Momma's Kitchen brings barbecue to downtown Springfield
Photos by Todd Cooper
It's tough reviewing a local business when the review isn't going to be all that glowing. This article, which appeared in Eugene Weekly's spring Chow! guide, required me, with the help of able editirix Molly Templeton, to make a call on just how aggro I wanted to be in discussing this place's culinary offerings. Trust me, this printed version isn't nearly so hardcore in slamming the food as was draft 1. I guess this is a sort of "damning with faint praise" situation. On the bright side, hey, check out the as-usual fine photographic work of Todd Cooper!
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Entering Momma’s Kitchen, one of the first things to catch my eye is a gleaming white host station, styled a bit like a church pulpit. The walls are a matching pure white, adorned with a framed print depicting an energetic African-American church service. Contemporary gospel music blares from a boom box by the kitchen.
With a restaurant that seems to be so much about the churchgoing experience, it’s amazing that Aline “Momma” Austin and Marian Austin, the mother-daughter team behind the Eugene-Springfield area’s newest Southern-style eatery, once served food in a nightclub. Aline Austin used to prepare and sell soul food at the Taboo club, now The Blueprint. “She couldn’t do the nightlife,” Marian says of her mother. “Her friends couldn’t even come there at all. She’s a churchgoing woman.”
The personable, gray-haired Aline does seem an unlikely candidate for slinging hash in a late-night hotspot. Originally from Alabama, Aline married a man from Texas, creating an impeccable pedigree for her barbecue. She imported her cooking chops, and her family, to Safford, Ariz., a small city just two hours to the northeast of Tucson. That’s where Aline raised Marian, along with her five sisters and three brothers.
“We lived in a little community where all the African-American people
lived,” a place called Little Hollywood, Marian says. “That was all we
grew up with: Southern dishes, Southern food. We didn’t know it was a
delicacy” until they moved to Oregon in 1985, following Marian’s eldest
sister.
Here in the Willamette Valley, Marian decorated cakes for a living, while her mother worked as a care provider for senior citizens. Aline noted that some of her elderly charges lost their appetites as they aged, but “When she cooked, they ate,” reports Marian.
The nightclub location followed, but the opening of the current Momma’s Kitchen in June of last year, in a space formerly occupied by a St. Vincent de Paul at the corner of Main and 5th in Springfield, feels truer to Aline Austin’s roots and clientele.
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