For many years the “iconic” American ghetto was marked by the predominance of low‑price restaurants and soul food restaurants serving traditional dishes from the rural South, from which many African American migrants came. Soul food restaurants offered a comfortable social space for developing and bringing to the fore a “black” identity, and a source of a feeling of “moral ownership” despite the lack of African Americans’ legal ownership of most buildings and stores. In recent years, however, increased transnational migration and gentrification in Bedford‑Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn black neighborhood, have expanded the local market for different kinds of restaurants, which challenges traditional African-American identity.