This coming Sunday, April 27th, is the 25^th Mildred Council Community Dinner held each year in Chapel Hill/Carrboro, North Carolina, where I live. The slogan for the event is authentic: “Sit down with a stranger and make a new friend.” Culturally diverse families, dishes, and entertainment come together in a middle school cafeteria for the annual bread breaking. Those who can pay buy tickets, and those who can’t get the same full plate.

Named in honor of the late the Mildred Cotton Council, the celebrated Southern chef best known as “Mama Dip,” this year’s dinner also marks the beginning of a new era, as Council’s granddaughter, Tonya, has just opened a dine-in café adjacent to her bakery on Elliot Road in Chapel Hill.

Here lunch is served Tuesday through Thursday 11 am to 3 pm. Friday includes a dinner service, 11 am to 8 pm. Saturday runs from brunch to dinner, 10 am to 8 pm, and Sunday from 10 am to 4 pm. Every meal reprises her grandmother’s recipes, some with Tonya’s special touch. Her fried chicken, for example, is extra crispy and perfectly browned. Her chicken pot pie (a special on certain days) includes a dab or two of melted cheese for extra flavor. The cole slaw has a little extra kick—maybe horseradish? The legacy chicken and pastries and the BBQ and Brunswick stew are reliable and mandatory. Tonya has also added a flight of cornbread—regular, jalapeno, and sweet potato—and a “chef’s choice” flight of pies on the dessert menu.

For those who mourned the closing of Mama Dip’s sit-down restaurant on Rosemary Street after 48 years in business, take heart. This new café, while smaller, operates efficiently. You place your order and pay up front, take a seat indoors, outdoors, or at the bar, and the iced tea comes fast.

The menu brings all the favorite sides—fried okra, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, lima beans, sweet potato souffle, long-cooked string beans, potato salad, squash casserole, mac and cheese, collards, and fried green tomatoes. And there are a few new handheld items—a chicken salad croissant, a shrimp or catfish po boy, a monte cristo with raspberry preserves and powdered sugar, a chicken fried steak sandwich, and a pimiento cheeseburger topped with sweet onion relish.

An entrée sized wedge or a mixed green salad with blood orange vinaigrette can also be a meal with optional grilled chicken added. And yes, there’s still banana pudding, pecan pie, key lime, a cake of the day, and more. The only thing missing for me, is the bread pudding, which we once praised, and Mama Dip sniffed. “Huh,” she said, “It ain’t nothing but old bread!”

Breakfast fare includes chicken and waffles, biscuits and sausage milk gravy, pancakes with warm maple syrup, divine grits, and seasonal quiche.

Mama Dip--so nicknamed because she was the child with the longest arms, perpetually sent to dip water from a barrel in the yard--was raised on a sharecropper’s farm in the Baldwin Township of Chatham County. There the three main thoroughfares are Tobacco Road, Tar Heel Road, and Persimmon Hill Road. Mama Dip made a terrific persimmon pudding in the fall from a tree outside the old restaurant. She served iced tea in Mason jars, satisfied many a Carolina basketball player’s appetite, and set a record for cookbook sales with her publisher, UNC Press. Now Tonya carries the mantle with pride, along with several other family members and longtime friends who cook and serve beside her.

In the bakery, Tonya’s gluten-free pecan cookies, made to imitate the crunchy top on her grandmother’s pecan pies, were selected for Oprah’s “Favorite Things” list in 2021. They are also available in several new variations in the shop—a perfect gift to take on the road when visiting friends. Tonya has also curated an impressive collection of gift basket items from other vendors, including cabernet jam from my mountain neighbors at Crow Bar Farm Foods of Little Switzerland.

All that said, Donna Campbell’s photos best tell the tale…

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