At Miss Amber's Café in Wedowee, Alabama, it’s all about family

Published On: 12.10.23 |

By: Jennifer Kornegay / Alabama Living

At Miss Amber’s Café in Wedowee, Alabama, it’s all about family

The Miss Amber’s Café team, from left: Rae Orgeron, owner Amber Conger, her daughter Brittany Olvey and her son Levi Allums. (Jennifer Kornegay / Alabama Living)

You’ll find some real sweet stuff at Miss Amber’s Café in downtown Wedowee: rich peanut butter cake, strawberry-lemon cupcakes, cinnamon-laced monkey bites and tart key lime pie. There’s even a saccharine note in the chicken salad.

But the sweetness isn’t confined to the food. It’s also floating in the air as Amber Conger, the restaurant’s namesake and owner, sprinkles “Hi, Suga!” and drizzles “Sure, Honey!” into her interactions with every diner who comes through the door. Plus, as Conger explains, the little eatery’s got a pretty sweet story, too.

“This spot was a coffee shop for 13 years, and then, in December 2016, it kinda landed in my lap,” Conger says. She spent a decade working at another local restaurant and then a few years running a barbecue joint from the town’s Exxon station when the owner said he was going to close. “I got that news just a few days before I got a call from the lady who had the coffee shop. Her husband had died, and she was ready to pursue something different, so she asked if I wanted to take over the space. I believe the Lord did that,” Conger says.

She said yes and reopened the space as Miss Amber’s Café in January 2017. From day one, family has combined with Conger’s sweet, friendly ways to form the foundation for the café’s success. Her son, daughter and best friend of 20 years run Miss Amber’s with her. It’s just the four of them composing a team that Conger calls “a blessing.”

Amber Conger holds a plate of the Trio Sampler as she welcomes guests to the dining area. (Jennifer Kornegay / Alabama Living)

A couple of years after opening, Conger’s daughter Brittany Olvey, nicknamed Toot, pushed her mom to expand the café’s original menu. Today, the café serves a wide range of American and specifically Southern classics. There are beefy burgers, like the Big Green Machine layered with provolone, bacon and a fried green tomato. There’s a long list of sandwiches, including a hot fried bologna and cheese and a fried chicken sandwich. The hot dogs, like the Hot Diggity bacon-wrapped wiener with pimento cheese and jalapeños, are always hits. And a weekly special on Thursdays, the Trio Sampler plate, includes Miss Amber’s chicken salad, with its finely shredded meat, a hint of mayo, some sweet pickle relish and another sweet but secret ingredient, alongside tangy pasta salad and a giggly square of the fruity-yet-salty strawberry-pretzel salad.

Then, Olvey took things further with the addition of Toot’s Sweets at Miss Amber’s, her line of fresh-made desserts and treats, including all the aforementioned sweets plus her most popular delight, red velvet cake, that are always available at the café.

Miss Amber’s also offers meals to-go, a move made during the pandemic and restaurant shutdowns. “When COVID hit, we came up with the idea to do hot meals for pickup at dinnertime,” Conger says. “We would not have survived without that, but it just took off, so we kept at it.”

She examined sales figures, found the best-selling selections and turned them into freezer meals that anyone can grab to take home. “We’ve got breakfast casserole, meatloaf, buffalo chicken over fire-roasted potatoes and more,” Conger says. In all, about 20 dishes rotate throughout the week. Last year, Conger estimates, she sold more than 2,500 meals in her tiny town.

In every bite, family again plays a key role, with multiple family recipes appearing in the freezer cases and on the menu, including Maw Maw’s dressing and a macaroni casserole Conger vividly remembers her mother making and taking to every family function.

A family function is a good description of lunchtime at Miss Amber’s, where regulars, including residents and weekend visitors to Lake Wedowee, are rewarded for their loyalty by being treated like aunts, cousins and brothers. “I know them by name, know what they want to drink,” Conger says. “I love seeing them and chatting and babying the kids that come in.”

The trio sampler is a big hit at Miss Amber’s featuring her chicken salad, the strawberry-pretzel salad and tri-color pasta salad. (Jennifer Kornegay / Alabama Living)

While diners choose from what’s offered, family gets what it wants, so when folks begged Conger to continue a breakfast bar that she’d tried out on a few Saturdays, she obliged. “They loved it,” she says. The bar is built around Maw Maw’s cathead biscuits, and the line begins forming well before Miss Amber’s opens for the morning meal.

The big biscuits are one of the café’s signature items, and many a morning, Conger turns up her kitchen radio and rolls out eight or nine dozen, each of which gets a little love pat before going in the oven. “Sometimes, you can still see indentions of my fingers on the top,” she says. “I get in a groove and really enjoy making them.”

Conger does not enjoy paperwork, so Olvey steps in to handle the business side of the business. “I’m the drill sergeant in the back,” Olvey says with a laugh.

The sweet spirit at Miss Amber’s is also evident in her cheery, colorful décor dominated by messages proclaiming peace and kindness, and art created by locals that enliven the 130-year-old building. Three wooden planks emblazoned with college football teams hang high and point to Conger’s allegiance, but also her desire to satisfy her customers.

“I’m originally from Georgia, and I’m a huge Georgia fan, but I put Auburn and Alabama on the wall, too, for my regulars,” she says. “At the end of the day, it’s all about them. That’s why I’m here. I just want to feed my community and work alongside my kids.”