UP SOUTH The shoebox lunch of the Great Migration, reimagined through the lens of smoke.

Justice of the Pies’ chef and owner, Maya-Camille Broussard, in partnership with Chef Dominique Leach of Pullman’s celebrated Lexington Betty Smokehouse, is proud to announce the return of UP SOUTH, a one-day culinary pop-up honoring the Great Migration, the legacy of the Pullman Porters, and the tradition of the shoebox lunch that sustained Black Americans on their journey north.

Between the 1910s and the 1970s, more than six million Black Americans left the Jim Crow South and traveled north by train in what is known as the “Great Migration”. The train’s dining cars and roadside restaurants along the route were not open to them due to state-enforced segregation laws and widespread discriminatory “whites only” policies. In response, Black mothers, grandmothers, and church communities packed shoebox lunches for the travelers. Fried chicken, boiled eggs, cornbread, and pound cake filled the boxes and were well-preserved in the sweltering heat of the train cars and was enough to sustain a family across hundreds of miles. Those boxes were not merely meals. They were acts of love, dignity, and defiance.

UP SOUTH reimagines those four staples through the lens of smoke, as a deliberate nod to the coal- and steam-powered locomotives that carried the Great Migration north, and to the deep BBQ traditions that traveled with it. Each dish is reinterpreted using slow-smoke and live-fire techniques that honor both the journey and the destination. Now in its third year, the UP SOUTH Pop-Up has become Justice of the Pies’ signature event during the James Beard Awards weekend, a moment when the culinary world descends on Chicago and the South Side of Chicago asserts its rightful place at the center of the conversation. The pop-up is both a celebration and a declaration: that the food traditions of the South Side are as foundational to Chicago’s culinary landscape as any other.