As is the custom in many families, cooking was a skill passed from generation to generation for Nancy Adams, owner and chief cook at Southern Star. For Adams, those are treasured memories.
“I remember my grandfather cooking Brunswick stew over an open fire in a cast-iron washpot,” she says. “He put pork and chicken in his, and some family members say he sometimes added squirrel. Yikes!”
Adams and her husband, Rick, moved to Chattanooga in 2000 and opened Southern Star in a small, shotgun-style eatery on Market Street across from the Chattanooga Choo Choo. The restaurant became so popular, they had to move to a bigger space down the street. They stayed there for seven years before moving Southern Star to Signal Mountain, offering prepared meals for takeout only. In 2008, the couple opened a second location on Broad Street at the corner of West 13th Street, offering both in-house dining and takeout. During the bleaker days of the pandemic, they reverted solely to takeout, but now they’re back to offering in-house dining between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Friday and takeout from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“We were uniquely situated to handle the challenges of the last year and a half, because we had been doing the take-away thing for a while,” Adams says, referring to the struggles many restaurant owners faced due to COVID-19. “We never closed our doors in either place – Signal Mountain or downtown.”
Here, Adams tells of her childhood growing up with great cooks who taught her the tricks to great Southern cooking, a specialty at Southern Star.