After the death of her son, business partner, Ma Duke keeps her Macon restaurant open

A week after Teresa Cohen opened her restaurant, Ma Duke Southern Cookin’, her youngest son was shot after a person broke into his home.

After more than seven months, Montenez Cohen passed away from his injuries, leaving behind his mother and nine children.

“It was real painful,” she said. “Before he left the world, he said, ‘Mama, look after my kids,’ because he knows that me and him were real close, real close and I told him that’s what I’m gonna do. So, that’s why I’m trying so hard to keep this restaurant going, to help support nine grandkids.”

Ma Duke Southern Cookin’ opened Aug. 23, 2019, and in addition to her son’s death, Cohen has been working night and day to keep her doors open through the coronavirus pandemic and the loss of her business partner, Robert Jones, who died in December 2020.

By February, she employed around 30 people, and because of the coronavirus pandemic, her staff has reduced to five people, she said.

“COVID just hit us really hard with my business so right now I am still down in sales,” she said. “It’s been very hard for me, and I’ve been the only cook here cooking all this food by myself for over a year.”

She requires her employees to get tested for the COVID-19 virus every three months, and they increased cleaning and implemented social distancing in their dining hall, she said.

“I keep my doors in my kitchen open... because I want people to see how clean we is to make them feel comfortable about coming in and eating in the restaurant,” she said.

Although she had a rough year full of loss, Cohen said she had some good times, such as when Stacey Abrams came to her restaurant and helped her sell quite a few meals.

Becoming Ma Duke

Cohen has been cooking since she was 7 years old. She never had trouble remembering recipes her grandmother told her, and she never uses measuring cups, she said.

“I took in everything my grandmama taught me, the recipes, how to cook, and I never wrote it down. It’s all in my head,” she said. “It’s a gift from God because everybody can’t do that. They don’t have the talent for it, but I don’t even own a measuring cup in this restaurant.”

She worked in several restaurants over the years, and after she learned the business side of running a restaurant, she opened her first restaurant in 2008 called Creative Home Cooked Meals in Warner Robins.

After two years, she moved to Covington and opened a restaurant, but she said it wasn’t in a good location.

When she came back to Macon, she didn’t have the funds to open another restaurant. That’s when she met Robert Jones. He said he would help her open her third restaurant in Macon as soon as she found a location.

But, she said he at least needed to try her food first, so she invited him to dinner.

“Once he tasted my food, he said ‘You’re going to make it in this restaurant,’” she said.

Finding a location wasn’t an easy task either, Cohen said, and she almost gave up hope to find the perfect location for her restaurant.

“Once I stopped looking, I found this building,” she said.

The restaurant is located at 1530 Rocky Creek Road, where Johnny V’s Restaurant used to have a location, she said.

On opening day, she said she served more than 500 people, and she estimated that she served around that many every day until the coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020.

Her famous turkey wings

The restaurant is open 11 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sunday, and Cohen said her turkey wings are her most popular dish. She sells around 12 pans during the week and nearly 20 pans on Sunday.

“They say these are the best turkey wings they ever had,” she said.

She’s received a lot of good feedback from her customers saying that they love her fresh vegetables and her food reminds them of their parent’s cooking.

“They really care a whole lot about the restaurant, and they tell me all the time, ‘We hope you don’t go out of business because we need this type of food over here in our community,’ because they don’t have a whole lot of places that they can go eat,” she said. “I try to keep my prices so everybody can come in here and they afford to come in here and eat.”

Once the restaurant gets back on track, Cohen said she is looking forward to giving elderly customers discounts on Wednesdays and feeding the homeless at the end of the day.

“I know if I continue on blessing other people, God’s going to bless me also,” she said. “We just want to help people and do what we can for the community and for the public.”

She has an investor who is planning to join her as a business partner, and she is trying to grow her staff. However, she has been blessed with two employees who have stuck with her through everything.

“You can tell when a employee is for the business, and not for just a paycheck because they help me out any kind of way they can,” she said.

Willie C. and Shirley Mays Montenezhave stood beside her through the coronavirus pandemic and have supported her while she grieved her son’s death.

Although she misses her son daily, she said she allowed herself to grieve and picked herself up to move forward.

“I think he’s in a better place…. It was his time to go, and I just had to accept that,” she said. “What keeps me going is him because before he passed, he told me, he said, ‘You’re strong,’ and he said, ‘I’m strong,’ and he said, ‘Continue on being strong because you made all of us strong.’”

This story was originally published March 3, 2021 at 2:06 PM.