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There’s a reason people keep coming back to the Silver Moon Café, and it’s not just the smothered chicken. Although the restaurant’s signature dish makes a compelling argument, the real draw is the woman serving up this mouth-watering classic.

Seabell “Mama” Thomas makes sure there’s a little bit of love in every bite. It’s comfort served up with gravy, a side of cornbread and washed down with a large glass of sweet tea.

Each meal wraps up with a hug as she sends customers on their way with full bellies and a little lagniappe to put away in the fridge for later. Some call it soul food, but Thomas, not a fan of that phrase, prefers “Mama’s home-cooked food.”

She gets cooking early every morning making breakfast, lunch and dinner for regulars she calls her children.

“I throw my arms around all of them,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if they’re 80 or 90. They’re all my children.”

Opening in 1985, the first restaurant was in a ramshackle building just across the railroad tracks on Brightside Drive. In 2000, she opened the present location on West Chimes Street. It was her intention to keep both locations open, but rising rents and the death of Andrew Buckner, the love of her life, forced her to close the Brightside location. Andrew and Seabell were never married, but their love affair spanned 22 years. He lost his battle with cancer on January 22, 2000, and Thomas could not shoulder the load of both restaurants on her own.

She turned to cooking to get her through the dark times and has emerged stronger than ever. Pictures, wedding invitations and baby announcements plaster the span of one wall in the tiny cafe and act as testaments to the number of lives touched by this tried-and-true woman everyone calls Mama.

“It’s who I am,” she says. “I am Mama at my business. I’m Mama at home. I’m just Mama.”