After 32 years in business, North Little Rock’s J&J Diner — a soul food restaurant and Friday night pool hall — announced that its doors would remain permanently closed. The fate of the Washington Avenue restaurant has hung in the balance since December 23, when its proprietor and matriarch, Mrs. Joyce Marie Maxon Givens, died unexpectedly after a procedure following heart complications.
Joyce, her sons Harold Givens, 50, and Chevis Givens, 44, told us, was the soul of the restaurant. The fried chicken was a huge draw, Harold said, and especially popular with the regulars who came to shoot pool in the late-night hours, until 1 a.m. on Fridays and until midnight on Saturdays, when the luncheonette transformed into a social club. “They came from miles around — and I’m talking about people hanging out late — for that fried chicken.”
“She was always cooking from the soul,” Chevis said. He’s been hanging out and helping at the restaurant since he was “12 or 13,” he told us. “A lot of people would ask her for a recipe, and she’d say, ‘I don’t have no recipe!’ When it came to how much salt to sprinkle over her signature cabbage, Chevis said, “she’d have her ancestors talking to her, saying, ‘OK, stop there. That’s enough.’”
Stories from the soul food spot have become fond memories for the Givens family. Harold was in high school when Joyce opened the restaurant, and spent plenty of weekends chopping celery, onion and bell pepper for Sunday chicken-and-dressing. Kitchen know-how, her sons told us, came from Joyce’s roots as a family cook before she and her brother, the late Johnny Lee Maxon, opened J&J in 1991. Joyce was the kind of person everybody tried to persuade to cook for the family picnic, because, as Harold said, “You didn’t have to worry about it tasting …” (He trailed off politely, but we got the point.)
Harold recalled a time when comedian Antonio Fargas — most famous for playing “Huggy Bear” on the late ’70s-era buddy-crimefighting-duo TV series “Starsky & Hutch,” had a gig in town, and ended up wandering into the dining room at J&J. “He walked in and he said, ‘I can tell this is a real soul food joint; You got white people eating in here!’ And everybody just fell out.”
Another day, Harold recalled, a big bus pulled up outside the diner. “And five or six guys got off this bus and asked, ‘Did we have any food?’ And my mom’s not turning down any money, so they came in and they ate. And come to find out, these guys were The Platters! We went to the liquor store, and they stayed all night. Those guys were so down to earth. Oh my God, we had a time that night.”
Joyce loved the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Dallas Cowboys, Chevis told us. And she “valued having fun every day,” Harold said. “She did stuff her way. If you didn’t like it, don’t come to her restaurant. Because you know what you’re gonna get. The same person. She was the same person every day.”
Marking her passing, the city of North Little Rock made a proclamation that January 4, 2024 would be designated as Joyce Marie Maxon Givens Day. When it rolls around in 2025, Harold said, the family plans to “party like rock stars.”