Rubber Meets the Road
Miss Susie’s Newtown Kitchen
It’s Sunday afternoon in the heart of Newtown. Cars pull up to the clean, whitewashed bones of a building on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way, where a ruddy orange food truck sits outside.
“It’s not easy sometimes to find a good, homecooked meal in Newtown on a Sunday,” remarks a customer at the truck’s window. Chef Golden Monix passes her a box she has to take with both hands, it’s so heavy with smothered turkey wings, candied yams, savory black-eyed peas, yellow rice, and a thick chunk of cornbread.
The mouthwatering menu at Miss Susie’s Newtown Kitchen draws on the Monix family’s Mississippi roots. Born and raised in Sarasota, Monix found his first calling while coaching football and track at Booker High School.
“I knew that working with and helping youth would be a path that I would like to take,” Monix says.
Later, Monix spent 15 years with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Sarasota and DeSoto Counties (BGCSDC), beginning as an athletic director and moving up to unit director of the Roy McBean Club in Newtown. He was instrumental in developing regular “family dinner” nights for the community. One night, rather than order in the food, Monix volunteered to cook the communal meal. Immediately he found himself the head chef for future family dinners and an annual Thanksgiving meal that nourished up to 200 community members.
“That’s when I learned that food and cooking were really my passion,” Monix says.
The truck at the curb signals that rubber has met the road on a project founded on empowerment and community vibrance. Miss Susie’s Newtown Kitchen’s inception as a brick-and-mortar restaurant broke ground with fanfare in February 2018, but fundraising and construction stalled after the passing of Steve Seidensticker, head of the family that owns and operates the Tableseide Restaurant Group and its philanthropic arm, Tableseide Cares. He had dreamed of a destination restaurant and hospitality training hub that would create jobs and positively impact lives within Sarasota’s historically Black community.
“He really was the driving force behind the project,” says daughter Lisa Seidensticker, who stepped back from Tableseide operations in 2019 to answer an urgent call from the Newtown community that her father’s dream must not fade out.
“His loss was detrimental in the fact that people knew Steve, and they trusted his judgment,” Seidensticker says. “I had to build up that trust with the community.”
She’d also build a team to help evolve her father’s vision for Miss Susie’s. Andrew Grossman joined the project as director of restaurant development in late 2019.
“It’s hard to talk about this project without talking about the pandemic,” Grossman says. “We wanted to make this a true collaboration with Newtown, but how do you do that when you can’t be with people, sit on porches, and talk in coffee shops with folks?”
Another roadblock emerged in construction costs, which have nearly tripled from $400,000 to $1.1 million. Seidensticker and Grossman face a fundraising Everest to put meat on the restaurant’s bones. Still, even in masked conversations held six feet apart, community enthusiasm for Miss Susie’s propels the project ever upward.
“As things opened up,” Grossman says, “we’ve been spending a ton of time in the neighborhood doing the things that we wanted to do: talking, learning the history, finding the contractors and small businesses in Newtown, hiring them, and getting to know their stories.”
A food truck had always been in the grand scheme for Miss Susie’s, but Grossman proposed mobilizing it ahead of schedule in what he and Seidensticker call “Miss Susie’s 2.0.”
“We are continuously raising money, and we believe that the food truck is going to help us bring awareness to the program,” Seidensticker says. “It gives us the ability to move around not only Newtown but the entire Sarasota community.” Profits from the food truck go back into the program, either by supporting the restaurant build or helping fund a 16-week hospitality training intensive in which the truck provides hands-on learning.
There’s no better example of the need for a program like Miss Susie’s than Monix himself. When Seidensticker and Grossman invited him to become executive chef, he was working as the Toronto Blue Jays’ catering chef for their spring training in Dunedin. Monix had climbed an arduous ladder to transition from a career in youth services to feeding professional athletes. Even with a culinary school as prestigious as Johnson & Wales University on his resume, Monix says he battled one question blocking his entry to the workforce: What restaurant experience do you have?
“[Seidensticker and Grossman] told me about how they wanted to help young adults in the community learn more about the culinary industry, how to come into a restaurant and actually learn, work, and get paid. I started thinking, ‘Man, what a struggle it was for me to get my foot in the door,’” Monix says. “If I can help young adults get that experience, that’s a concept I’m buying into.”
Onboard the mobile version of Miss Susie’s Newtown Kitchen, Monix combines his Southern food heritage, culinary talent, and vocation for helping young folks forge successful life paths. Facebook and Instagram are the best ways to learn where the truck will roll up next, but it’s easy to find outside Miss Susie’s future homesite at 1741 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way. After a hearty breakfast on Thursday, a Friday night fish fry, or Soul Food Sunday, customers who’ve tucked into a meal from Miss Susie’s have reported the food is so scrumptious, it visits them in dreams.
