Flashback Friday: Wichita loved this Old Town soul food restaurant in the late 1990s

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature that will appear every Friday on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants they once loved but now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.

This week’s featured restaurant, Mama Love’s Kitchen, opened in Old Town 23 years ago.

Music fans in Wichita are quite familiar with the late Rudy Love and his son, Rudy Love Jr., who performs all over town.

But people who lived in Wichita in the late 1990s also remember Rudy Love’s mama — Ahnawake “Mama” Love — the family matriarch who, for a brief period, shared her soul food cooking skills with a grateful Wichita.

Mama Love’s Kitchen opened in Old Town at 242 N. Mosley, where Egg Cetera is now, in 1998. It had six booths and 12 tables, and it was usually filled to capacity, especially during lunch.

The restaurant didn’t have a menu — just a chalkboard listing specials prepared from recipes Love had been using for years at her own Sunday dinners.

The walls were decorated with items that represented the Love family legacy: a North High basketball jersey adorned with the No. 22, which was worn by five different Love men. Family photos also were hung on the walls, as were albums recorded by Rudy Love Sr. R&B, soul, blues and gospel music would fill the room as people found seats at tables covered with red-and-white checkered table coverings.

Diners could order things like Salisbury steak, catfish, barbecued brisket, fried chicken, collard greens, black eyed peas, buttery skin-on mashed potatoes and baked mac and cheese. The sweet cornbread, which was more like cake, was a must-have. Family members would insist to customers that real love was mixed into all the restaurant’s dishes.

Mama Love’s Kitchen was often staffed by its namesake’s brood of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren: In 1998, she had 15 children, 40 grandchildren and nearly 20 great-grandchildren. Ahnawake would travel throughout the dining room, chatting with and charming her customers.

No matter how full they were at the end of their meals, people knew they needed to order one of Mama Love’s homemade desserts, which included sweet potato pie, apple cobbler and Sock-it-to-Me cake.

But Mama Love’s lasted for only three years. closing in 2001. Mama Love died in September of 2011.