When Jake Goldbold was a student at Kirby-Smith Junior High — and if he was lucky enough to have a little money in his pocket — he’d stop at Fred Cotten’s barbecue restaurant for a sandwich.
Those sandwiches and Godbold’s tie to the restaurant were intertwined for decades, becoming a lasting piece of Jacksonville’s political heritage.
“After I became mayor, instead of going to The River Club, I’d go there,” he recalled this week.
Many others followed. Cotten’s was the in-spot for lunch, a place to go to and be seen or to see the political elite.
“You got to see a cross section of a lot of people,” Godbold said. “Police and fire, black and white. Everybody used to go there.”
Godbold went there so often, there was a table in the back reserved for him. In fact, longtime customers still call it “Jake’s table.”
Now, after 68 years, the restaurant at 17th and Main streets is closing Monday. An ending to one of the city’s most iconic businesses.
A familiar face leaves
The beginning of the end of the restaurant probably started in 2000.
When Cotten’s widow died in 1999, his nieces sold the business to Billy Cowart the following May. (Fred Cotten died in 1982.) Cowart had handled payroll for the restaurant for years and said he was approached by the nieces to buy it.
Lucille Baker, who had run the place for five decades, left soon afterward. When Baker left, so did some of restaurant’s customers, including its most recognizable one.
“I never have been back there,” Godbold said. “It was not the same with me.”
Baker had been the heart of Cotten’s for years. Godbold said she had been there since she was 10 or 12. “She couldn’t hardly see over the counter,” when she started working there, Godbold said.
Cowart said Baker was unhappy he bought Cotten’s, but it was her decision to leave, not his. After about eight weeks, she stopped coming in.
He wonders how things would have been if he had just let her run the place for him like she did for Cotten.
“When she left, it hurt,” he said. “It really did. Everybody loved her.”
Cowart said the nighttime business, which brought in a good percentage of the restaurant’s revenue, dropped after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He said people just didn’t want to come out at night, as much.
After that, he said, business continued “slowly, slowly dropping.”
Cowart said the restaurant was taking in $10,000 a week when he bought it. But, he said, it never made him a dime.
He estimates he put $900,000 into it, hoping the business would turn around despite what the numbers showed him. “And I’m supposed to be a decent accountant,” said Cowart, who also runs a tax preparation business.
Making the decision
About three years ago, he started threatening to close the restaurant. Then he’d back off.
“I kept thinking that during football season business would pick up,” he said, but it was never enough.
In 2012, he began paying someone to run the restaurant for five months each year while he focused full time on his tax business. That was another financial drain that made the decision to close more apparent.
When a potential buyer began showing interest in the building but not the business, Cowart said that was the right time to make the decision to close.
Keep in mind, he had made that decision before. Three other times, in fact.
Last year, Cowart told his wife of 49 years he was going to shut down Cotten’s. He gave her three different dates. The first two — September and November — came and went.
At the end of December, Cowart told his wife it would be January.
“She said, ‘Billy, that’s the third closing,’” Cowart, 79, said.
Finally, eight months later, he decided Monday would be it.
Closing time
The news is tough for longtime customers to accept. Scott Wilson has been a friend of Cowart’s since the two worked on an Ed Austin campaign.
Despite there being some good days sprinkled in, he knows the past several years have been tough on the restaurant.
“It’s real sad,” he said.
Wilson also worries whoever buys the building might tear it down. “It would be sad to lose the building. It has a lot of character,” he said.
Now that the decision’s made, Cowart is at peace with it. “I’ve always enjoyed this but it’s been a real stress on me,” he said.
He won’t be out of the business completely. He still owns the recipe to Cotten’s famous sauce, which he’ll sell along with the restaurant’s salad dressing. “It’s a mix between a Thousand Island and a Ranch,” he said.
“I’ll take my cooker on the street once or twice a month and if somebody wants a catering job, I’ll do it,” he said. “There’s no overhead and I’ll enjoy it.”
Cowart expects a good crowd Monday for the restaurant’s last day. One person who won’t be there is Godbold.
“After all these years, I never go by there and not think about going there all those years,” Godbold said.
He misses the old times there, but he said, “It just lost its flame.”
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