Starting in the 1940s, Wilkes ran a boarding house in Savannah, Georgia, and was known for her good cooking. She let boarders bring family and friends in to eat, and eventually that grew into a restaurant.
Still known as Mrs. Wilkes’ Boardinghouse, even though she hadn’t taken on boarders for 30 years, the restaurant is known for its lines of people waiting for a spot at one of the community dining tables. “It is a great introduction to the whole South,” says John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. “The pomp and circumstance of it mattered as much as the food.”
She worked most every day for 60 years, always saying grace for the whole room before the food was served, family style, and making sure that the food was perfect — along with the servers’ manners. She was at work watching over things when I was there to eat in 1999, and in the fall of 2002 when she suffered a stroke and died two weeks later, on October 30. She was 95.
Update: As of 2026, Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room, as it came to be known, was still in operation.