late-night soul food spot, which seems mostly true — even if it was more apt a few years ago when the business used to set up on the sidewalk, on Broadway or Telegraph, selling ribs and meatloaf plates to the bar crowd until as late as 2 a.m. These days, the convenience store iteration of Dimond Kitchen is open until midnight on weekends, and that still feels like a miracle — to be able to snag a piping-hot plate of pork chops, greens, and mac and cheese during your late-night liquor store run.

My abiding love of restaurants embedded inside liquor stores and gas station convenience stores is well-documented at this point, including a long obsession with Borinquen Soul, which sold the most delicious Puerto Rican pernil and arroz con gandules I’d ever eaten out of this very same slightly janky corner store kitchen.

What I love most, I think, is the joy of discovery — of stumbling on unexpected deliciousness in an unusually casual or inappropriate setting. “What?” we said to the woman working the counter at 10 o’clock on a recent Friday night. “You serve oxtails on the weekend?” Even before we’d ordered our food, we were making plans to come back.

At Dimond Kitchen, you should be prepared for the food to take a little while, especially if you order anything beyond the spread of entrees and side dishes already laid out in warming trays on the steam table. The chicken wings are fried to order. So are the pork chops, before they get smothered in gravy. And the garlic noodles are tossed fresh in a hot pan — again, all to order. With just one or two cooks cranking plates out of that tiny, bootstrapped convenience store kitchen, it’s no wonder we waited a solid 40 minutes.

How much you enjoy that wait might depend on how you feel about the late-night corner store vibe, which has its own brand of joyously chaotic Town energy. A white guy in a hoodie tried to sweet-talk the staff into letting him buy a (nonexistent) “two-meat, one-side” combo plate. (“It’s twice the meat, half the sorrow,” he quipped, nonsensically.) A young woman with long braids slapped a couple of dollar bills onto the counter after the chef gave her a few extra tubs of housemade hot sauce, shrugging him off when he said she didn’t have to pay. Every once in a while, someone would burst into the store cussing jovially.

“Chef, you can smell that shit up the street!” one of them shouted.

Most everyone seemed like they were a regular. Which makes sense because once our food arrived, each takeout carton steaming-hot and filled almost to overflowing, we stopped thinking about anything else except how astoundingly delicious it all was.

The special of the day was smothered pork chops — juicy, bone-in specimens drowned generously in a savory brown gravy that was pitch perfect, neither too thick nor too thin. The kind of gravy that makes you want to eat a boatload of white rice.

Another excellent vehicle for rice (or noodles) was the garlic shrimp. Vaguely Alfredo-like in its creamy richness, the sauce was slightly spicy, a little bit sweet, and thoroughly addicting. Meanwhile, the fried chicken wings — arguably the staple of the menu — were plump and full-sized (with the tips attached), impeccably seasoned and succulent as all get-out. These were as delicious plain as they were with a drizzle of Crystal or the restaurant’s sweet, housemade hot sauce.

What really made the meal, however, was the abundance of side dishes, which we found to be even tastier than the mains. There were sweet, syrupy yams and gloriously golden-crusted jalapeño mac and cheese. There was dirty rice that actually tasted dirty, in the best way, with a livery depth of flavor we couldn’t get enough of. Best of all, there were soft collard greens soaked in a pool of potlikker so tasty and potent, I would happily drink a whole bowl of it on its own.

It all comes out smelling so intoxicatingly good, you want to devour it right away — which is a slight problem, because the corner-store setting means there aren’t any tables or seats to speak of. But on a clear evening, when the night air isn’t too chilly, you can do what we did and set up a very Oakland-style picnic: Lay your bounty on the hood of your car, right there in the convenience store parking lot. Roll up your sleeves. And dig in.

Dimond Kitchen is open Tuesday through Thursday, 2–10 p.m., and Friday through Sunday 1 p.m.–midnight inside Two Star Market at 2020 MacArthur Blvd. in Oakland — though it’s best to call ahead to confirm their hours.