Katie O Soul Food

How Katie O’s Suddenly Exploded on TikTok

"When Katie Owes opened her Brooklyn soul-food restaurant in 2014, “Tik Tok” was still just a Kesha song and her customers were mostly family and church members; eleven years later, the menu she cooked as her grandparents’ sous-chef—based on her grandma Peaches’s North Carolina recipes—remains unchanged. I watched a kitchen in constant motion producing crunchy fried chicken (the most popular order), shrimp, fish with homemade tartar sauce, pork chops, smothered turkey wings and sides like garlic whipped potatoes ladled with gravy, collard greens flecked with smoked turkey, spicy cornbread dressing and very cheesy macaroni; strawberries-and-cream pudding and syrupy yams were being portioned that day as well. Owes’s favorite dish is the turkey wings (the No. 2 best seller), which are bought from a butcher as six-inch flats, dry-brined in the house paprika-heavy, red-hued blend for a day or two, layered in butter and braised for hours, then returned to the oven to brown before their juices are thickened into gravy and the wings are smothered in sauce—a process she described in detail. All other entrées are fried to order with batches of chicken in constant rotation, and Owes said they go through “ten pans of mac and cheese a day, ten pans of turkey wings,” a pace limited by the restaurant’s small size and long lines that followed a cluster of TikTok videos (notably one by @cheatdayking). The operation runs takeout Friday through Sunday (the rest of the week is reserved for catering and charity), and Owes formalized her nonprofit, Soul Food to the People, in 2021; she now envisions a bigger Katie O’s plus a dedicated community kitchen where people in need can sit down and order for free, and she’s raising $100,000 to fund Thanksgiving meals and pantries. With staff starting prep as early as 5 a.m., family members and occasional guest chefs help steady service—Sabrina, Owes’s mother, sprinkled dried parsley on potato salad while a new hire portioned pudding and a former executive chef scooped yams—and despite the block-long weekend lines and the feeling of having to “cook Thanksgiving dinner for 300 people every day,” Owes stays until after the last customer is fed, managing the line and doing whatever it takes to keep feeding everyone she can." - Tammie Teclemariam