Everyone's favorite aunt is reopening her Findlay Market stall in a roll-up door space at 10 a.m. July 19.
Aunt Flora (Katrina Mincy) first had a stall at the market in the early 2000s, but, according to a release, had to shutter the space after she and her husband, Ron, faced some serious health issues. She returned as an outdoor vendor recently and is now ready to be back full-time serving cobblers, pies, barbecue sauces and gourmet coffee.
The grand reopening on Friday will include speeches by Aunt Flora, her team and members of the Corporation for Findlay Market, as well as a ceremonial cobbler cutting.
Aunt Flora is well-known both locally and nationally for her spin on comfort food, including her famous cobbler.
As excerpted from CityBeat dining writer Brenna Smith's interview with Aunt Flora in 2012 after the opening of her downtown Cobbleria:
"Flora has been opening restaurants and food stalls for almost a decade, a venture that began with her first pie contest in the early 2000s with Chuck Martin of The Enquirer, which she won with her cobbler, of course. She was inspired to start a business selling cobblers after her number got out to the public. The next thing she knew, she could hardly keep up with the pie orders.
"He did a story on me and that was around Thanksgiving,” Flora said. “I was crying. I had cobblers on my ironing board, my coffee table. I had cobblers everywhere.”
Her famous cobbler recipe and her penchant for cooking have taken her many places in Cincinnati as well as onto the television sets of Martha Stewart’s and Oprah Winfrey’s shows. Stewart sought out Flora’s cobbler at (her first) Findlay Market stall. Flora remembers walking up to her store front after delivering cakes and seeing Stewart eating one of her cobblers.
“I thought I was going to die,” Flora said.
They hit it off and Flora was on the show’s set shortly thereafter, hanging out with Stewart and cooking up a savory cobbler."
In addition to her Cobbleria, Aunt Flora also opened a slew of now-closed comfort and soul food restaurants including Aunt Flora's House of Soul in Silverton, downtown's homestyle What's in the Skillet and a space at Northgate Mall.
Findlay Market has more on the history of Aunt Flora.
