TASTE OF THE TREASURE COAST
Down-home cooking was Granny’s Kitchen specialty, including the fried chicken, left, and collard greens with the restaurant’s most popular dish, oxtail stew.
“I asked my mother if she had a recipe for oxtails, and she
said, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you there.’ So, I took our
recipe for beef stew, experimented and used oxtails. It started
outselling everything on the menu,” she says.
The restaurant business was good, and eventually they
closed the grocery store. Charles took over the cooking and
Hassie made the desserts. Their employees were neighborhood
70
kids in the summer, or people they knew who might
need a hand-up.
She made a point of rewarding the neighborhood kids with
free meals if they did well in school.
TIME HAS COME
After decades of serving breakfast and lunch, Hassie says it
is time for the couple to retire. She was diagnosed with breast
cancer two years ago, but has recovered and is doing well.
Their son, Greg, who was set to take over the restaurant, has
health problems that prevent him from continuing the business.
They have plans to travel more and to take their grandchildren
to see where Hassie grew up in Georgia. “We love road
trips,” Hassie says. “I love getting those travel tickets from
the AAA.”
But the mark they left on the community will be long lasting.
If anyone has left a place better than when they arrived,
it is the Russ family.
The sign hanging on Granny’s walls, says it all. “Good
Food. Good Friends. Good Times.”
“Sometimes I find it hard to believe,” she says. “Me, a little
black girl from Brunswick, Georgia, who lived aside the railroad
tracks.”
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