Thomasena's Takeout serves fresh deep-fried fish and chicken all day & 100 other combinations to fit your taste buds. CALL-INS TAKEN TUES. - FRI. 11AM-2PM
The Trentonian wrote the first article about us.
By JOEY KULKIN
[email protected]
TRENTON — Fish and grits all day. $5.
Those are the six most popular words on a plastic sandwich board in front of the door at the southeasat corner of Spring and Calhoun streets, home of Thomasena’s Takeout, where five-dollar fish and grits sell like hotcakes between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. thanks to a 40-year-old owner by the name of Venice Johnson. He lived the first 30 years of his life as a Trenton statistic — no parents, raised by a righteous grandmother but roaming the streets anyway smoking and selling weed, doing a little time at the workhouse — only to grow up and reinvent himself as a businessman and restaurateur. “I wasn’t satisfied with the food around here. I wasn’t satisfied with the prices,” Johnson said the other day. “The ‘hood deserves this.” “This” is Thomasena’s Takeout, which has been open for five weeks. In the days leading up to the four-week anniversary, Johnson told Trentonian TV talk show host Freedom Green that going to “West Bubble” (slang for “the hood”) to find decent eats became tiresome. Either the fish and grits cost too much, or didn’t satisfy his taste buds, or the service turned him off, or all three. No stranger to the selling of wares — incense and oils in his 20s, books in his 30s — Johnson expanded his business reach into the food arena as a 40-year-old. Following through on the idea to sell fish and grits and chicken and waffles and about 100 other combinations of breakfast, lunch and dinner was not a leap of faith because the 1990 Trenton High grad held a variety of jobs at Denny’s (10 years as server) and then Trenton Country Club (five years as a bartender, locker room attendant and server). The devout man of God made the idea more personal when he chose the street he grew up on to open Thomasena’s Takeout: Spring at the corner of Calhoun. Drugs! Murder! Ghetto! “It’s really not that bad,” Johnson said. The soft-spoken man took over an empty building that used to be called Dee’s Place, which served soul food, and assembled the pieces to open the same kind of place with his own spin and flavor. He hired a 6-foot-5 chef by the name of Donald Riley, then gave work to a tireless prep guy by the name of William Roman, and then Johnson opened the doors to Thomasena’s Takeout and sounded the clarion call: fish and grits all day for $5! Several places in Trenton serve fried fish. The difference is that fish at Thomasena’s is fresh, never frozen. Same with the wings. Everything is plucked from a refrigerated display case and dropped into the deep-fryer full of peanut oil; Johnson has done the research and knows which places use peanut oil. There aren’t many because it’s expensive. “They have the best wings here because they fry it in peanut oil — it takes it to another level,” a customer by the name of John said Saturday morning. As for the fish, he said, “if I run into bone, I’m shutting it down. But the fish here is clean and boneless, and it’s fried to perfection. I would like to have the secret recipe, but they won’t give it up.” Only Johnson and Riley know the secret recipe. Speaking of secrecy, Johnson showed his business savvy in the hush-hush way he scouted Riley. Riley, 42 is a Trenton High grad who has cooked for about 20 years. He was working the grill at ShopRite on North Olden when a guy he’d never seen before showed up one day in the middle of a busy shift. He was cooking fried and grilled chicken and steaming fresh veggies and eggplant and doing the whole kitchen thing. The anonymous guy proceeds to pepper Riley with question after question about food and preparation and everything else culinary. Some fellas in this situation might have told the guy to get lost or politely asked him to come back another time. Riley answered every question until the guy left. He didn’t think much of it until a guy by the name of Venice Johnson asked him to meet at 141 Spring Street. “I was, like, ‘You were the guy at ShopRite!’” Riley said laughing. “I liked the way Donnie handled the pressure,” Johnson said of that ShopRite test. “I asked a whole bunch of questions back-to-back-to-back. I thought he was busy, and he kept his composure.” Now that he was inside the soon-to-be Thomasena’s, Riley faced his most obvious test: cooking for Johnson and five of his friends: shrimp scampi and chicken alfredo and several other not-so-easy dishes. Johnson and his buddies killed those plates, and Thomasena’s had its chef. “I love dealing with the public,” Riley said Saturday morning amid a busy breakfast crowd. “And feeding people brings me joy.” Riley said the secret to frying great fish is peanut oil and seasonings “and the fish has to be fresh.” Even though the optimum time to fry fish is 2 minutes and 30 seconds, Riley leaves it in for 3:40 because “most people around here want their fish well-done. It’s flaky, juicy and crisp at 3:40.” Thomasena’s serves basa, whiting, tilapia and porgies. You’ll always know porgies because it has bones, but it’s not as easy to tell the difference between basa, whiting and tilapia unless you eat fish for a living. Even the best fish eaters are prone to being snookered, and one of the things Johnson takes pride in is telling customers the truth, a virtue his Grandma Thomasena instilled at a young age. She began raising him when he was 8. “She wasn’t that good of a cook,” he told Freedom Green, “but she was a heck of a woman. She had my back ... and I love her and miss her. And she was tough, she gave it to you like it is. Just like we do here. We don’t tell you basa is flounder when it’s not flounder. We tell you it’s basa.” Basa’s slang name is “swai” and according to Tightwad Tod at consumerreports.com, swai “is native to Southeast Asia — Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia” The white-flesh fish is similar to catfish and has “a sweet, mild taste.” Venice Johnson is a sweet, mild-mannered man but admits to being anal about the way he runs his eatery, about the way he wants his employees to perform. Everything must be precise. He thinks before he speaks, and he doesn’t raise his voice; you have to pay attention to what rolls off his tongue. His words are worth paying attention to, however, because they are full of wisdom. He’s a smart businessman. “I’d rather make a quarter off four people than a dollar off one,” he says, which says a lot about the way his mind works, and he tells every customer “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Venice Johnson smoked pot for the first time when he was 11. In Trenton, that kind of start should have led him to a life of trouble with the law and prison time and recidivism. Many Trenton men cannot live unless they’re locked up time and again. Johnson chose not to be one of the statistics. He has two boys and four girls, a “phenomenal” girfriend by the name of Nicole Davis who stands by her man and pushes him in the right direction, which is why he chooses the straight and narrow. “The risk is too high,” he said. Johnson said he hasn’t smoked weed in eight years. Like every man “I struggle within myself, but I handle it within myself.” It’s the age-old struggle that pits good and evil. and the owner of Thomasena’s raises his voice just a bit to proclaim “I’ve been winning.”
