Ruth Daniels located her latest Annie Ru’s Carryout and Catering restaurant where she said it was needed most.
After a March 10 ribbon-cutting, Annie Ru’s started serving customers March 11 at 5045 Soutel Drive, Suite 18, in the Sherwood Town Center in Northwest Jacksonville.
The center has a large and well-worn parking lot with heavily faded striping. The only major chain store is Domino’s. Other spaces are occupied by an industrial training facility, the Al Amir Islamic Center, a nursing academy and a few other locally-owned small businesses.
The new restaurant is Daniels’ way of giving back to her community, she said.
“I wanted to bring something with a nice atmosphere to the Northside of Jacksonville. That’s my goal. We love people and we want to show that we don’t have to go to the (St. Johns) Town Center. You can come right here,” she said.
Daniels and her husband, Clifford, will be at the restaurant in the beginning while the neighborhood learns of the new location. These days, both restaurants are run by the couple’s four grown sons.
The restaurant is a combination of booths, tables and banquette seating. There is room for extra dining space or private events. Daniels estimated the restaurant is about 5,000 square feet. She expects to hire 15 to handle breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as catering.
Annie Ru’s serves traditional homemade Southern soul food. The menu includes homestyle chicken, pork chops and meatloaf as well items like neck bone and potatoes. Sides include collard greens, butter beans and field peas.
Ruth Daniels started a catering company in 2008 at 3909 Hendricks Ave. in Miramar until she turned that space into Annie Ru’s Carryout and Catering in 2011. She combined her mother’s name, Annie Lee Hayward, and her own, to form Annie Ru’s. She later closed at Hendricks Avenue to move to a larger space at 2851 Edgewood Ave. N. in West Jacksonville. That restaurant is still in operation.
Daniels said customers are fond of her mother’s version of a menu mainstay.
“The specialty of the house will probably be my mommy’s mac and cheese,” she said.
“That’s the first recipe she gave me while I was in her kitchen, sitting on a stool.”
The new restaurant serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hours are 6 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. on Sunday.
The Edgewood Avenue location used to serve breakfast until the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
“After COVID, we were feeding families who had lost family members. So we had to put the breakfast on hold because we were catering funerals every day,” Daniels said.
“That to me, was just so important. We ministered to those families through food.”
In the mornings, the new restaurant will serve items including made-in-house salmon croquettes, stewed potatoes and liver and onions.
Daniels is not ruling out reinstating breakfast at the Edgewood location in the coming months.
The build-out was handled by several subcontractors. Daniels declined to disclose the cost of opening.
The ribbon-cutting included a letter from Mayor Donna Deegan, words from Jacksonville City Council member Ju’Coby Pittman and a former employee, Andrew Hart, who now has his own business. Hart spoke of his time working for Daniels.
“He was really a young boy when he worked for me. He now owns his own Chick-fil-A in Ocala,” Daniels said.
“He came and spoke and inspired everyone.”