ROBERTSDALE, Alabama — Ever since she was young, Mary Smith dreamed of having her own restaurant.
“I’ve always wanted to own a restaurant,” she said. “I’ve been talking about it since …
This item is available in full to subscribers.
Please log in to continue |
ROBERTSDALE, Alabama — Ever since she was young, Mary Smith dreamed of having her own restaurant.
“I’ve always wanted to own a restaurant,” she said. “I’ve been talking about it since I was 17 or 18.”
Now, Smith owns two restaurants which feature good, old-fashioned Southern dishes she learned how to make when she was a little girl.
“I was the oldest of 12 children,” Smith said. “My mother worked a lot, so as the oldest, she needed me to help put food on the table.”
So at the age of 7, Smith said, her mother began teaching her the recipes that had been handed down through her family for generations.
“Because I was cooking for children, I had to learn to be creative in the kitchen,” she said. “I had to cook food that they would want to eat that tasted good and was good for them.”
A native of Loxley, Smith said, she moved to Daphne with her family at a young age. When she was in middle school, the family moved to Mobile, where she spent the remainder of her youth into adulthood.
She started working in the food industry when she was still in school.
“I’ve done just about everything there is to do in the restaurant business,” she said, including working for a couple of trained chefs and working at a variety of restaurants from buffets to breakfast bars to seafood.
But when it came time to open her own restaurant, Smith said, she had no choice but to return to her roots.
In 2011, she and her family opened Mary’s Southern Cooking on Springhill Avenue in Mobile.
“Most people know us as ‘the big green building,’” she said. “It really stands out and it is a heavy traffic restaurant, always packed.”
The menu includes traditional favorites like fried and baked chicken, made from a more-than 100-year-old family recipe, along with sides like mac and cheese, collard greens and candied yams.
For the more adventurous, there are pork chitterlings (chitlins), made from the intestines, and ox tail.
While she brought a lot of her family’s traditions to the table, she admits when it comes to dessert, it was her husband Lawrence who supplied his family’s recipes, including buttermilk pound cake, pies and red velvet cake.
“When people ask me if I bake, I have to admit that I’ve never really liked sweets,” she said.
Lawrence’s sister, Patricia Winston, is now responsible for all the baking, she said. “Toe to toe, she’s every bit as good as (Lawrence),” Smith said.
About a year ago, Smith opened a second Mary’s Southern Cooking, in the Greer’s Cash Saver Shopping Center on Highway 59 in Robertsdale. Just recently, she had a ribbon cutting with the Central Baldwin Chamber of Commerce.
These days, she says, she goes back and forth between both restaurants. Her son and two daughters run the restaurant in Mobile. Her sister, Sharon Peters, and daughter Shawanda Lawson, run the Robertsdale location.
“I go back and forth between the two restaurants, tasting everything to make sure it’s consistent,” she said. “I don’t want anybody saying they went to Robertsdale and it tasted better than the food in Mobile.”
While she admits that her daughter, who is now responsible for most of the cooking, has become pretty accomplished, she is still looking for that day-to-day consistency.
“She’s gotten to where she can cook just like me,” Smith said. “I tell her all the time that people come up to me and tell me what a good job I did with the cooking that day, but it’s all her, so I tell her, ‘if people think it’s mine, then you’re doing it right.’
“She’s been doing this for five years now and she’s still in training. When I think she’s got it to where it’s that way every day, then I know she can take over.”
The only thing she doesn’t trust to anybody else, she says, is the chitlins.
“They have to be done right, so I have to do those myself,” she said.
Mary’s Southern Cooking is open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day, except Saturday, at 22245 Highway 59 South, Unit 4, on the north end of the Greer’s Shopping Center in Robertsdale.
Daily specials are available and all meals are boxed up so you can eat in or take it to go.
