when you want, where you want.
Her Soul-Food Restaurant Opened 11 Years Ago. The Lines Arrived This Summer.
Photo: Katie O
When Katie Owes opened her Brooklyn soul-food restaurant in 2014, “Tik Tok” was still just a Kesha song and her customers consisted mostly of family and church members. Eleven years later, the food at Katie O’s (yes, it’s a play on her name) remains unchanged, based on the recipes Owes’s grandma Peaches learned to cook in North Carolina before she moved to New York with her husband in their late teens. Owes was always the sous-chef in her grandparents’ kitchen, helping cook for a revolving door of visitors. What is now Katie O’s menu was her family’s Sunday dinner: crunchy fried chicken, shrimp, fish with homemade tartar sauce, pork chops, smothered turkey wings with sides like garlic whipped potatoes ladled with gravy and collard greens flecked with smoked turkey. Owes’s restaurant was something of a hidden gem for over a decade until TikTok user Brandon Hayes — whose handle is @cheatdayking — posted a video about Katie O’s for his 42,000 followers (he’d noticed the storefront while he was on his way to a different dinner), which was followed by a cluster of videos this summer that prompted a flood of new visitors — plus the block-long line that has become a fixture on weekends.
The new popularity has required some adjustments. Just before service this past Sunday, Owes moved up and down the long kitchen space, checking in with a new hire who was portioning strawberries-and-cream pudding at the front and a tenured cook in the back stirring the massive stockpots until she reached another cook cracking eggs into separate hotel pans to coat different meats already marinated with Peaches’s red-hued, paprika-heavy spice blend. Owes’s mother, Sabrina, put a finishing sprinkle of dried parsley on portions of potato salad. Hav & Mar’s former executive chef Airis Johnson was also helping that day, scooping syrupy yams.
The fried chicken is Katie O’s most popular order, but turkey wings are Owes’s personal favorite. (They are the No. 2 best seller.) To make them, she buys the wings from a butcher whose six-inch flats contain about a chicken thigh’s worth of meat each. That way, a $25 platter of two with two sides — spicy cornbread dressing and very cheesy macaroni among them — never looks paltry. After any errant feathers are removed, the wings dry brine in the house blend for a day or two before they’re covered in a layer of butter and braised for a few hours. From there, the juices are separated and thickened into gravy while the wings go back in the oven, uncovered, to brown before smothering in their sauce.
All of the other entrées are fried to order, with batches of chicken in constant rotation, plucked from the tray to fill orders as quickly as they can, still sizzling. “We go through ten pans of mac and cheese a day, ten pans of turkey wings,” says Owes, who explains that the restaurant’s output, and her ability to control the still-growing line, is limited by its size.
Just before the posted 2 p.m. opening time this weekend, the shortening was still in the process of turning clear — later than usual since the previous day’s crowds had kept them open long into the night. “I left at one,” a fry cook told me while others stayed behind to keep cleaning, causing the unavoidable delays that bled into this day’s opening. A different chef comes in at 5 a.m. to begin each day’s prep, while Owes arrives a few hours later to stay until after the last customer is fed. She’s been doing this on and off for all 11 years the restaurant has been open, but with this spike of unexpected pressure, she’s needed to find new ways to help the kitchen keep up.
“Imagine cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 300 people every day,” Owes says. Her role now extends to line management; when she finally opens the door, there’s already a crowd of 45 people and counting, most of whom have discovered her recently on social media.
“My family’s from the South,” said one of the two women at the front of the line, who had come from Bed-Stuy 30 minutes before opening to try Katie O’s for the first time, and her Brooklyn soul-food experiences had been lacking. She began to express some doubts about the wait at this operation just before Owes walked up with a container of strawberries-and-cream pudding, a handful of plastic spoons, and a mellifluous “I got you” — enough to restore her faith.
Photo: Tammie Teclemariam
Katie O’s only sells takeout food from Friday to Sunday; the rest of the week is reserved for catering orders and charity. Since the opening, Owes has prepared and distributed the exact same restaurant food as free meals through her church. (Owes formalized her nonprofit, Soul Food to the People, in 2021, after converting her restaurant to a community kitchen during the pandemic.)
Now, Owes’s vision for the future involves a bigger Katie O’s in addition to a dedicated community kitchen “where people who need food come in, get a menu, sit down and order, and I get them for free,” she says. “A lot of people I talk to, they don’t eat out. They’re in a shelter, they’re homeless. They are the forgotten community, so I want them to come in.” More immediately, she’s raising $100,000 for the upcoming holiday season, which will pay for her second year of supplying 1,000 Thanksgiving meals and 1,000 pantries.
Owes never intended to open a restaurant that made people give up entire afternoons in order to enjoy the food, but as long as the crowds keep coming, she’s going to open her doors and feed everyone she can.
Five hours after opening, the line was just as long as it had been all day, only with a new set of people who had committed to the afternoon with folding chairs and conversations. A man from New Jersey who’d gotten there at 3:30 was chatting with some people from Queens. They seemed to be having a great time. “You in line for four hours,” he said. “You better make friends.”
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