A slightly brown-skinned man with the hint of a pot belly, he lilts into a delicate Jamaican accent when he stops to talk, especially when favored (West Indian) customers come in. He came to the United States ten years ago working at a ski lodge as a cook ("I used to go to work in true snow storm, man, at 35 below for $1.50 an hour and me from Jamaica? I was ready to go home, man!"). He intended to save enough to start his own business in Jamaica, but he's invested in his restaurant and doesn't now know whether he'll go back home. The Silver Slipper is as much a second start for Leonard Matthews as Grandma's is for Sid Gerstenblatt; but Leonard has weaned his child for eight years instead of eight weeks, and then, Leonard never had much choice about work.

"Since I was 11 years old I worked in restaurants and hotels," he says, "first in Jamaica and then here. I start in an American restaurant as a boilerman, and I watch and I learn until I make it to assistant chef, I don't know anything else."

But he knew he could never make the kind of living he wanted for himself and Daphne working for someone else, "and we wanted to be our own boss," he says, so they borrowed enough to match their savings, bought their store, and taught themselves to keep the accounts. Leonard does all the purchasing and cooking, and Daphne provides the counter service and does the books, and says Leonard, "We do everything together. I make a decision and ask her and if she has a better decision I say okay, we do it. She's a whiz."

Matthews's one and only goal is to be independent, and he would even forsake the security of a franchise restaurant for the autonomy of owning his own place. He was offered the managership of a Pewter Pot restaurant in Central Square, but "I don't want anybody to tell me how to run my place. If I feel like I should sell curry goat or short rib, they going to tell me no. I don't want to be a Pewter Pot." He doesn't want to accept orders from the manager of a chain, and he doesn't want the government to take charge of his business, either. "You work hard-hard and you get your money and you got to invest it, man! It's yours!"

Matthews is also frustrated by his inability to help change his surroundings; he can't, for example, renovate his building because it doesn't belong to him and might get torn down at any moment. More importantly, he hates the deterioration he sees around him in Roxbury.

"I'd like to see our people build Roxbury instead of hanging on the street. I'd like to go into a business where I could take two or three people off the street at least, where I can produce something. But the number one thing to think about is survival. People say they can't do this but they don't try; if I set myself a goal I want to conquer. If I don't, I sick!"

But is he happy? The 14 hours a day, the worry, the gamble?

"Look man." He is impatient, wanting to get back to his customers. "Life is a gamble. Sometimes it pay off, and sometimes things are slow and I take it like a man. Just as long as it's the two of us and we can pay the bills I satisfy. I satisfy."

And back to work he goes.