Chicago's Mac & Cheese Queen Built a Home in the Curb Market: The Story of Navena Moore and Auntie Vee's Kitchen
The BeltLine News — Business Spotlight
The Municipal Market on Edgewood Avenue — the Sweet Auburn Curb Market, Atlanta's oldest public market — has fed this city for generations. Farmers, butchers, bakers, and lunch counters have come and gone inside its walls on the same historic ground where Dr. King grew up. These days, if you follow the smell of jerk spice and baked cheese through the market, you'll land at a counter run by a woman everybody just calls Auntie Vee.
Her name is Navena Moore, and before Atlanta ever tasted her mac and cheese, Chicago already knew.
The Leap
Moore did not come up through restaurant kitchens. She was a managing broker — a professional with a career, a title, and the steady 9-to-5 life that comes with it. And like a lot of founders whose stories we tell, she reached the point where steady wasn't enough.
Tired of the typical 9-to-5, she stepped out on faith and created Auntie Vee's Kitchen. In an interview about Black entrepreneurship, she explained that the drive to create was simply in her — a gift, she said, and one she believes more people carry than they realize. Ownership, in her telling, is about freedom: knowing the value of being, as she put it, "in charge of your own limits."
Her advice to anyone standing where she once stood comes down to two short sentences: know your worth, and trust your vision.
The business's own listing traces Auntie Vee's Kitchen to 2012, built on what she calls "halal comfort fusion" and great customer service. More than a decade later, both halves of that promise are the whole brand.
The Mac That Made Her Name
In Chicago, Moore earned a reputation that followed her south: she was known as the city's premier maker of mac and cheese. In 2015 she took the top honor at Chicago's Mac & Cheese Fest — and the dish that built that name is still the centerpiece of her Atlanta menu.
It's called the Kamal'ee Mac: boneless chopped jerk chicken and tri-color peppers folded into her mac and cheese, topped with crushed tortilla chips and finished with the kitchen's signature "magic sauce." It is not your grandmother's mac and cheese — it is a Chicago champion wearing Caribbean colors, and it tells you everything about how this kitchen thinks.
That thinking runs through the whole menu. The grits come loaded — grilled chicken, jerk chicken, salmon, or oxtails — under melty shredded cheese, bell peppers, and onions, zig-zagged with your choice of three sauces. There are rice bowls, hearty sandwiches, Caribbean-style chimichangas, even oxtail pizza, plus desserts like peach cobbler and pound cake and three house-made lemonade flavors to wash it all down. Reviewers say the portions are generous and the wait can be long — and that it is totally worth it.
Soul Food, With a Distinction
Plenty of counters serve soul food. Very few serve it like this: the meats at Auntie Vee's Kitchen are halal-certified ,a distinction that sets the kitchen apart in Atlanta's comfort-food landscape and opens its tables to customers many soul food spots never reach. It's right there in the name she gave her cooking — halal comfort fusion — Southern and Caribbean traditions on one plate, made for everybody.
Moore's touch shows up in the small things, too. Her famous oatmeal cookies, by her own telling, were born one day when she walked into a kitchen just to release some creative energy — and got them right the first time.
"100% Effort, Every Day"
Auntie Vee's also rolls as a food truck around greater Atlanta, but the Curb Market counter is home base, and the energy there matches the sign-off on nearly every one of the kitchen's posts to its 31,000-plus Instagram followers: "100% effort EVERY DAY! We pray you all enjoy your orders. We appreciate all the support!!!"
That's the whole story in one caption. A broker who bet on herself. A Chicago mac and cheese champion who brought her crown to Sweet Auburn. A kitchen feeding the market the way an auntie feeds family — big plates, open doors, and nobody turned away from the table.
On Edgewood Avenue, that's not just a business model. It's a tradition — and Navena Moore is keeping it.
Auntie Vee's Kitchen
📍 The Municipal Market, 209 Edgewood Ave SE, Atlanta, GA 30303
📞 (470) 990-2709
🕐 Mon 12–7 · Tue–Wed 11:30–7 · Thu–Sat 11:30–8 · Sun closed
🌐 auntievees.com — online ordering available
📸 Instagram: @auntie_vees
👩🏾🍳 Founder: Navena Moore
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