Jessica Hanners’ culinary journey has taken her from Tuscaloosa to Portland, Charleston to Atlanta.
Now, she’s back home in a little fishing hamlet on Guntersville Lake in the northeast corner of Alabama, where she’s the chef and owner of an off-the-beaten path dining gem that she has affectionately named the Homecoming Café & Country Store.
“South Sauty Creek is where we are,” Jessica explains to an out-of-towner. “That’s what our little community is called. It doesn’t even show up on a map. The closest dot is Langston.”
For those who aren’t from around here, that’s near the border of Marshall and Jackson counties, about 20 miles north of Guntersville and 15 or so miles south of Scottsboro on a two-lane stretch of county road called South Sauty Road.
Jessica grew up less than a mile from here, and when she was a little girl, she would hang out at the store after she get out of elementary school each day.
“The story I always tell people is when the bus would drop me off in third grade, it would drop me off here,” she says. “I would just come inside and sit behind the counter with the original owner, Joe Martin, until my parents got off work.”
Her parents later bought what was then called the South Sauty Café and ran it for about 15 years.
As teenagers, Jessica and her cousin Allison Fredrick worked summers at the café, flipping burgers and hanging out at the lake.
Later, after graduating from Guntersville High School, Jessica went to the University of Alabama to study hospitality management, and as a student at UA, she got her first real taste of the restaurant business at DePalma’s Italian Café in downtown Tuscaloosa.
“That’s where I cut my teeth,” she remembers. “I started working at DePalma’s at 20 years old washing dishes and moved up to kitchen manager within like six months. That was my first kitchen manager job.”
The dining room at Homecoming Cafe in Langston, Ala.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
‘It was now or never’
After she graduated in 2005, Jessica moved to Portland, Ore., where she became a manager for the Pacific Coast Restaurants group.
She later came back down South, attending culinary school at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte and working at restaurants in Charleston and Atlanta.
In Atlanta, she was an executive chef for restaurateur Jenny Levison’s Souper Jenny neighborhood cafes for about eight years.
While Jessica was away, though, her parents sold their little café and country store, and the next owner closed it a few years after that.
So, it sat empty for a couple of years, and on Jessica’s trips home, her parents tried to talk her into moving back and reopening it.
She wasn’t interested.
“They were like, ‘Why don’t you take it?’’' she recalls. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, no, I’m not moving back there from Hot ‘Lanta.’”
Then she had a son, and the long hours working in restaurants for somebody else became less appealing.
“So, I kind of decided it was now or never,” she says. “I’ve always wanted my own place. I had been managing restaurants since I was 22.
“I sold my house, packed up my stuff, sold a bunch of stuff, and moved in with my parents and opened this place back up because this is home. It really is.”
In a personal nod to her return home, Jessica renamed the business the Homecoming Café & Country Store, and she reopened it on Feb. 17, 2018.
It didn’t take long for her to realize that she was back where she belonged.
“We hit the ground running,” she says. “We had above-and-beyond positive reception, and people have been very supportive -- driving from Scottsboro, driving from Guntersville.
“We don’t just rely on the seasonal campers,” she adds. (People) are driving to come here to eat, and that’s a blessing.”
Homecoming Cafe & Country Store is a community hub where folks who visit the South Sauty Creek area come for everything from live bait to gasoline to a bite to eat.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
‘The community hub’
The country store side of the business -- which is adorned with deer heads, mounted fish and an assortment of vintage boat motors -- carries all the essentials for a day on the lake, from sunscreen to live bait.
“We’re a café, but we’re also a bait shop and a gas station and a convenience store,” Jessica says. “So, we are the community hub for South Sauty.”
The café – which is accented with family photos, fabric-store curtains and a fishnet-stockinged leg lamp (à la “A Christmas Story”) on one of the tables – serves breakfast and lunch seven days a week, along with Friday night dinner specials that are worth the trip -- by car or by boat.
“It’s faster to come here by boat from Scottsboro,” Jessica says. “They just shoot right across the water and park their boats across the street.”
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With its elevated but accessible menu, Homecoming Café is the type of place where you can get biscuits and gravy and multigrain toast with smashed avocados, a hamburger steak and a chicken salad plate.
Breakfast dishes include Green Eggs and Ham (with collard greens, ham, eggs and an onion ring over stoneground grits) and Candied Bacon Stuffed French Toast, as well as pancakes and bacon.
Lunch options include the Happy Hippie salad (with local lettuce, seasonal fruit, goat cheese, pecans, hemp hearts, chia seeds and bee pollen) and the Aloha sandwich (with grilled chicken, ham, pepper jack cheese and grilled pineapple slaw on a brioche bun), as well as a cheeseburger and a chili dog.
“I feel like people even in the most rural part of the country deserve to eat chef-y food,” Jessica says. “They should be able to eat fresh, clean, healthy, prepared-with-love food. Everyone should have access to that. So that was my point here.”
Dent's Smoked Pork Plate at Homecoming Cafe in Langston, Ala., is named after owner Jessica Hanners' uncle Dennis "Dent" Hanners, who built her smoker and taught her how to cook on it.(Photo by Laura Dixon; courtesy of Homecoming Cafe & Country Store; used with permission)
‘Different every week’
Many of her dishes are named for friends and family members who have inspired and encouraged her.
Jeanne’s Chicken Salad Plate is in honor of her mother, Jeanne Hanners, who also does most of the baking for the café, and the D.W.’s Biscuit & Sausage Gravy is for her father, Dwight Hanners, who some folks call “D.W.”
Dent’s Smoked Pork Plate is a tribute to her uncle Dennis “Dent” Hanners, who built her smoker and taught her how to cook with it, and The Rachel Homemade Chicken Fingers are named after a childhood friend who would only eat chicken fingers growing up.
“The vegetable plate is named for me because if I go to a country cooking place, like City Café in Northport, I always get the vegetable plate,” Jessica says.
On Friday nights, Jessica pulls out all the stops with dinner specials that typically feature a fish option (including blackened red snapper and pan-seared trout) and a meat option (including grass-fed flank steak and porterhouse pork chops).
“It’s different every week,” she says. “I have my favorites -- like snapper and grouper because we were raised on Gulf Coast seafood -- but I do branch out. If you can get halibut at a good price, you need to eat it because halibut is delicious, and we don’t get that a lot.”
She buys her proteins from Evans Meats out of Birmingham, which provides her with grass-fed beef and hormone-free chickens from Joyce Farms and fresh seafood from the Alabama Gulf to the Atlantic Coast.
“I’m really passionate about using smaller farmers instead of giant, commodity, stockyard-raised cattle,” she says. “I think it’s better for us, and our environment. The same thing with the chickens.”
As much as is practical, Jessica gets her produce from local growers.
“To me, it’s natural that we would call the farmer that lives 15 minutes away,” she says. “Like our collard greens that I just picked up today in town -- they’re from Grant because our farmer in Geraldine, her collards aren’t ready yet.
“There’s not a tomato in this building until it’s growing in your back yard,” she adds. “Then we’ll have tomatoes.”
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This past December, Jessica expanded her business and opened a Homecoming Sideshow food trailer, which typically parks in downtown Guntersville at Ross-Graden Lumber Company and at Main Channel Brewing.
That menu includes such salads as Strawberry Fields (mixed greens, strawberries, feta, almonds, avocado and balsamic vinegar) and the Big A (mixed greens, grilled artichoke, pickled onions, goat cheese and lemon vinaigrette).
Sandwiches include the Side Chic (Vietnamese grilled chicken, cilantro mayo, pickled veggies and micro greens on ciabatta) and the Bama Dog (a bacon-wrapped hot hog with pimento cheese, collard greens and Alabama white sauce, all topped with pork rinds).
The Aloha sandwich at Homecoming Cafe features grilled chicken, ham, pepperjack cheese and grilled pineapple slaw on a brioche bun. It is served here with a side of macaroni and cheese.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
‘A clean way to live’
Among the Homecoming Café's most loyal customers is Jackson County Circuit Judge John Graham, who, along with his wife, Angela, often makes the 45-minute drive to and from their house in Stevenson to eat dinner at there on Friday nights.
“Before the (COVID-19) pandemic, we were in the habit of going about three Fridays a month,” Graham says.
On a recent Friday, though, the judge and his wife were back at their favorite place for the first time in about a year. He ordered the seared halibut piccata, and she had the Happy Hippie salad with grilled chicken.
While Graham says the fish served at Homecoming Café is “as good as anything you can get in Huntsville or Chattanooga or Birmingham,” it’s not just the food that keeps him coming back.
“No. 1, I like Jessica,” he says. “I have an awful lot of respect for her and who she is and where she comes from and what she’s doing.”
Graham established and runs the Jackson County Drug Court, whose goal is to heal and rehabilitate nonviolent drug addicts so that they can lead sober lives and become productive members of the community. It has been recognized as the best drug court in Alabama.
Jessica, who says she struggled with drug and alcohol abuse as a teenager and in her 20s, says she has a special place in her heart for the work Graham is doing and has employed a few recovering addicts who have participated in the 18-month program.
“I have been cooking in restaurants my whole life,” she says. “What I found out is there is a lot of alcohol and drug addiction in the restaurant business. I was luckier than most that it didn’t completely ruin my life as it very easily could have had circumstances been different.
“But our industry, the hospitality industry, is absolutely ravaged by alcohol and drug addiction,” she adds. “At the same time, I think it’s exactly the kind of industry that could be really pivotal for people coming out of recovery.
“If we can create a safe space in our restaurants for these people to come and work and help them see there is a different way to live and a clean way to live – that is something that I’m really passionate about.”
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One of the most inspiring graduates of the Jackson County Drug Court program is Allison Fredrick, the cousin who used to flip burgers with Jessica back when they were teenagers working for Jessica’s parents.
“We grew up together,” Jessica says. “We’re basically like sisters. We could have easily had similar tracks in life. And I got out, and she didn’t. There were a couple of years that I didn’t talk to her because I was just waiting to get the phone call that she had died. . . .
“With help from Judge Graham . . . and through his drug court program, she was able to get sober and stay sober,” Jessica adds. “She’s been clean for four years now. She has custody of her children again and has gone back to school to be a certified addiction counselor.”
So, when Jessica came home to open Homecoming Café three years ago, the first person she called to come work with her was her cousin Allison, who cooks, serves and does a little bit of everything at the restaurant.
“She was the absolute first choice,” Jessica says. “She has been here since the beginning.”
Jessica Hanners is the chef and owner of Homecoming Cafe, which she opened in February 2018 after she moved back home to the little community where she grew up near Langston, Ala.(Photo by Laura Dixon; courtesy of Homecoming Cafe & Country Store; used with permission)
‘The middle of nowhere’
It was Allison, in fact, who introduced Graham, the judge who helped her turn her life around, to Homecoming Café.
“Honestly,” he says, “the first time I went down there is because Allison invited us to come on a Friday morning when we have drug court. I took my office staff down to eat lunch, really just to show some support to Allison.
“I got there, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is really unusual, and it’s really good and it’s better than anything else in driving distance.’”
Like a lot of folks around here, he’s been coming back ever since.
“Homecoming is such an unusual place,” the judge says. “It’s a gem out in what most folks would call the middle of nowhere.”
And for Jessica Hanners, the woman who came back to run it, it’s also home.
Homecoming Café & Country Store is at 6845 South Sauty Road in Langston, Ala. The phone is 256-582-3367. Breakfast and lunch hours are 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily; dinner is 5 to 7:30 p.m. Fridays. For more information, go here. To follow the Homecoming Sideshow food truck, go here.
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