Chef promises late mother to open food truck in her honor

Jonette Williams grew up in Brooklyn, cooking the South Carolina regional Gullah Geechee cuisine with her mother and grandmother.

With “mommy” and “nana,” Williams spent hours in the kitchen perfecting Gullah Geechee staples such as red rice, slow-cooked spiced legumes, stewed meats, poultry, greens, tomatoes and okra. Her mother’s particular specialty was red rice, she said.

A daughter’s promise

Cooking was so central to the family’s life that when Williams’ mother, Hurtha Robinson, was dying of liver cancer in 2016, Williams made her a promise: One day, she would open a food truck in her mother’s honor.

“She didn’t look at me and say anything else except for ‘When?’ And I told her I didn’t know, but soon,” said Williams, who moved to Columbus in 2001.

“After she passed away, I wanted to honor her.”

Glorious: ‘It was something that she felt about my food’

Williams’ mother even gave her daughter’s food a name: Jonette’s Du Jour Glorieux Cuisine. Glorious, the French word for glorious, stood out.

“It was something that she felt about my food,” she said.

With the name as her foundation, Williams, 41, launched Glorious (pronounced glory-yoo) WaFulz, a gourmet waffle pop-up that has appeared at Antiques on High the last three Saturdays, in addition to Seventh Son Brewing.