Big Mama's spring is slap-your-face good
Thursday, April 03, 2008
By Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
J. Monroe Butler II/Post-Gazette
Brenda "Big Mama" Franklin preaches the gospel in Big Mama's House of Soul.
Big Mama is having one blessed spring.
"Mama" is what customers call Brenda Franklin at her Big Mama's House of Soul soul food eatery on Penn Avenue in the Strip.
"Baby" is what she likely calls them back.
As in, "Hi Baby! You waited on? What you need, Precious?"
This week, more hungry Babies than usual squeezed into the front of this take-out only storefront, the exterior of which glows Steelers gold even through the black smoke that pours off the outdoor grill.
In early March, the CBS Early Show chose this tiny joint to give a business makeover as part of its "Early on the Case: Small Business, Big Rescue" series.
Big Mama's House of Soul
Big Mama's House of Soul, at 1603 Penn Ave., is open noon to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday; on Friday and Saturdays, it's also open from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. The phone is 412-471-2910; on the Web, www.bigmamashouseofsoul.com.
Contributions to the Brenda Franklin Fund (checks made out to "The Pittsburgh Foundation" or "The Pittsburgh Foundation -- Franklin Fund") should be sent to:
The Pittsburgh Foundation5 PPG Place, Suite 250Pittsburgh, Pa. 15222
Credit card gifts may be made by going to www.pittsburghfoundation.org.
The TV show had learned about her from a story in the New Pittsburgh Courier. The show not only came to Pittsburgh, it also took Mama to New York City, where she spent March 26 through Saturday. Episodes about her and her restaurant aired on each of those mornings and were posted on CBSnews.com. They show how executives from Ruth's Chris Steak House chain, including Vice President Culinary Jim Cannon, helped her with procedures such as calculating costs and coming up with standardized recipes, since she cooks everything from her head -- and her heart.
It didn't take the restaurateurs long to recognize that, as the CBS producer and crew had.
Regulars know how "the Reverend" Franklin -- she's a minister in addition to a jazz-turned-gospel singer -- breaks out into song in her place.
On her New York trip, while being dined at Harlem's famed Amy Ruth's soul food restaurant, Ms. Franklin heard the opening note and couldn't resist belting out "I'll Take You There," which had other patrons singing along and asking for her autograph.
"Then she had a receiving line!" marvels Lanette Jarvis, Ruth's Chris' public relations director, who'd been charmed by Ms. Franklin within minutes of meeting her the week before the "Early Show" series ran.
Thanks to the restaurant chain, Ms. Franklin is only getting more famous -- and more efficient. Ruth's Chris already gave her a new commercial mixer and other kitchen gear. Later this month, the company is flying her and her son, Vamar, one of the family members who works with her, on an all-expenses-paid, 10-day trip to New Orleans, where the chain is opening a new restaurant. The Franklins will get some more training at the new restaurant and do more meet and greets ("Brad Pitt is supposed to be there!"). But the big news, Ms. Franklin says, is, a plant there is going to make and bottle her "Big Mama's Steel City Soppin' Sauce," the first in a line of foods she plans to distribute to supermarkets.
Even bigger: While the restaurant is closed when the Franklins are away, Ruth's Chris is covering her expenses and, via its kitchen design company, remodeling the place, which she hopes to eventually expand into the space next door (or somewhere else) as a sit-down restaurant, even a restaurant-jazz club.
That's her dream, as she told "Early Show" co-anchor Harry Smith, explaining, "That's my vision. Every color, every creed. I want everybody to be able to come in and enjoy what it's really all about. It's all about the music and then the food. Because that's what it originated from."
The show had another surprise for her on Saturday's episode: Tim Adams, principal timpanist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, showed up and announced the starting of a charitable fund to honor her wish to give back to her community by helping students get musical instruments.
The fund, run by the Pittsburgh Foundation, will be overseen by a committee that will include Ms. Franklin. Once it reaches $10,000, money can be given to area schools to buy instruments.
Ruth's Chris got it rolling. The remaining seed money will come from the auction of a Steelers-autographed rocking chair that sits in the front of Big Mama's, which is decorated with autographed photos of Steelers including Hines Ward, who loves her food. She's also hung up the autographed photo of the PSO that Mr. Adams gave her.
"God is sooo good," Ms. Franklin was saying as she bustled around the tiny kitchen Monday morning, struggling with her son and cook George Dillard to keep up with customers who were eating them out of collard greens (her specialty), corn bread (she makes a seafood corn bread stuffing too) and cobbler (peach or cherry or apple caramel).
"Ridiculous!" Vamar Franklin said as he rushed from the stove to the steam table. "We went from 20 slabs of ribs to 100 overnight!"
The food wasn't coming out fast, which is the only criticism you hear about the place, but that's what the Ruth's Chris makeover means to fix.
Meanwhile, his Mom was "too blessed to be stressed," as she told a customer.
"Oh, this mac and cheese is absolutely pretty!" she sang. "Now this is slap-your-face mac and cheese. ... That macaroni will make you hurt somebody!"
The customers, most of them regulars, and many feeling at home enough to try out the Steelers rocker, ate it all up.
They're used to Mama telling them to speak up -- even telling them to answer the phone for her if she's busy. She'll tell you if you're ordering too many starches for one meal, and folks she thinks are eating too much pork, she cuts off.
"One guy had the ambulance stop to get a half slab of ribs for him -- on the way to the hospital," she says with a smile.
Get her going on a topic such as drugs or violence, and she shifts into the cadence of a preacher. "We've got to get back into these kids' business!"
That's why she seems so thrilled about her music fund, which she hopes will grow into a way to reopen closed schools and teach music and culinary arts to lift up young people.
On possibly the worst day ever to ask her about her life story, she steps out of the kitchen onto the street, where she's met with honks and waves from passing cars. Neighborhood firefighters hit the air horn and wave, too.
"This is all day, child," she says. "I'm gonna have to get an automatic arm."
She tells how she grew up in Garfield and attended Schenley and Peabody high schools.
It was her Alabama-born grandmother who taught her to read and write -- as part of teaching her to cook. "She told me I had to learn to cook because I was so greedy" about eating her grandma's cooking.
She says her interpretation of those family recipes isn't Southern, but true soul food: "Your heart, your mind, your soul -- everything you have goes into that food!"
Ms. Franklin starting singing in Pittsburgh jazz clubs when she was so young that she needed a chaperone to get in, but 22 years ago, she was saved and gave up that life for Jesus, she says. She's been drug- and alcohol-free as well as celibate since.
In the early 1990s, she says, she left town and went to Maryland. She sold cars for a while and when she lost that job, sold her homemade food to the car salespeople.
When she worked on a construction site, as an elevator operator and "prayer counselor," she also sold food to the other workers. She kept doing that even after she lost her car and traveled by bus. She got knocked so low she was surviving on supermarket food samples.
Life, and the Lord, took her to North Carolina, where she cleaned houses before managing to open her own small eatery. But she soon closed it, called to come back to Pittsburgh, where in April 2007 she opened Big Mama's House of Soul.
She couldn't get a bank to help her, not even her own, but help came from many quarters, including a friend who loaned her some money and a contractor who agreed to put a kitchen in.
Among the customers who could hardly wait for her to open was Howdy Emery, founder but no longer owner of Emery Tree Service of Pa. Even before tasting hers, the soul food fan, who peeked through her eatery's newspaper-covered windows, asked her to cater "a party for a friend of mine named Bill."
As in, then-retiring Steelers coach Bill Cowher. His photo hangs in the restaurant, too. He's hugging Mama.
"And the rest is history," she says.
Mr. Emery wound up giving her the big black custom commercial grill, too, to replace the puny one from Wal-Mart that she started with, plus picnic tables and more.
"Don't tell me what God can't do," says Ms. Franklin, who's enjoying all these blessings, but she's not losing her bearings. "I been in the storm for 22 years," she says, invoking the parable of "The Little Red Hen" to say she isn't going to be stupid.
"I think what's getting ready to happen is going to snowball," she says with a grin, before pantomiming a parade march.
But for now, she's got to march inside and make more collards, corn bread and cobbler.
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