When home.made, a longtime Athens restaurant with a serious following, closed permanently in February, it was a major bummer as yet another small business went belly up in an economy that favors scale and extractive values. But chef/owner Mimi Maumus has landed on her feet and is now running the food program at Buvez.
The coffee house/bar/after-school stop in Boulevard by the train tracks on Barber Street is a good fit for Maumus due to their similar values. She met owner Bain Mattox when they were both working at Five & Ten, back when it was on Lumpkin Street in the space that now houses Slaters. Even then she was a relentless experimenter in the kitchen, and the two of them enjoyed bouncing ideas off one another. They tried to convince chef-owner Hugh Acheson to do cocktail/food pairings, but Athens wasn’t ready for it in the way it would be now.
Buvez has limitations, including the lack of a proper kitchen. Right now, it has a toaster oven and a single induction burner. But Maumus says she thrives on limits and that they fuel her creativity. Right now, she’s working on ways to use up leftover bits and bobs (a banana butter, for example, to deal with extra bananas that pile up, and the lack of an oven). She’s also considering the ingredients already on hand. Coffeehouses have multiple kinds of milk with which to make drinks, so why not roll with it and offer granola bowls with yogurt, soy milk, regular milk, etc.?
Maumus also loves to find healthier, more authentic takes on mass food items. Her kid, like most kids, is obsessed with Starbucks’ pink drinks, so Maumus is playing around with a version of same based on fresh ingredients and without corn syrup. Why not opt for something better for you and made locally? She’s pushing for moving away from premade items wherever possible (new syrups with which to create Italian-style sodas that incorporate half-and-half, homemade honeycomb candy, banana bread coffee that uses both the banana butter and brown butter, snacks based on cold dates that include protein but have the chewiness of a caramel).
The menu remains small for now, and what’s on offer might not settle into a routine for a while. Why make a salad if you can’t get good lettuce? Why push for evening food if there’s no market for it? Long, rectangular toasts with a variety of toppings might be on offer if she can find a supplier, and a tuna melt is a great way to work with the kitchen’s spartan supplies.
Maumus praises the staff at Buvez effusively. Like her, they’re fond of experimenting. And she appreciates the focus on quality and community that the business has always had. She says she’s much rather be in that kind of environment than being a celebrity chef.
Her influence is already present in an array of zero-proof cocktails, alcohol-free offerings that satisfy the need to be fussed over while maintaining sobriety for whatever reason suits you. The new menu should get going more seriously in early April, but progress is already underway, and it’s great to see a talented chef land in an environment conducive to her skillset.
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