When Kitt Williams was 8, she took a break from watching Gilligan’s Island to look for a snack in the kitchen—a simple quest that would become a pivotal career moment. Spying her mom’s leftover cornbread on the counter, she used it to make a ham and cheese sandwich.
“I loved the taste of it,” Williams says. “From that moment on, every time she had cornbread, I would make a cornbread sandwich.”
Now Williams owns Kitt’s Kornbread Sandwich and Pie Bar in downtown Jefferson. Hungry customers often line up down the block for her cornbread creation—two decades after it debuted.
But the journey to her culinary empire was anything but linear.
Williams and her mother, Sarah Rosetta Williams, moved from Dallas to Jefferson, a small town about 45 miles northwest of Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1992 to open a bed and breakfast. But when Sarah received a breast cancer diagnosis, the duo returned to the Metroplex for her treatments.
They eventually moved back to Jefferson and turned the bed and breakfast into a diner to make use of Sarah’s culinary talents. “She could look in the refrigerator and see five things and find a whole meal out of that,” Kitt says.
In 2003, the duo moved downtown to open Jefferson’s House of Pies, an eatery that whipped up sweet and savory dishes, from Cajun meat pies to buttermilk pies. As the business grew, diners repeatedly requested sandwiches.
“I thought, ‘Well, if I ever do a sandwich, it’s going to have to be something different,’ ” Kitt says.
One of the signature menu items was Sarah’s famous chicken and dumplings soup, which they started pairing with broccoli cornbread. One day, Kitt had a flashback to her childhood in the kitchen.
“The broccoli cornbread smells really good coming out of the oven,” she explains. “And it just hit me: oh, cornbread sandwich. I used to do that, and I wonder if other people would want that.”
It proved to be an instant hit.
When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, it also affected Jefferson’s tourism traffic, Kitt says, prompting the Williamses to shut down the business and sell everything. After a few unsuccessful months of selling food at Canton’s First Monday Trade Days, a massive flea market closer to Dallas, Kitt’s dread of having to work an office job inspired her to return to Jefferson and reopen the business with the cornbread sandwich as the star of the menu.
They reopened in their old location but quickly outgrew it as demand spiked. Kitt found a larger space in 2009, in a nearby former drugstore that needed a total renovation.
The booths and tables were a bargain, a $300 yard sale find, and the oven was a steal on eBay. The bar was delivered an hour before the grand opening of Kitt’s Kornbread Sandwich and Pie Bar. The old neon sign from Jefferson’s House of Pies has an honorary spot in the front window.
One of Kitt’s main challenges was perfecting the cornbread recipe so it wasn’t too greasy or crumbly. Concocting the top-secret formula for their three flavors—original, broccoli and jalapeño (the most popular)—was a two-year mission that’s constantly tweaked due to supply changes.
On Saturdays, the crowds stack up, like the ham, turkey and cheese between two slices of cornbread.
“If you’ve never had it, we always say you should get the jalapeño club all the way because that has the biggest wow factor when you first bite into it,” Kitt says. Or order the Bigfoot Texan—a double-patty burger smothered with Texas chili, cheese and jalapeños followed by a slice from one of their most popular pies, buttermilk and chocolate pecan.
As the popularity grew, Sarah dove into franchising the business and opened a Carrollton branch in 2013 while also researching how to sell a cornbread bake mix. Three months after opening the new store, Sarah, a 15-year breast cancer survivor, died from stomach cancer, halting the expansion plans.
Kitt shut down the Carrollton location to focus on the original and carry on her mother’s legacy in Jefferson. 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of Kitt’s cornbread sandwich.
“We feel Mom is still here helping us,” Kitt says. “It’s a testament to our ancestry. My mom, my grandmother [and] my great-grandmother all had businesses that flourished even in hard times.”
