Mother and daughter open new Southern comfort food restaurant in Macon

Lula Williams and Lorietta Brown, a mother and daughter team, opened a new restaurant in Macon a week ago Tuesday.

Aroma Essence Southern Cuisine is located at 881 Wimbish Road.

“We are very close,” Brown said. “That’s my best friend: my mom.”

The restaurant offers Southern comfort food from fried chicken to meatloaf entrees to a variety of sides such as collard and turnip greens, rutabagas, green beans and macaroni and cheese.

“It’s real Southern, down home cooking and everything is made from scratch,” Brown said.

The restaurant is open from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, with plans to expand those hours in the near future upon hiring additional staff, Brown said.

Brown, 41, owns High Achievers Learning Center in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Macon. She’s helped run the day care center, formerly known as the Little People Development Center, with her father, Solomon Williams, since she was 19. She became the sole owner about three years ago.

Living a dream

Williams, 70, retired from the Bibb County school system in 2008. She taught culinary arts at Northeast High School.

“My dream was after I retired as a teacher for 33 years was to have my own restaurant and I prayed and I asked God for it,” she said. “It’s so joyful to ask God to help you achieve a dream you’ve always had.”

Williams started cooking when she was 8. Both her mom and dad worked, and she’d help her dad, who got home first, prepare dinner.

She recalled first learning to make turnip greens and fried chicken. She credited her mother and grandmother for teaching her how to cook.

“The name Aroma Essence, it actually came about because when my mom taught at Northeast High School with culinary arts, her kids actually came up with that name and they actually ran a full-fledged restaurant at one of the adventures inside of the culinary world for them to get their experience of how to work in a restaurant,” Brown said.

“They did meals for teachers and people in the school system … So, when we decided to do this, she wanted to bring it back as homage back to what she originally started when she taught school.”

The student-run restaurant operated out of the vocational building at the high school from 2006 until Williams retired, she said.

The mother and daughter team also have a food truck, Momma’s Gourmet Wings and More.

“We came up with that name because my mom actually is such a good cook,” Brown said.

The food truck, which was launched in 2019, is known for its wings and eight accompanying sauces, especially the “tropical delight” sauce, Brown said.

“She’s really the person that came up with the sauces and things of that nature,” Brown said of her mom.

In addition to public venues, their food truck is available for private events.

A food truck, too

The food truck menu includes a house salad, Caesar salad, chef salad, chicken salad, house salad, fried Tilapia and Whiting fish, and gourmet hot dogs and hamburgers, Williams said.

Last fall, Williams said she saw that the restaurant space that had once housed Lil Benny’s Smokehouse was available, and she and her daughter decided to launch their restaurant there.

“It has has taken us since September up until March to get it in the order the way we wanted it and and to get our program where we wanted to be,” Williams said.

At Aroma Essence Southern Cuisine, customers can expect to find traditional Southern favorites on a rotating basis, Brown said.

For example, the restaurant served up seafood last Friday. Offerings included fried catfish, salmon croquettes, baked salmon fillets and Tilapia with sides like turnip greens, rutabagas, cabbages, baked beans, green beans and coleslaw.

The previous day, the restaurant offered main dishes of barbecue ribs and barbecue chicken. On another day, the restaurant might serve beef patties with onions and gravy, Brown said. The side dishes also may vary from day to day.

Their fried wings from their food truck likely will be available most days at the restaurant, but won’t include the various sauces but will be served up plain, Brown said.

For most of the restaurant’s dessert offerings, they partner with James Havior, who has a home-based business, Havior Cake Factory. He sells his made-from-scratch cakes, pies, cheesecakes and brownies by custom order.

“He has a red velvet cake and a lemon pound cake to die for,” Brown said.

Other desserts served up at the restaurant include banana pudding and pecan pies that Williams makes, Brown said.

Other family members also work at the restaurant, including Brown’s older brother Solomon James Williams, her aunt Bernice Moore and and her uncle Douglas Patterson.

Brown said she’s in the process of building a website for the restaurant. Meanwhile, she’s advertised positions for the restaurant on the Facebook page of their food truck.

At the restaurant, COVID-19 safety measures are practiced, including taking temperatures, requiring face masks when not eating, spacing seating for social distancing and ensuring hand sanitizer is available, Brown noted.

In addition to dine in, take out is offered. The restaurant’s telephone number is 478-474-0055.

“We just want everybody to know that we’re here and to just come out and see us and get them some good food at reasonable prices in a good atmosphere with a family-owned business,” Brown said.

This story was originally published April 22, 2021 at 5:00 AM.