Stur 22 owner Charles Brewer reflects on journey

“I was following the hype,” said Brewer, who opened his first Stur 22 on South Street in 2017 and then followed that up with a second location four years later. “I was like, ‘It’s downtown. I should get double what I was getting (on South Street).'”

Sadly, it never materialized.

He envisioned Husker Saturdays with people lining up outside Stur 22, 1320 O St., to feast on his award-winning chicken wings.

He hoped the same clientele who embraced his West African cuisine at the first restaurant would make the short drive downtown.

And he thought that the nearby students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln would consider Stur 22’s bowls a can’t-miss lunch option.

As a result, Brewer, the 43-year-old native of West Africa who moved to Fort Worth, Texas, as a boy and earned a scholarship to play small-college football in Nebraska a couple of decades ago, closed his restaurant last week.

On Friday, Brewer sat inside the dining area of the downtown restaurant — the lime-green chairs stacked upside down on the table tops — as a handful of lunchtime regulars knocked on the door, wondering why he wasn’t open for business.

He contemplated the past decade — that moment he dared to bring the foods his mother made him in Liberia, the recipes he and Gertrude tweaked for three years to be something Americans would eat.

Make no mistake, Lincoln ate Brewer’s food — maybe not with the frequency required to keep Stur 22’s lights on, but those who tried it usually liked it. 

“I think they did embrace it,” he said. “But it was so new. Still to this day, we’d get people who hadn’t heard of it. Seven years later, they had never been to this place. … I think my food was quality. We should have had more attention.”

Brewer isn’t bitter. If anything, he’s relieved. When you’re a small-business owner — especially one that runs a business where consistency is the cornerstone — long days and hours become the norm.

“I’m not a control person, but my food has got to be high quality, so I was in here 12, 13, 14 hours a day, every day. I was chained to this place.

“It’s time for me to be done. I’ve been doing this for so long. I lost about 50 pounds since I’ve been doing this.”

Brewer never had any intention of opening a restaurant. He had no idea how to cook when he was young. But he excelled in football — a defensive back — which brought him to Concordia University in Seward in the early 2000s, and he eventually found his way to Lincoln.

The plan was for him to open a night spot. He’d worked hard to put together a solid business plan. One of his advisers told him he needed to serve some food — his native food, in fact.

He scoffed at the notion, believing that no one would eat West African food, but after playing with some recipes and adopting a fusion between the foods of Africa and the Caribbean, he found that people really liked what he was cooking.

Proof of that came with a couple of popup dinners at the Rock Island Social Club, where he sold out in mere hours and walked away with $2,000 each night.

He had something he could sell, but the Historic Haymarket district was way too expensive for him, so he ended up taking over the Rock Island Social Club location in Rathbone Village and opening Stur 22 in 2017.

And in those early years, business was great. Much of that, he would later learn, was because the residents of the nearby Country Club neighborhood — many of whom were seasoned travelers — often frequented the restaurant. There was no need to explain the nuance of jerk seasoning or the foods that simmered in pots all day, bursting with different spices and flavors.

The plan was to grow Stur 22 into something big. The second restaurant was the first big step, but in hindsight, that second restaurant might have been more successful in south Lincoln.

There were problems that went far beyond a pandemic that shut down downtown. Parking was also a problem he never could conceive of when things eventually reopened.

Having grown up in Fort Worth, parking was always just part of the adventure when going out on the town. You might have to search and pay a few bucks, but “it was part of the experience,” he said.

“Lincoln is still trying to figure that out,” he said. “I bought into the hype of downtown.”

Brewer isn’t finished. He’s ready for a break and perhaps a return to education. He worked in the financial aid department at Southeast Community College for years and might go back.

He also has a line of sauces and rubs that he sells online, and is contemplating the possibility of someday opening up a small night spot that specializes in jazz music.