For Evelyn Wallace, preparing lunch every day is like cooking for family, only the crowd numbers about 100. It’s homestyle cooking at The Bovina Café, a non-descript board-and-batten diner just off I-20 east of Vicksburg.
And the family, that’s the way Evelyn feels about her regular customers, is now into the third generation enjoying her food. The atmosphere is so downhome that some of her patrons often take their plates to the kitchen for washing.
“Some come so often that if they don’t show up for a few days, I check the obits or call the funeral home,” she laughed.
It’s so much like family that when the café was closed a few years ago after a fire, customers pitched in to help get it repaired and open again.
About 50 people can be seated at tables and in booths in a room painted yellow and trimmed in red, and a few pictures decorate the walls. On the tables you’ll find condiments with the same labels you might buy for your own kitchen. An old ice cream box is a reminder of bygone days; it holds the desserts.
The meals are served cafeteria-style and include a meat, several vegetables, cornbread, dessert and drink, and it’s all homemade with Evelyn doing most of the cooking. The portions fill the plates, but she says not to worry. “You can eat your lunch here and run three miles and you won’t gain any weight.”
She cooks what the public likes, just the way she cooked for her own family, because “if you have too much of one thing left over too often you take it off the menu.” Her busiest days are usually Thursdays and Fridays, and her most popular dish is jambalaya, served on Fridays. Her employees often take home the leftovers, but she fixes some to-go plates for elderly people at no charge, because “it’s just something I like to do.”
Evelyn grew up on a farm near Big Creek in Calhoun County where almost everything the family ate was what they raised. She learned to cook by watching her grandmother and her mother in the kitchen, but, “Sometimes I would go back to Mother and say, ‘Where did I go wrong? It’s not quite like yours.’ It’s just getting that knack to make it just right.”
Her years in the food business began when her children were in kindergarten. Evelyn and her husband were building a home at Willow Creek, and she’d go for hamburgers at what Allen Kitchens called The Chicken Box, next to his service station at Bovina. His wife, Linda, ran the cash register. Her children were also in kindergarten, and she asked Evelyn if she would work part-time so the two could swap times of taking the children to school and picking them up.
Eventually Evelyn went to work full-time. David Wright took over the business for a year, and, after he left, the Kitchenses asked Evelyn if she wanted to run the restaurant.
“I said I guess so, if I wanted a job,” she said. “And to this day I tell people, ‘Don’t let Linda Kitchens talk you into working part-time.'”
Workdays are long ones for Evelyn. In addition to lunch, The Bovina Café also serves breakfast, and customers often are waiting for the 5 a.m. opening. She is up at 2:30 each morning, but by the time she gets to work her husband has already turned on the grill and made the coffee.
The café’s breakfast hours are from 5 until 10:30, and lunch is served from 11 until 2:30. It is closed on weekends, but Evelyn finds it hard to cook for just two. She’d rather go out and enjoy somebody else’s cooking.
Evelyn laughs at the old adage, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Instead, she says, “Healthy? Maybe. Wealthy? No. And wise? Very doubtful. If I was wise I wouldn’t be working.”
Restaurants are often gathering places for friends, and, among the early-to-rise customers at The Bovina Café are men who sit at the same table and swap gems of wisdom. They are Evelyn’s husband, Tom, Lee Pennebaker, Glen Kittrell and Sam Price. One day Sam told her, “You should hand out diplomas when you get up from that table.” On another occasion, the group started discussing religion, and Sam commented, “I think I’m going to call the pope. He could learn something.”
Though most of her customers are regulars, some travelers plan their trips to make sure they’re at Bovina during lunch. Some see the café from the highway and stop to dine. One such customer was the owner of a national restaurant chain, who, just passing by, chose the place for his birthday meal.
In her 35 years of serving about a hundred people a day she’s seldom had a sorehead and only once has she given someone his money back and asked him to leave, a mind-boggling statistic when you do the math.
“Word of mouth is my best advertising,” she said. “You won’t find us on the Internet because I’m computer illiterate and have no ambition to learn.”
“I tell people I’m the best restaurant in Bovina,” she said. “They can’t argue with that.”
Bring your appetite. The Bovina Cafe, 191 Tiffintown Road, is open from 5 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The restaurant is along the south Frontage Road at the Bovina Exit off Interstate 20.
STORY Gordon Cotton
PHOTOGRAPHS Melanie Thortis
