Better Than Your Grandma’s Biscuits
A Queens-based couple delivers true Southern goods with their monthly drops.
The Deligram highlights some of the best food artisans making delectable things in and around New York City. Since our recent (and first!) drop, featuring a sundae collab with Bad Habit Ice Creams and L’Appartement 4F, we’ve had ice cream on the brain. But as the weather hits 40-degree temps, it’s time to move into comfort food territory. That’s where Sundays Only comes in — the biscuit delivery service helmed by baker Connay Bratton and author Tembe Denton-Hurst. Read more as the Queens-based couple talked about their dream future plans, the biggest challenges they face, and the dishes that must be on the Thanksgiving table.
The Product: Homemade biscuits that come in assorted flavors like garlic and herb, sweet potato, and funfetti — occasionally with a cute little jar of jam on the side.
How to Buy: Follow @sundays.only to get notifications on their monthly drops and fill out an order form for delivery.
Price: Biscuits are $4-6 each, depending on the flavor.
Tembe: I spent my childhood split between New York and DC, because I had separated parents. My grandmother was in DC, and she makes the best biscuits in the whole world. And being in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with a bunch of other Caribbean people and constantly eating Jamaican food at home, but also having Trinidadian food here, Guyanese food there… I got to experience Black culture and Caribbean culture, and see where they overlap and where that was different.
Whenever all seven of my cousins would all sleep over [at my grandmother’s house], she would have biscuits for breakfast. We'd eat them with honey and jam, and we would just inhale them. Now that she's older, she doesn't really cook anymore, and I remember telling Connay, “Oh, it's Sunday, I really just want some biscuits.” And she was like, “Alright, I'll try them.” She looked up a recipe on Food Network and just made them. They didn't taste anything like my grandmother's, but they were still good. I remember calling and being like, “Grandma, what's the recipe” and she gave us a bit of a blueprint. Connay didn't do it anything like she said, but they ended up still being really good.
Connay: I'm a true Southern baby. I'm from Virginia, from the Hampton area, and then I have family that goes down to North Carolina. Because of that, my roots are soul food. When I started doing the biscuits it was easy for me because it’s another soul food-like staple. I love to cook, but I just feel like baking comes naturally to me because my grandmother used to work in a bakery. My other grandmother on mom's side is also huge into baking. My dad, he's a chef. So he cooks a lot, but he's not a baker. I really got it from my grandparents. The one thing I do enjoy about my cooking, and which is a key part of baking, is just using my hands. When it comes to making biscuits, I'm very hands on. I don't use a lot of machines, even if we have 200 or 300 orders. One reason I do everything by hand, is it’s like I'm giving whoever orders a little piece of love. Every time I get a biscuit, it just reminds me of home.
Tembe: We were just steadily hosting people for brunch, people were coming over, and she was always making biscuits. Every time they were different, she was perfecting the recipe and then it hit a point where I was like, “they're really, really good. They've surpassed my grandmother's biscuits in their uniqueness.” Every time everyone ate them, they were like, “Oh my god, I've never had biscuits like these.” Fast forward to the beginning of the pandemic and I said maybe we should do a little order and see if people want them. Our first set of orders was maybe 14 or 15 people.
Connay: We were hand delivering all these things. When we first started it, it was really fun for us, because our favorite thing after we finished cooking and filling up orders was just riding in the car together. Just driving in a different neighborhood seeing parts of New York we never see because of delivering.
Tembe: We've learned a lot about New York real estate, who lives where and the different neighborhoods. It's always cool to see how closely people live or when two people order from the same building, but they don't know each other. I always find that to be amazing. But delivery is tough, it's hard to master. We're always thinking about whether it is time for us to get a website and do orders that way, but then at the same time, we don't want to lose the spreadsheet aspect of it, because it's really convenient and easy for us to read and move through. Logistics are hard, I think, for any business and I think that that is what the difficult part about scaling. It was harder when it was just the two of us doing everything all the time, but we had so much control over every piece of the process, so giving up some of that control is challenging too.
Connay: First of all, we want to expand so that we can have more people taste them. We’re a small batch company, and we want to make it even bigger. I want to make a biscuit mix for Sundays Only. I always say as the best reference: I want to be the Jiffy of biscuits. Everyone knows that when they have Jiffy, you know what you're going to get and I want that same feeling with Sundays.