Eating at Mom's

From the beginnings of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, the mission of the institution was, in part, to make a quality education available at a price affordable by the predominantly rural families of Texas. As a state school, Texas A&M University, during the time we were there, still fulfilled that mission. Consequently, the majority of the students had little disposable income.

In the Corps, meals were served at Duncan Dining Hallseven days a week, three times a day. The food was the subject of much derision, but the Corps meal plan made it quite affordable. But, fish looked at weekends as a way to avoid the hassle of eating in the dining hall on weekends with upper classmen. Off-campus food was expensive, but, as they say in Eco 101, where there's a need, there's an opportunity; where there's a demand, there's a profit to be made in supplying it. Of all the residents of Bryan/College Station, you wouldn't have picked a group of over-60 ladies to have the required entrepreneurial drive - but they recognized opportunity when it knocked, and Mom's was born.

Actually, there was no official name. In fact, there was no official business (more on that later) -- just an old wooden house in a residential area, in which all the rooms but the kitchen had been transformed into eating areas. There was no sign, and no advertising, but this eatery usually had a full house, completely due to word of mouth (pun intended.)

When you went into Mom's, you were directed to a table which seated six or eight. There was no menu. Soon one of the ladies would start bringing bowls of food to the table - it was family style, just like at Duncan. The food was what you'd call home cooking - high on starchy stuff like potatoes (baked, mashed, or fried), beans, corn, peas, cornbread, black-eyed peas, chicken-fried steak or veal cutlet (both with heavy breading), fried chicken, lots of rolls and biscuits with butter and white gravy, big glasses of iced tea and water, etc. There was no check, either - when you'd had all you wanted, you dropped a couple of dollars into a fishbowl as you went out the front door.

I don't think Mom's still existed when we left Aggieland. Somebody probably complained to a city official, who noted the non-conforming zoning, the lack of a business license, health inspection, tax ID, payroll withholding, or other paperwork items required of an actual enterprise, and issued a cease-and-desist order. But who knows, an Aggie by the name of Gene Street might have gotten the idea for his Black-Eyed Pea restaurants from a visit to Mom's.

John (Yankus) Yantis