Carla's Country Café to close Sept. 30

Carla’s Country Café, a well-known restaurant on Bulldog Drive in Gainesville, is closing after nearly 10 years of feeding area residents. Owner Carla Jenkins said the restaurant’s last day will be Sept. 30 - after serving the after-church crowd the popular Sunday fried-chicken buffet. “We’re going to have a big cake that day and serve everyone a big piece of it to say thanks for all the years of eating with us,” she said.

Carla said she is looking forward to semi-retirement as she joins a new restaurant, the Black Bear Grill, to be opened soon by David and Jimmy Fortner in the former Frank’s Place restaurant on Highway 5 just north of the Gainesville city limits.

She plans to work as a waitress in the new restaurant two or three days a week and then “come home and not worry,” she said. Her daughter Nicole “Nikki” Morgan, who has worked alongside Carla at the Country Café, expects to join the Black Bear Grill wait staff as well. According to the new restaurant's classified ad in this week’s Times, the restaurant this week began accepting applications for full-time and part-time chef/line cook, prep cooks, dishwashers, servers, bartenders and cashier for the adjoining package store. Carla said she had enjoyed getting acquainted with the Fortners and was looking forward to continuing her waitressing career, which began when she worked as a carhop at age 13.

“When I filled out my application at the new place, I put down that I had 48 years of waitress experience,” Carla said. “Jimmy asked me if I started with the horse and buggy.”

Carla and her husband Paul, along with Nikki, moved here from Genoa, Ill., in 1998 after Paul’s retirement. “We had visited this area, and had vacationed here,” she said, “and we have folks in this area.”

Paul settled into retirement, but Carla wasn’t quite ready for that. She went to work as a waitress at Papa Bob’s, the restaurant that was operated by Missy Foster and her sisters, Pam McGinnis and Vicky Evans, in the current location of the Country Café. She continued to work in the restaurant as it went through other ownership, and in 2003 she took over the business herself, renting the space from property owners Kay and Bob Campbell, now living in Joplin. Missy Foster became one of Carla's employees at the time.

One of the café’s popular features is a corner set up as a memorial and tribute to veterans. “Paul was in the service during Vietnam, and we’ve always had a POW-MIA flag flying in the yard at our house,” Carla said. “After 9/11, flags appeared everywhere, but then as time went by they sort of disappeared. When Memorial Day rolled around one year, I put up some pictures and things to honor the vets. Everyone seemed to like it. Customers brought in pictures of their family members. Then one day a motorcycle group came in, and most of them were veterans. One man stood there looking at all the pictures and things, and he actually got tears in his eyes. He made a rose out of napkin and handed it to me. He said, ‘This is to thank you for doing this.’ That rose is still there – kind of dusty, but it’s up there beside the picture of the Tomb of the Unknown.”

Carla always worked as waitress in her restaurant but says she can cook “if I have to.” Besides Nikki, who works as waitress, and husband Paul, described as her right-hand man and “go-fer,” the café’s staff currently includes Heath Treat, Venessa Cupples, Darrell Eliott, Matthew Worley, Jacquline Rhodes, Kathy Nelson and Nikki’s husband, Brian Morgan.

Carla said Sept. 20, during Hootin an Hollarin, will be the last day for the popular Thursday catfish special. Then, after the doors close on Sept. 30, the staff will spend a few days, “cleaning up and emptying the freezers,” she said.

“I’ve shed some tears,” she said. “In fact, I don’t even know if I want to be here that last day. But this is for the best.”