Today we’d like to introduce you to Mimi Maumus.
Mimi, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
As with all good things, home.made began as a dream. Years of hard work and baby steps have made this “little business that could” grow from a side project to a brick and mortar business.
Dreaming up how to open a restaurant without any money, I started home.made out of my home in 2006. Home.made began as a personal chef & catering business, managed in the early mornings and late nights outside of my regular job. In 2011, home.made took the next step and moved into our current Baxter Street location.
Home.made has since grown beyond just catering and currently offers lunch, dinner and an event space for private functions. My signature line of southern snacks is available in gourmet gift shops across America.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The road has been smooth enough but has definitely had its share of bumps. Often, in the midst of a struggle, things can feel very uncertain and intense but I have always come out the other end of the problem with a new awareness that leads me to thankfulness for the struggle in the first place. Things don’t always work out the way that they’re planned but, in hindsight, they consistently work out exactly as they should have.
If I had had things “my way,” I would have opened a restaurant in my twenties – before I had a real awareness of what all is involved in restaurant ownership. I don’t believe that that restaurant would have made it very long and maybe I would have switched career paths… I’ll never know.
My greatest struggles have been understanding the “business” side of the business. I have had to learn to pay attention to the numbers and to really educate myself about maintaining the financial health of the business. There have been some close calls that have woken me up to how necessary my involvement is in accounting.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about home.made – what should we know?
home.made is a catering company, a lunch and dinner restaurant and also has a line of packaged foods. The business grew organically from just catering in response to customer demand. I grew up in New Orleans and moved to Georgia when I was 17. I cook from a place of nostalgia – wanting to share and recreate my food memories. Not everything on the menu is a specific memory but that is the spirit that I work from. I could probably trace flavors and dishes back to my first experience with them. Growing up, there were frequent crab and crawfish boils in our backyard and now, even just the smell of the crab boil seasoning can transport me back to that place. At home.made, we make our own crab boil seasoning mix and make a stock with it for cooking on the line. I adore that flavor and infuse it into almost everything that we cook.
One of our most beloved menu items are swanee bites. Swanee bites are, for me, the intersection of my New Orleans roots and Georgia adulthood. Growing up, cheese straws were an absolute food favorite – always homemade and, in New Orleans, they were always piped into little rectangles with a cookie press. When we started making cheese straws for home.made, many people were unfamiliar. I was selling bags of them at a holiday market and had samples available on my table and I actually made a child cry! He was expecting a sweet cookie but instead got an unexpected (and not sugary) flavor. Constantly churning food ideas around in my head, swanee bites were my attempt at having a pimento cheese appetizer that wasn’t a tea sandwich. I, instead, had the idea to put pimento cheese between two cheese straws and roll the cheesy edges in chopped pecans. I was super happy with the result and, even though it took quite a while to figure out how to streamline the process for all of the cheese straws, (lots of broken cookies presses, several employees begging to take swanee bites off of the menu because of how labor-intensive they were,) I am so thankful that I listened to that little voice in my head that told me to keep going. For someone who didn’t have pimento cheese in their life until they were 30, I certainly make a lot of it now!
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
There are so many people who have made my business possible – my partner, who found our current building when I was, at the time, in a tiny warehouse space. She then convinced me to move forward with actually building out a legitimate kitchen. I really didn’t believe that I would be able to undertake something of that scale financially but she encouraged me through every step of the way.
There are several other business owners who were very open with sharing their resources to help home.made get off of the ground. I was able to borrow vans to make deliveries and run credit card payments through their businesses (I’m sure that’s totally illegal but it was a very long time ago!).
My friends were my original coworkers and I absolutely could not have done any of this alone. They helped me navigate the early days and made home.made possible.
I appreciate this question. I think, too often, people look at “successful” people without realizing the village of people behind and around them that have made their success possible.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1072 Baxter Street
Athens, GA - Website: www.homemadeathens.com
- Phone: 7062069216
- Email: info@homemadeathens.com
- Instagram: homemade athens
Image Credit:
Kristen Bach
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