So often the way we cook, our tastes and our relationship with food as a whole, are shaped by the mother figures in our lives. Most people inevitably have at least one dish that falls flat for its inability to be “the way my mom makes it.”

Whether biological mothers or not, our world’s maternal figures frequently carry a legacy of food that speaks not only to flavor and technique, but to history and philosophy. In honor of Mother’s Day, we spoke to several prominent members of the Richmond food scene to ask them about the mother figures in their lives who had an indelible impact on them.

Leah Branch on her grandmother, Peggy, aka “Sug”

Leah Branch, the executive chef at The Roosevelt, remembers her grandmother Peggy—despite her nickname being “Sug”—as “a pretty spicy lady.”

She was a consistent presence in Branch’s childhood, with her home in Chesterfield often being the place where Branch, her sister, and her cousins would go after school. Throughout these visits, as well as on Sundays and during the holidays, food was omnipresent, not only on plates, but integrated into the surroundings.

“[In her backyard] she had fruit trees and nut trees; she was an avid gardener,” says Branch, recalling memories of cleaning dozens of walnuts that fell from her grandmother’s tree. “I think that came from the fact that when she was growing up, that’s just what you had to do to supplement your food … she was out there in the yard up until her 90s.”

Cooking was more interwoven into the fabric of Sug’s life than a pastime, says Branch. The subsequent generation of women in her family, in reaction to what served as an obligation, didn’t put an emphasis on teaching the younger generation these food traditions. Instead they focused more on ensuring their children were equipped to go beyond the domestic world. However, Branch says that attitude has changed with time, alongside her path of making cooking into a career and an art.

Branch had an interesting conversation about this with her mom recently.

“She was sort of saying we didn’t preserve a lot of those recipes or try to master them from our mothers because they seemed like they were chained to the stove, and she didn’t feel like she wanted us to be chained to the stove,” she says. “I think that’s one of her regrets now… and I think it makes her happy to know that there are people who really want to honor that tradition and that history now.”

Today, Sug’s legacy is incorporated into Branch’s own menus through her most coveted dish: her potato rolls.

“I always asked about [the recipe] and she showed me a few times, but it was really just about throwing this visual amount in, using this sifter that I like to use,” she says. “During the spring and summer at The Roosevelt, we’ll serve my version of her potato rolls. They’re never going to be as good, and I’ve just had to accept that. We serve them with a crawfish salad; it’s one of my favorite things we have on the menu.”

Manny Méndez on his grandmother, Blanca, and mother, Judith

Manny Méndez, founder of Kuba Kuba and part owner of restaurants Little Nickel and Galley, remembers the exact date his family moved from Cuba to Richmond, Va., a transition sparked, in part, by his mother Judith being accused of working as a CIA agent while employed at the American Telephone Company.

“We left Cuba on August 2, 1968; we landed in Virginia at Richmond International Airport on August 3, 1968,” he says. “And we’ve been in Richmond ever since.”

Along with Judith, Méndez arrived with his grandmother, Blanca. The two women had different philosophies on womanhood: Blanca leaned into traditional homemaking, while Judith was eager to pursue a career.

Despite their differences, both found connection through food, though in opposite ways. Blanca was the cook, improvising in the kitchen and coming up with unconventional but tasty combinations like grapefruit and cheese. Judith, a career accountant with a love of precision, gravitated toward baking. She’s now well known as the creator of Kuba Kuba’s iconic tres leches cake, served at the restaurant since it opened in 1998.

“My mom is definitely a baker—a chemist,” Méndez says. “My grandmother just made delicious food. Her philosophy was, ‘You have to have a lot, and it has to be delicious.’”

For many families who have relocated to new countries, food provides comfort and consistency within new surroundings. Richmond in the late ’60s was far removed from Cuba, both culturally and in the culinary realm. Former staple ingredients like avocados and plantains were hard to come by.

Still, the women in Méndez’s family focused on maintaining traditional recipes with the ingredients they could find, and occasionally getting access to prized ingredients during trips to Washington, D.C. Blanca, in particular, showed how strong technique could elevate even the simplest ingredients.

“It was also about the instruments she used. My grandmother used a pressure cooker for everything,” he says, noting that the sound still takes him back to childhood. “That sweet sound is part of the deliciousness.”

The Méndez family kitchen was always cross-cultural, and many of its flavors are present in Kuba Kuba’s menu. In addition to staples like Cuban arroz con pollo, they also ate Spanish tortillas and paella—introduced thanks to his father’s Spanish roots—as well as pernil, a slow-roasted, marinated pork dish pulled from his mother’s Puerto Rican heritage.

Méndez recalls oil being reused from meal to meal, with the scent of the last dish always lingering in the air. Through it all, Judith was always baking, gifting cookies and cakes to friends, family and fellow members of her church long before she made a sale. It’s something she still does to this day.

“She just made cookies for my friend’s mom, who’s coming in from out of town,” he says. “Today she made a coconut cake, and I don’t even know where that’s going. Probably to a priest. Jesus gets a lot.”

Brittanny Anderson on her great-grandmother, Dora

Brittanny Anderson, chef and owner of restaurants Metzger Bar & Butchery, Brenner Pass, Black Lodge and Pink Room says her great-grandmother Dora didn’t just make magic in the kitchen. She also impressed through captivating tales about her life.

“She had a crazy oral tradition of stories,” Anderson recalls. “Like her having a near-death experience when she was 12 years old, getting her tonsils taken out on a table in Roanoke, [or] getting struck by lightning through a window when she was in her early 20s. She’s just one of those people who everything seemed to happen to.”

For decades, Dora owned a gas station that included a deli counter where she’d sell small snacks and sandwiches to travelers. She maintained the business through challenging times, keeping it up and running through the Great Depression. Anderson says that her cooking, which had a major presence at all of her family’s celebrations, was informed by the practice of transforming limited resources into something special.

“I think a lot of people in the rural South struggled a lot,” she says. “I don’t think they would think they were poor, but it definitely wasn’t easy to get the things that they needed. They really had to be self-reliant, and I would say that’s what came through in her food and her philosophy—making the best out of what you have, being grateful for what you have, and finding abundance in the small things.”

Many maternal figures have made an impression on Anderson’s food today. Her mother’s cheese ball is on the menu at Pink Room, Anderson’s cozy walk-in-only eatery. She has a long-running fascination with the quirky 1960s-era Midwestern recipes her grandmother made, the kind shaped with Jell-O molds, whether savory or sweet. Dora is no exception, and menu items like peas and speck in sherry cream, beans with pancetta and crème fraîche and others are all twists on familiar fare from Dora’s kitchen.

“I would say that’s what came through in her food and her philosophy—making the best out of what you have, being grateful for what you have, and finding abundance in the small things.”

“My great-grandmother really inspires a lot of my food, and there are things that she cooked that are really connected to her story,” Anderson says, sharing the anecdote that the smell of cooked dairy still reminds her of Dora at the stove cooking peas in milk with country ham. “She lived in the Northern Neck, so things like crab and fish and wild game were also a big part of what she cooked. Growing up eating that and seeing how self-sufficient she was really sank in and influenced who I am as a chef and a person.”

Anderson carries Dora’s legacy further into her career by aiming to emulate the thoughtful, industrious spirit she carried throughout her life.

“She was an incredibly giving person, and really fearless,” she says. “I would say the biggest thing that she taught me, that I try to share with everyone, is respect for ingredients and respect for the people who have produced those ingredients. That’s something I hope to pass on.”

Katrina Giavos on her mother, Stella

If you are just entering the Richmond food scene, one of the first icons you’ll discover will be Stella Dikos, the eponym of the Greek restaurant staple Stella’s.

Stella’s mother died when she was just under 5 years old. Finding herself the only woman (really, a girl) in her family, she took on the domestic duties expected of her at an extremely young age. Nearby relatives taught her how to cook, and being from a poor family, she learned how to make a wide variety of dishes from what was readily available and affordable—namely, ingredients like vegetables and legumes. She learned how to refresh these staples again and again through different combinations of herbs and cooking techniques, honing her ability to refine flavors.

When Stella first arrived in Richmond, she was 19 years old and the new bride of Stavros Dikos, who was already working in the city’s restaurant scene.

“She was very shy, really wouldn’t speak much,” says Giavos. “She didn’t know the language and she was scared. The Greek community here embraced her, but when she stepped out of that safe zone [first working at The Village], they were in awe of her.”

Growing up with two parents working in food, Giavos says she and her family were quite literally raised in the restaurant business. Most of their days and meals were spent within the restaurants they owned and operated.

This made getting the opportunity to eat at home its own special occasion. With that came the chance to enjoy dishes like Stella’s Greek aromatic meat sauce, spanakopita, baklava, Greek wedding cookies and her most coveted Greek Easter bread—all away from the crowds.

Nostalgic elements of her presence in the kitchen span the senses, from rich flavors to the smell of mastic, a tree sap from a tree found on the Greek island of Chios, that Stella frequently baked with and that still perfumes the headscarf she cooked with.

And although she shared her food with the public, Stella was eager to keep the exact secrets to making them within the family.

“She was very guarded with her recipes,” Giavos says. “She would say, ‘Don’t ever give this away.’ I am so determined to carry on as much of her, and the recipes that I can do really well, on to my granddaughters.”

“What I didn’t realize until there were 500 people at her memorial is what impact she had on so many people …

When Giavos reached adulthood, she and her mother transitioned into a new relationship as business partners, a journey that she says wasn’t always smooth, with tension bubbling up between old- and new-school business sensibilities. But little by little, they were able to reach an understanding, and Giavos now recognizes several of her mother’s qualities in herself, she says.

“The way that she used to be walking around looking into the trash to see what you’ve wasted, that’s what I’ve turned into now. When they say you don’t want to turn into your mother—I’m turning into my mother!”

Right up until Stella passed in 2024 at the age of 82, Giavos says she was still learning things about her mother, with every car ride being marked by a new story she had never heard before, a new window into her knowledge. Perhaps most of all, she says she wasn’t quite aware of the magnitude of Stella’s influence. She’s not sure Stella knew it, either.

“People will meet me on the street now who will say, ‘Oh, I sat with your mom, I met her once at a market, and what an extraordinary woman,’” Giavos says. “What I didn’t realize until there were 500 people at her memorial is what impact she had on so many people … I just think that is so incredibly special, and she deserves to know that, and I don’t really think she did.”

Michael Lindsey on his mother, Mildred

“I come from a long line of great cooks,” says Michael Lindsey, who credits his grandparents, uncles, and particularly the women in his family, for introducing him to the art of balancing wild game, barbecue techniques, sweet and savory flavors and more.  It’s knowledge that he says kept him from needing to go to culinary school to succeed in the restaurant industry.

But he maintains that his mother, Mildred, is his biggest influence.

“Whatever she touches is always perfect,” he says. “My passion for cooking and attention to detail definitely come from my mom.”

Lindsey, founder of Lindsey Food Group and owner of restaurants like Lillie Pearl and Buttermilk and Honey, says his mother’s approach to cooking centers on not just flavor, but on expressing love and affection through food.

“She’s always been the sweetest, most loving person,” he says.

“Everything is about nurturing. That’s why I love not just cooking, but being of service. I take pride in the moments when people try my food and close their eyes or point at it—not for recognition, but because I know I’ve touched someone’s soul.”

Mildred’s desire to connect through food shows in her culinary repertoire. As the family moved from state to state with Lindsey’s father, who served in the Air Force, she bonded with neighbors from different cultural backgrounds by asking them to teach her their favorite recipes: ragu, egg rolls, enchiladas, tamales.

But Lindsey admits her go-to was always the Southern food that she grew up on.

“I don’t own a true Southern soul food restaurant, but I want to open one—and it’s going to be all my mom’s food,” he adds.

Even now, many are already familiar with Mildred’s recipes. The macaroni and cheese at Lillie Pearl, a universal crowd pleaser, is her own. And if the fact that she’s always expected to bring the dish to family gatherings isn’t enough proof of its appeal, her mac-and-cheese is also an award winner.

“I won the Richmond Mac and Cheese Festival in 2021,” says Lindsey. “There were around 45 entries. We did our pimento mac-and-cheese that we have at Lillie Pearl, and then I did a Nashville spice version. We won first and second place. For me, being known for mac-and-cheese—and knowing that my exact recipe is hers— is incredible.”

Preserving recipes like these has become a project of its own for Lindsey. These days, he’s asking his mother to write them all down, with the goal of compiling them into a book for his siblings. On a larger scale, he sees the kind of Southern food his mother makes—Black family recipes passed down through generations without formal documentation—as “heirloom recipes” he’s committed to preserving.

“You’re not going to find a lot of old, old-school Black cookbooks, but the approach to cooking—especially among older Black women—is the same,” he explains. “Everybody has a little twist, but you can eat almost anybody’s food and be satisfied. Passing that on from generation to generation is so important. And that’s being lost now with my generation, because the gap is a lot bigger between the children and the parents. We went to college, we moved away … For me, it’s important to keep those things together.”