Southern Living, June, 1997

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Dip Into The Divine
By Bridgette A. Lacy

For almost 20 years, Chapel Hill has hidden a lip-smacking, down-home restaurant. Find out how Mama Dip makes her cooking so irresistible to so many.

Snapping beans in the kitchen of her Chapel Hill restaurant, Mildred Council—called Mama Dip by family and friends—recalls one Saturday morning back in 1976. She had yearned to open her own eatery and started the business that day with exactly $64. The Chatham County native spent $40 on grits, coffee, eggs, bacon, and sausage and put the remaining money in the cash register.

Breakfast sold out. And with that income, Mama Dip bought pork chops and chicken for her dinner customers. By closing time, she had rung up $130 in sales. Word of her delicious—and unpretentious—home-style cooking spread quickly. Thanks to the restaurant's proximity to the UNC-Chapel Hill campus and a fabulous review in The New York Times, her success was sealed. The mother of nine, single after a failed 30-year marriage, had discovered her livelihood.

Today at 67, Mama Dip masterminds a Triangle institution. It's not a fancy place (checkered tablecloths, vinyl padded booths, and wooden chairs fill two modest dining areas), but college students, blue-collar workers, and professionals alike crowd the place with their chatter and clattering. Dean Smith, Carolina's head basketball coach, eats there with his family. And when he's in town, Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan visits for home-style cooking.

But whether it's intended for a star or a student, Mama Dip's food always tastes special. "We start from the basics," says Elaine Council, one of Mama Dip's daughters and the restaurant's manager. On this summer morning, Elaine works in the kitchen. She coats the pieces of chicken with a mixture of salt, pepper, and flour. Nearby, her niece Sherry prepares dough for pies and cobblers. Plastic bags filled with fresh string beans from the city garden wait on the countertop to be washed. Lard, butter, and fatback fill the refrigerator. On the stove, a pot of squash cooks slowly, and a vat of okra and tomatoes bubbles.

"I use very little water because some food makes its own water," Mama Dip says, giving tips as she tends to the food. "I like to cook with a lid." She uses just a little salt and a dab of butter to season most vegetables. And pork flavors her pinto beans and greens.

Mama Dip's best-sellers are fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, and catfish. Each comes with two vegetables, cornbread or homemade yeast rolls, and is served on a plain beige plate.

Chrystle Swain, owner of a public relations firm in Durham, eats her dinner there every Friday. "They don't have to ask, they know what I want—catfish, collard greens, and potato salad. I always have the cornbread and the pecan pie à la mode."

Chrystle keeps coming back because she loves the feel of the place. "It's like walking in your grandmother's kitchen."

Chuck Stone, a syndicated columnist and communications professor at UNC is also a big fan. "Anybody who doesn't eat at Dip's doesn't love Jesus," he says. "The thing I love about Dip's," he continues, "is its multiracial and multicultural clientele. This is the South; you get more integration in a soul food restaurant in North Carolina than you get in Philadelphia."

And Mama Dips aims to keep it that way. "I don't want no fancy restaurant. I want people to feel at home here."