March 29, 2024

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The Food community

The inspiring story behind this beloved Auburn restaurant

10 min read

An autographed T-shirt hangs in a frame behind the counter at Pannie-George’s Kitchen, a beloved, family-owned soul food restaurant just a few miles from the Auburn University campus.

Prominent among the signatures on the orange-and-blue Pannie-George’s shirt are those of Bo Jackson, the Heisman Trophy-winning Auburn running back, and Pat Dye, the legendary AU football coach.

“Damn, It’s Good!” Jackson wrote.

“Sho’ is!” Dye added.

In Auburn, you can’t get a much better endorsement than that.

Pannie-George’s has been a favorite of AU athletes, students, alumni and anybody and everybody else who appreciates a good, home-cooked meal since the restaurant opened on South College Street in 2005.

“It’s right down the street from the college, and it’s right off the interstate,” says Kia Tyndale, who runs the family business with her mother, Lorine Askew, and her two older sisters, Mary Key and Jerelene Askew. “It’s perfect.

“We liked the set-up because we knew we wanted to do cafeteria-style (service) and not waiters and waitresses,” Kia adds. “We wanted to keep it kind of homey and Southern, like when you go to your parents’ house.”

Pannie-George’s Kitchen became so popular, in fact, that the Askew family opened a second location in downtown Montgomery in January 2020.

Kia and her mother, Lorine, run the original Auburn location, and Mary and Jerelene manage the one in Montgomery. (Another sister, Rewa Echols, who started at the restaurant when it opened, retired last year.)

They all do a little bit of everything, though.

“Everybody just pitches in because we’re family,” Kia says. “Wherever you see the team lacking, you just jump in and do whatever you have to do.”

Pannie-George's Kitchen in Auburn

The steam table at Pannie-George’s Kitchen in Auburn, Ala., features a selection of fresh vegetables.(Bob Carlton/[email protected])

‘Why don’t y’all just open up a restaurant?’

And to think, the only reason Lorine Askew and her daughters got into the food business in the first place was to raise some extra money for a family reunion trip to Ohio about 20 years ago.

Working out of Mary’s kitchen in her home in Opelika, they started preparing and delivering home-cooked meats and vegetables to some of the employees at the East Alabama Medical Center where Mary, a registered nurse, worked, and it quickly grew from there.

“We would all get off our jobs, and we would go to her house and prepare the meals,” Lorine remembers. “When she got off work, we would deliver the meals.

“Our clientele started to build,” she adds. “We sold to different plants – Briggs & Stratton would be one of them — to the hospitals because Mary worked at the hospital, to some of the funeral homes, some of the business offices, some of the doctors’ offices.”

The family made enough money to pay for their trip, but when they got back, their customers wanted more.

“The family reunion was over, and people started inquiring, ‘When are y’all doing those plate sales again?’” Mary, Lorine’s oldest daughter, recalls. “So, we decided to go ahead and start back doing that.

“Then, one of our customers asked us one night, ‘Why don’t y’all just open up a restaurant?’ And we were like, ‘Well, why not?’ It wasn’t something that we sought out to do. It just happened.”

They attended a small-business seminar at Auburn University, where Mary and Jerelene had both graduated – Mary with her nursing degree and Jerelene with a degree in political science.

“We did research and read books, anything that we needed, and we used that to start the business,” Mary says. “And from there, you pretty much have to learn everything hands-on.”

They found an ideal location in The Village at Parkerson Mill shopping center on South College Street and opened the doors to Pannie-George’s Kitchen on July 1, 2005.

Pannie-George's Kitchen in Auburn

Lorine Askew, left, and her daughter Kia Tyndale run the original Pannie-George’s Kitchen in Auburn, Ala. Lorine’s daughters and Kia’s sisters Mary Key and Jerelene Askew operate a second Pannie-George’s location in Montgomery.(Bob Carlton/[email protected])

‘The backbone of our family’

They named their restaurant in honor of Lorine’s parents and her daughters’ grandparents, George and Mary “Pannie” Taylor, whose home in rural Camp Hill in Tallapoosa County was the scene of many family gatherings, almost all of which revolved around food.

“We would have these huge cookouts at George and Pannie’s house and we would invite the community to come in,” Mary remembers. “We were a small community from Camp Hill, so everybody knew each other, and we were all family.

“So, that’s where we come from and that’s pretty much how we are today,” she adds. “That is the background and the essence and the backbone of our family.”

While their parents worked the night shift at the cotton mill, the girls would go to stay with their grandmother, Miss Pannie.

“Miss Pannie was literally our second mom because she raised us,” Mary says. “Every single night, she would have dinner for us. She would be making those fried okra patties and homemade biscuits and fried fish. That was how we ate every night in the country. . . Miss Pannie was the matriarch of all of us.”

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George Taylor, who also worked as a carpenter and managed the family farm, was much-loved by his community and his church, his granddaughter Kia says.

“He did a lot of construction work, and even though I was a girl, I would follow him, and I would try to do those things with him,” Kia recalls. “If he had a job, my mom would let me go (with him).

“Everybody was very, very close to my grandad,” she adds. “My granddad was loved by a lot of people. He was a good man. He was a real good person.”

George Taylor died in 2001, but his wife, Pannie, still lives in Camp Hill and occasionally makes some of the desserts they serve at Pannie-George’s Kitchen.

“She still cooks some things that are here, like sweet potato pie (and) banana pudding,” Kia says. “People will come just for those things because they know that Miss Pannie made them.”

Pannie-George's Kitchen in Auburn

Auburn University football legends — including Heisman Trophy winner Bo Jackson and former head coach Pat Dye — autographed this Pannie-George’s Kitchen T-shirt, which hangs on the wall of the restaurant. “Damn, It’s Good!” Jackson wrote. “Sho’ is!” Dye added.(Bob Carlton/[email protected])

‘Bo loves the chicken’

Over the years, Pannie-George’s Kitchen has kept the Auburn University football team well-fed, occasionally catering after-practice meals for the players.

They don’t go hungry, Lorine Askew says.

“They love the Kool-Aid,” she says. “They love the mac and cheese. They love the banana pudding. They sho’ love the fried chicken, (although) some of them have gone to baked chicken now because they are trying to maintain their weight.’’

Before he died last year, retired Auburn coaching legend Pat Dye was a regular at Pannie-George’s, and Bo Jackson and Cam Newton, the past two AU Heisman winners, drop by on occasion.

“Bo loves the chicken,” Lorine says. “He always gets chicken to take home to his wife. He says I’m his ‘other mother.’

“And Cam, when he’s back in town, he comes back by here,” she adds. “When you’ve been here for a long time and you’ve fed that football team and you’ve got a rapport with the players, they’ll come back from time to time.”

Almost all of the Auburn sports teams love Pannie-George’s, in fact.

Signed posters from the AU women’s volleyball, women’s soccer, women’s basketball and swimming and diving teams, among others – as well as the cheerleaders, majorettes and marching band – cover one of the walls of the restaurant.

“We do a lot of catering for Auburn University,” Kia says.

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College football analyst and former Penn State quarterback Todd Blackledge is a big fan, too.

Blackledge discovered Pannie-George’s Kitchen back when he was filming his “Todd’s Taste of the Town” segments for ESPN’s college football broadcasts. He subsequently featured the restaurant in his 2013 “Taste of the Town” guidebook to the best places to eat in college football towns.

“Pannie-George’s was another place that we stumbled on,” Blackledge said in an interview with AL.com at the time. “It was relatively new (then), and I hadn’t heard about it. . . .

“Those kinds of places, where you order your meat and get all of the homemade side dishes, those places are right in my wheelhouse. And when I got out there, I met some of the nicest ladies that I’ve met in five years of doing ‘Taste of the Town.’”

Blackledge no longer does “Todd’s Taste of the Town,” but he still visits Pannie-George’s for some fried chicken and mac and cheese, Lorine says.

“Todd comes here a lot of times — every time he’s in or around this area,” she says.

Pannie-George's Kitchen in Auburn

Kia Tyndale fills a to-go order at Pannie-George’s Kitchen in Auburn, Ala. Tyndale started working at the restaurant as a teenager when her mother and sisters opened it in 2005.(Bob Carlton/[email protected])

‘You’re that dude I saw on “60 Minutes”’

A few years ago, Jerelene Askew, the more outgoing of the siblings, struck up a conversation with another one of their customers who stopped in to eat whenever he passed through Auburn.

She was pretty sure she had seen him on television.

“I’m a talker, and I just started talking to him,” Jerelene recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, you’re that dude I saw on “60 Minutes.” Aren’t you a lawyer?’ . . . He said, ‘Yes, I’m a lawyer, and I’m that guy from “60 Minutes.”’ And we just started a conversation from there.”

“That dude” was social justice activist Bryan Stevenson, who had been on “60 Minutes” to talk about the wrongful conviction of Anthony Ray Hinton, who served nearly 30 years on Alabama’s Death Row before, with Stevenson’s persistent legal help, he was exonerated and released.

“I talked, and he talked, and we formed a relationship,” Jerelene continues the story. “I always tell people that it happened over some chicken. That’s the best way to do it. We had fried chicken that day, of course.”

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Stevenson kept coming back to Pannie-George’s Kitchen, and he and Jerelene continued to talk.

Then, before he opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery in April 2018, Stevenson asked Jerelene if her family had ever thought about opening a second Pannie-George’s in Montgomery.

“I was like, ‘No, but I tell you what: You pray, I’ll pray, and let’s see what God has planned,’” Jerelene remembers.

Those prayers were answered, and, on Jan. 17, 2020, the family opened their Montgomery location in the EJI Legacy Pavilion across from Montgomery Riverwalk Stadium.

“It was not a leap,” Lorine, Jerelene’s mother, says of their decision to open a second location. “It was an invitation. (We) prayed about it, doors came open, and that’s where we are.”

Pannie-George's Kitchen in Auburn

This to-go box from Pannie-George’s Kitchen in Auburn, Ala., includes country-fried steak and gravy with green beans, black-eyed pea and a cornbread muffin.(Bob Carlton/[email protected])

‘Thank God for our customers’

About two months after the new restaurant opened, though, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and both the Auburn and Montgomery restaurants had to close their dining rooms and shift to curbside-only service.

Many of their regular Auburn customers drove an hour each way to help the new Montgomery location weather the pandemic, Jerelene says.

“We thank God for our customers because our customers in Auburn have been loyal to us from day one,” she says. “Some of them were driving from Auburn to Montgomery to keep supporting both restaurants.

“And see, that right there, to me, is loyalty,” she adds. “And I thank God for them every day because they kept us afloat in Montgomery.”

The dining room in Montgomery reopened to limited seating in early June 2020 and just recently started seating guests at full capacity. The Auburn location, which has been offering carry-out service only since the pandemic began, is expected to reopen its dining room sometime after the Fourth of July holiday.

Early into the pandemic, Pannie-George’s Kitchen also launched its Pannie-George’s Leadership Academy, whose mission is to identify and train high-school students to become future leaders, whether they are planning to work in the restaurant business or want to pursue some other career.

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Among other requirements, students in the program must maintain a 2.75 GPA, need to submit three letters of recommendation, and have to write an essay about why the Leadership Academy would benefit them, Jerelene says.

The students work in the restaurant after school and on weekends, and they learn to do everything from prepping and cooking the food to greeting and taking care of the customers to sweeping and cleaning the restaurant, she says.

“They know how to do some of everything,” Jerelene says. “Everything there is to know about the restaurant business, we pretty much teach them. I’ve got some young people who can put some grown folks to shame because they have been with us so long, and we have groomed them and trained them. So, they know how to do it.”

It is yet another example of a door opening when the Pannie-George’s Kitchen family least expected it.

As Mary Key says: “A lot of things have fallen in our lap that we didn’t set out to do.”

Pannie-George’s Kitchen is at 2328 South College St. in Auburn, Ala., and at 450 North Court St. in Montgomery, Ala. For hours, menus and more information, go here.

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