 "Photo: Carol Moore")
At 7 p.m. on Friday, the line of customers nearly touched the door at Fat Mama’s Soul Food and Sandwiches, a 5-month-old restaurant in Oshkosh, next door to Erbert and Gerbert’s on Wisconsin Street, right across the street from the UW-Oshkosh campus.
The following Monday, with the snow melting outside and the dinner rush now a memory, co-owners Devin Burks and Shiequane Johnson revealed the soul behind their restaurant: Fat Mama herself.
“That’s me, that’s my name,” Johnson said, laughing. “That’s been my nickname pretty much since birth.”
Johnson, who isn’t actually fat, embraces her moniker.
“I was fat when I was a baby, and the name just stuck as I got older,” Johnson said. “My mother, everybody calls me that.”
Even Burks, her friend of 13 years and now her fiancée, referred to her by the nickname, which didn’t exclude him from receiving some gentle ribbing in return.
As the couple playfully bantered back and forth, Johnson talked about buying a bicycle to exercise during slow days but laughed when a friend at a nearby table suggested she buy Burks some roller blades.
“He isn’t going to do anything,” Johnson said. “All he does is get fat.”
And that’s Fat Mama’s: comfortable and personable. Even on Friday night, as the dining area swelled with customers, Burks strode from behind the cash register and circulated among the tables, asking everyone how their meal was.
This juggling of roles is necessary, as Fat Mama’s is truly a mom-and-pop operation: Burks and Johnson are the restaurant’s only two paid employees.
“We don’t have ‘employee’ employees, just some people that will come and help us out, just family and friends,” Johnson said.
Johnson is as vigilant about the restaurant’s customer base as her fiancée is, as she recalled every guest from Friday’s rush, table by table, on Monday: the first-time guests, an Oshkosh student who made a return visit, and the regulars.
“Some people say, ‘It’s our first time here, we don’t know the menu, can you give us a minute,’” Johnson said. “And then once they sit down and eat, they’re like, ‘Everything was awesome—believe me, we’ll be back.’”
“They say that a lot—‘We’ll be back,’” she said.
The word of mouth has been mostly positive as Johnson and Burks navigate their business’ crucial early period.
“We don’t hear any bad news,” Johnson said. “Well, we hear some things, like when we first opened, that it took too long for people to get their food. But, you know, we make our food fresh.”
Fat Mama’s recipes are all Johnson’s own creations, or inspired by her mother, and she takes her craft seriously. She makes everything from scratch, including the batter for fried food and the breading she puts on Fat Mama’s catfish.
“Basically, everything is my own seasoning and my own recipes,” she said.
After decades of emulating her mother’s culinary skills as a child in St. Louis and later in Milwaukee, watching numerous cooking shows and working at places like the Golden Corral, she finally achieved her goal when Fat Mama’s opened on Oct. 10, 2009.
“Opening up a restaurant has always been my dream,” she said. “And through a blessing of God, I got it.”
Johnson said finding this location, at this time, was meant to be. She and Burks, who both moved to Oshkosh from Milwaukee four years ago, were walking by the Wisconsin Street storefront when it was up for lease and jumped at the chance to fulfill their dream, failing economy be damned.
And if their customers are any indication, they aren’t failing very often.
For frequent customer and Oshkosh resident Mitchell Nurenberger, Fat Mama’s is exactly what the city needed.
“I like the atmosphere, the food is awesome, and it’s pretty close to home,” Nurenberger said.
As The Temptations’ “My Girl” played in the background, he was eager to demonstrate his loyalty to Fat Mama’s.
“I eat here like every other day,” he said. “Possibly every day.”
Besides the R&B, soul and rap music that typically plays at Fat Mama’s, the restaurant has some distinctive décor, like a rectangular mirror behind Nurenberger’s table that’s tilted 45 degrees to the side. Five dozen one dollar bills were taped to the Plexiglas behind the cash register, each bill with a sublime aphorism written on it in black marker, such as “good food is color blind.”
The dining area’s six tables almost poured into each other, with just enough space for chairs not to hit one another, which was by design.
“You know what, it’s comfortable here,” Johnson said. “People come in here and eat, they listen to some music—I play all kinds of music for the crowd—they’re comfortable here.”
First-time customer Rick Finch, from Neenah, raved about his dinner and Fat Mama’s sauce as Usher’s “Yeah!” pumped out of the speakers.
“I think the restaurant is very unique,” Finch said. “And the prices—$4 for four pieces of chicken? That’s awesome.”
Right behind Finch, four Oshkosh students finished their grilled cheese and pulled pork.
“We were kind of walking past,” Mary Shudy, a freshman, said. “We saw the name and thought it was funny, so we came in, but the food was good.”
13 comments
DRUG DEALERS ARE NOT WELCOME HERE. They are trying to invade our city and make it filthy like milwaukee