Bites Nearby: Mimi's Café

Mimi’s Café at 11702 North Dale Mabry Highway is a restaurant known for good service, quality breakfast and lunch and Mimi’s famous muffins.

What many people don't know is that Mimi’s also offers an excellent dinner menu and good drink prices. The ambiance is pleasant, modeled after the 1940's French bistros and cafes with a pinch of the New Orleans vibe thrown in for spice.

General Manager James Chatterton's 28 years of restaurant experience and professionalism accounts for the smiles on the customers’ faces. Mimi’s runs almost flawlessly and the food is spot on. The French onion soup is the perfect blend of just the right amount of broth, cheese and not too much broccoli and onion. And the corn chowder served with an ice cold beer is the ideal evening refreshment.

Patch recently cornered Chatteron for a Q&A.

Patch: Tell me about your experience in the restaurant business?

Chatterton: I’ve been in the restaurant business for 28 years. I
started out in college with the Steak and Ale Corporation. Norman Brinker
started the Steak and Ale concept. He also started Chili’s. I worked for PoFolks restaurants and Sonny’s Barbeque. I was the general manager at Sonny’s barbeque for 15 years. And then I owned my own café for about two or three years. And I’ve been here going on six years.

Patch: What has changed about Mimi’s in the six years that you have been here?

Chatterton: The foods stay pretty much the same, but we have menu changes about every three months with certain items like our feature items. Everybody likes the muffins. That never changes. They’re home cooked. We actually have a commissary across country in California. All of our prep stuff is shipped from there.

Patch: Why does Mimi’s continue to be so successful?

Chatterton: Because we give great service, great products, great food and the prices are really good. We’re very competitive. We have pretty much anything you want on our menu. We have salads. We have steak if you want a steak. We have fish. We do breakfast, lunch and dinner. We open at 7 a.m. every morning and we close at 10 p.m. on the weekdays and 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturdays.

Patch: How does Mimi’s maintain such good wait staff?

Chatterton: We have a lot of help that comes and stays around for years. We have some servers that have been here since day one. You’ll hardly ever hear that. We still have three or four of them. Usually that doesn’t happen, because a husband or somebody gets a job somewhere else.

Patch: Are you going after a certain age group or demographic?

Chatterton: Not really. We’re here for everybody. We have a great kids menu. We cater to everybody, to the young and the old. We do a lot of salads during the day. We do have a lot of elderly people who come in for our muffins. They love our muffins.

Patch: What is something that people don’t know about this place?

Chatterton: Everybody considers Mimi’s a breakfast and lunch place and not a dinner place. Everybody comes in and eats breakfast on Saturday and Sunday, but we do a tremendous dinner also. We have a very broad menu. A lot of people don’t think of us as a place to go out to dinner. And all the newer Mimi’s now have full bars. We’re looking into that, too. We’re owned by the Bob Evans Corporation. We used to be owned by Arthur J. Simms and his family. And the place is named after a young French woman Arthur met in France during World War II.