When Jimmy and Britton Gammill began cooking tamales in their kitchen more than 25 years ago, they weren’t exactly the best in town.

It all started after the death of local woman known for her tamales. The Gammills decided to attempt cooking tamales and gathered family and friends one Saturday for a cookout and tamales.

“They were terrible,” the Gammills’ son, David said. “But they had put in all this time and effort and money, so we ate them. We ate them all week. Me and my sister would get a tamale for breakfast and one thrown in for lunch.”

Britton admits it took a good year before their tamale recipe was perfected.

“Tamales are so labor intensive, and you have to cook them for three hours,” she said. “The more you do it, the more you improve on what it needs, more salt, less salt or whatever it might be.”

Once the tamales were perfected, the Gammills gained a tamale following.

“We have a pretty good sized family, and we would give them to family members because you make a big batch at a time,” she said. “It got to where we had friends saying, ‘Next time you make tamales, make me some. I would be happy to pay you for them.’”

The Gammills eventually decided to open a restaurant — but hadn’t yet decided on a name.

David and his sister, Poppy, had started a joke between the two of them during the tamale-perfecting process that happened in their parents’ house.

“We kept saying that mom was going to become a fat mama from eating all the mistakes,” David said, laughing. “We decided to let my parents in on the joke, and when somebody said Fat Mama’s Tamales, it was just like a light bulb went off.”

Fat Mama’s opened in June 1989 in a log cabin across from their current location on Canal Street.

“The first day they sold out,” Gammill said. “And the second day they sold out, too, and it just kept going.”

After a while customers began requesting chili, beer and other items, so Fat Mama’s began expanding its menu.

Fat Mama’s soon needed more space as well.

The Canal Street log cabin which housed the restaurant was only 600-square-feet, and the National Park Service was seeking to take the cabin for development, so Fat Mama’s began searching for a new location.

NPS allowed Fat Mama’s Tamales to remain in the cabin until a new location was established.

Fat Mama’s Tamales remained in the little log cabin until Aug. 15, 2008, when it relocated to 303 S. Canal St., just across the street from the cabin.

David now runs Fat Mama’s and has expanded it beyond just tamales, with menu items including nachos, po’ boys, taco soup, Mexican cornbread and other dishes.

Fat Mama’s also has an online store where people from all across the world — as far away as Switzerland and Hong Kong — order Fat Mama’s Hot Tamales, Fire and Ice Pickles, and, of course, the restaurant’s famous Knock You Naked margarita mix.

The Internet has really changed the restaurant business in ways Britton says she could not have imagined.

“You can have a slow day in Natchez, but if you have a good day on the Internet, it changes the whole game,” she said.

Beyond tamales and margaritas, David has worked during the past several years to ensure Fat Mama’s contributes to making Natchez a great city in which to live, focusing that work through the Krewe of Fat Mama’s and the promotion of visual art in town.

Fat Mama’s started a crowd funding Kickstarter campaign last year to pay for 25 fiberglass donkey sculptures that would be painted by local artists in honor of Fat Mama’s 25th birthday this year.

While the restaurant did not raise the $40,000 it had hoped, Fat Mama’s purchased five donkeys to be painted by local artists. The donkeys will be displayed at the restaurant’s celebration on Saturday.

The celebration, which will begin at 11 a.m., will include giveaways, food, beer, a meet-and-greet with the donkey artists and music by Speakeasy, Ben Lewis, The Delta Mountain Boys and others.

The donkeys, David said, represent the efforts Fat Mama’s is making to promote art in Natchez, a cause very important to he and his wife, Devin.

“It’s very important to us that we are not only a restaurant where people like to come and enjoy the food and atmosphere, but also a contributor to the community,” David said.

Britton said she is proud Fat Mama’s has grown to be a place people have loved for 25 years and hopes the same is true for the next 25 years.

“We are just so grateful to all of our customers who have stuck with us through the years,” she said. “My years at Fat Mama’s have been the happiest years of my life.”