Table for you: Down-home dining

See Brenda's Place

Ask Brenda Glueck to sum up the idea behind her down-home diner, Brenda's Place, and you'll get a succinct answer.

"It's all about home cooking, honey."

With a relaxed atmosphere and food that comes strictly from the made-from-scratch, home-cooking tradition, Glueck said her restaurant is a place where customers, and employees, are made to feel right at home.

That atmosphere -- along with the food, of course -- is what keeps Brenda's huge cast of regulars coming back, and what turns many new faces into regulars after just one visit.

Mary Crowden, center, served Bette Ruester, left, and Judy Gilbert at Brenda's Place on Friday, August 31, 2007. (Kit Doyle)

"Once they come for the first time, they always say 'We will be back,'" Glueck said.

What brings them back?

"The good food," Glueck says. "And you're down home, you're comfortable in here. Nothing's put on. I've got good waitresses. Just everything, the atmosphere, the food, the prices."

Brenda's is currently celebrating its 10th year in its 602 Morgan Oak St. location. Before that Glueck owned and operated another diner in the site of the current Bel-Air Grill before the former owners of her current building gave her a shot at purchasing the diner.

"There was no place in town to get a home-cooked meal, so I said let's go for it, so that's what we did," Glueck said.

"I just like to cook," said Debbie Lappe, the 10-year-veteran cook at Brenda's Place in Cape Girardeau. (Kit Doyle)

Glueck has years of experience in perfecting her recipes. She started in the food business at 13 years old, when she cooked and waited tables at the old Home Plate restaurant, which was housed in a now-demolished building across from the site of Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus.

Glueck's home-cooking is only available at breakfast and lunch -- she and her crew come in at 4:15 a.m. every day to get start cooking breakfast, which is all made from scratch.

But mornings and middays are busy times at Brenda's Place, with regulars and newbies a common site in the small, inconspicuous diner on Morgan Oak.

The diner has four employees, plus Brenda. Her husband Virgil, an over-the-road trucker, helps out in the kitchen when he's home.

"Everybody helps everybody."

A fried catfish plate waited to be served at Brenda's Place in Cape Girardeau on Friday, August 31, 2007. (Kit Doyle)

Glueck says the menu is full of popular items, but it's her daily specials that really draw in the crowds: ham and beans on Monday, fired chicken on Tuesday, chicken and dumplings every other Wednesday, Thursday's ever-changing variety day and the famous fried catfish dinner on Fridays.

"I will put my catfish on Fridays up against anybody's in Cape," Glueck says, smiling proudly.

Another reason for Brenda's popularity, says Glueck, is the low prices. She says she only raises her prices when she has to keep up with inflation. For the huge portions the Brenda's crew dishes out, her customers get their money's worth, Glueck says.

The basic philosophy is to give her customers an experience that's harder and harder to come by today -- a good, hot home-cooked meal for an affordable price.

"It's just old home-cooked food, and it's hard to find that anymore," Glueck says.