STONE MOUNTAIN — On Tuesday afternoon at Cherokee Rose, eight days after the political incident, a server named Ann Wolfskill puts on her black apron and gets back to work. A hint of wood smoke drifts from the kitchen to the dining room. The daily special is a 10-ounce slice of smoked prime rib, a smaller version of the entrée Wolfskill served at Table 11 not long before she accidentally went viral.
Wolfskill is 72, and by her own estimation she has worked in restaurants for 52 of the last 58 years. She recalls serving other famous people without controversy: Mariah Carey, Jon Bon Jovi, Jimmy Buffett. She really liked Buffett. He came into Ernie’s in Fort Lauderdale on a Sunday morning, ordered a Bloody Mary and complained about having to wear shoes.
“Here’s your old-fashioned, sir,” Wolfskill says, delivering a cocktail as the dinner crowd fills in. With two bad knees and a bad back, she walks gingerly from the table to the server’s station in her plain black sneakers and punches in an order on the touchscreen. She pulls out a lighter and lights a candle for a table. She laughs and gently touches a customer’s shoulder. As she hands a heavy plate across a table, her hands tremble.
Wolfskill calls herself a “widow with a mortgage.” She has always returned to work: After a car crash, after her husband died, after a pandemic temporarily crippled the restaurant industry. She’s been at Cherokee Rose since opening day in 2021. Wolfskill considers her co-workers family and the restaurant her home. She has no children. Sometimes she eats here on her day off, or spends holidays with the owner and his family because she has nowhere else to go.
“I’d do anything for her,” says Steve Swimmer, another server.
This is why Wolfskill fights back tears when she tells a reporter about the incident. It felt as if she had hurt something that she deeply loved.
A restaurant is a fragile thing, vulnerable to damage by any number of outside forces.
Changing tastes.
Rising costs.
And once in a while, the cruel winds of politics.
Credit: Thomas Lake
Credit: Thomas Lake
A picture goes on Facebook, and controversy follows
One day in 1963, an announcement blared through the intercom at Riverland Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale. Wolfskill was 10 years old. President John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated.
About five years later, she came home to find her mother crying. Kennedy’s brother Robert, then a U.S. senator, had also been shot to death.
Wolfskill didn’t closely follow the news, but all these years later the Kennedy name still meant something to her. And so she was pleasantly surprised on Monday, Aug. 11, when the late president’s nephew — also the namesake son of the late senator — walked into Cherokee Rose for an early dinner.
He looked like his father, she thought.
Unmistakably a Kennedy.
He shook her hand.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, had an entourage of about seven people, Wolfskill recalled. Secret Service agents sat across the room while Kennedy and two aides took Table 11, near a low stage where musicians sometimes play. Kennedy asked Wolfskill for a recommendation. Wolfskill said her two favorites were the filet and the prime rib.
He ordered the prime rib, with collard greens and jalapeno corn pudding.
As she did her work, Wolfskill heard snatches of conversation. A woman with a laptop computer was talking with Kennedy about the shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wolfskill says it was then she realized why Kennedy was in town.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Even someone as news avoidant as Wolfskill knew a bit about what happened Aug. 8, when a gunman fired more than 500 rounds at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta and DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose died trying to stop him.
Kennedy finished his dinner, thanked Wolfskill, and said some nice things about the food. Wolfskill asked if he’d be in a picture. Kennedy agreed. Standing by the bar, he put his left arm around her shoulder. They both smiled.
Thinking it would be helpful in promoting the restaurant, Wolfskill posted the picture on Facebook. She finished her shift and went home.
The next morning, a friend called her.
“Your picture’s gone viral,” she says the friend told her. “You might want to get security.”
What Wolfskill was about to find out is that Kennedy has a lot of detractors in metro Atlanta, especially in deep-blue DeKalb County. Kennedy serves a boundary-pushing Republican president. He has antagonized CDC employees so much and so often that some of them blame him for helping create the conditions that led to the shooting.
When Wolfskill got to work the next day, a co-worker said someone had called the restaurant and cursed her out. Wolfskill went on Facebook and deleted the picture.
But the damage was done. There were more angry calls, angry voicemails, angry emails. There was talk of a boycott. There were also a bunch of new one-star reviews online.
“I hope you are run out of business for serving that piece of trash RFK,” someone wrote on Google. “and I hope you all catch incurable diseases and die!!!”
Someone phoned the restaurant to ‘call her a fascist’
Tuesday at Cherokee Rose, eight days after the Kennedy visit, the bartender is holding a blowtorch. She’s making a smoked cocktail called Elysium. Wolfskill walks by, carrying plates in those trembling hands, and the plates rattle softly.
Restaurant owner Jonathan Hartnett sits in a chair near the front door. The door has a handle made of a deer’s antler.
“Everybody who walks through that door is gonna get the same service, no matter what,” Hartnett says.
He named the restaurant after the state flower of Georgia, a large white blossom with a golden center and a short blooming season. A page about the Cherokee Rose from Georgia College & State University notes that “favorable conditions will produce a second flowering in the fall of the year.”
Hartnett says a lot of people doubted him when he set out to open a high-end restaurant in Stone Mountain village. But it has built a loyal and diverse following. Cherokee Rose blurs the lines between a barbecue joint and an upscale steakhouse. Swimmer, a salesman by day and a Cherokee Rose server by night, says he grew up in Stone Mountain and never previously saw a restaurant this good in this town. Ann Wolfskill’s first name is on the menu, attached to the chocolate pecan pie whose ingredients include the homemade coffee liqueur she gives to friends at Christmastime.
Credit: Thomas Lake
Credit: Thomas Lake
Yes, Hartnett says. Someone did call the restaurant and ask to speak with Ann, “so they could call her a fascist.”
But he got pictures of two other people standing on the corner holding signs that said WE LOVE CHEROKEE ROSE.
While some customers stayed away, and perhaps told friends to do the same, others made a point of showing up and/or posting brand-new five-star reviews. It evened out. Hartnett says the numbers have held steady since the incident.
Around 7:30 p.m., someone changes the channel on the TVs above the bar. The Braves lead the White Sox, 2-0. The dining room holds a range of customers. Two sharply dressed men. A young man in a ball cap. A woman with a tattoo sleeve. Outside it was raining for a while, but now the rain has stopped.
Wolfskill checks on her tables and then takes a short break. She’ll be here until after midnight. A reporter asks if there is a lesson to be learned from this whole episode.
“Lessons are,” she says, “I’m never gonna post a political figure picture the rest of my life.”
She gets back to work. Dusk is visible through the front windows. Cars pass on Main Street. The Braves lose the lead, gain it back, lose it again. They will eventually come back for an astonishing 11-10 victory. Wolfskill refills a water glass. It glows in the candlelight.
She has lost count of all her bosses of the last 58 years. Were there 30? Maybe 40? Regardless, she says, Hartnett is the best she ever had. She kept apologizing, and he kept telling her she’d done nothing wrong, and they both kept working in a place they loved.
For an outside observer, one memory keeps coming back. A scene from the dinner rush of that Tuesday night. The bartender sets a bottle on a high shelf, a clear glass bottle of red-gold liquid, and for one long moment the bottle wavers, high above the floor, as if it might fall and shatter.
But it settles down and does not fall.
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