A small Caribbean joint in Stockport is fast becoming a favorite for the rich and famous.
The renowned Mama Flo’s on Buxton Road, just off Stepping Hill Hospital, regularly welcomes the likes of Kyle Walker and Harry Maguire.
In fact, on Wednesday night this week, Walker stopped by for takeout and picked up two orders of Flo’s curried goat with rice and peas and a cornflakes cake as a pudding.
Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, Flo, better known as Florence Coke, said: “I asked him if he would like a portion of steamed vegetables but he said no.
“So I said, ‘Kyle, you’re a footballer, you really should be eating vegetables.’ He is so beautiful. So I plucked up the courage to ask him for a picture.
(Image: Mama Flos)
“He was holding one bag and I was holding the other and I said, ‘I’m not going to get close because of Covid times’ but he didn’t mind at all.”
Florence, 67, had been in City just the day before taking her granddaughter, who plays for the academy, to practice.
“He was asking everything about her, how old she is and how she was,” she continued.
Two other mystery footballers – Flo forgetting their names – also recently drove over from Wilmslow and called ahead to ask them to keep the store open for them as it was about to close.
“The shop was closed because sometimes they don’t want people bothering them. So they came up and said, ‘You guys are footballers!’ and they laughed and said yes. Honestly, I don’t remember their names! But they were so nice and they all love Mama Flos.”
Mama Flo is in Stockport
(Image: Mama Flos)
Other famous regulars include Swansea and West Brom’s Kyle Bartley, Stockport’s Will Mellor, Edwina Currie and Stone Roses icon Ian Brown.
“Ian Brown keeps coming in, I have a picture of us on the wall,” she says.
Florence, who used to sell copies of the Manchester Evening News outside the newspaper’s former Deansgate offices, left her job at the perfume counters at Selfridges in 2010 to open her first takeaway in Gorton.
In 2013 they moved to their current premises in Stockport.
She came to the aid of the community during the lockdown, providing hundreds of free meals to hospitals, care homes and schools, as well as NHS staff and key workers.
Mama Flo provided free meals to NHS workers at her Stockport shop
(Image: Stockport Express)
She often woke up at 4 a.m. to cook for her “Free Food Mondays,” on which she provided meals for nurses, police officers, and ambulances.
When asked what she thinks draws people to her, she says she treats it like home.
“And I make my jerk chicken just like I do back home in Jamaica, in a drum can,” she says. “It’s authentic, real, natural. That attracts people. You can smell it, the charcoal blowing in the air. It is real.
“And I’m a talker, and people love that.”
