Andrea Rankovic
On Thanksgiving Day, when most businesses close down for the holiday, Teresa’s Restaurant shows its gratitude by serving the community a free meal. At Teresa’s, home is always open for business.
Seat Yourself
Formerly the site of Kentucky Bearings, the one-story building on Gordon Avenue is unassuming, but the parking lot brims with cars. Inside, like most places we call home, are the sounds, smells and signs of life.
Dishes clatter in the kitchen. The dual aromas of breakfast eggs and lunchtime meatloaf swirl in the air. On the walls hang metal signs for DeKalb and John Deere, a painted saw, a figure made from arrowheads, and team spirit items from the University of Kentucky and Western Kentucky University.
Silver-legged stools push up to the counter, and the remainder of the seats are scattered in multiple configurations. A giant chalkboard displays the daily specials, and license plates from all 50 states form a border between the walls and the ceiling.
This is a place where the locals don’t need menus. Breakfast is available from opening till closing, and strangers don’t stay strangers for long.
In what used to be the nonsmoking section, Virginia Evans wipes down a table and waves to a couple as they take their seats. The man jokes, “Virginia has more followers than Facebook!”
It might be true.
Evans started her waitressing career 48 years ago at Vincent’s, an eatery next to the skating rink in Butler County. She started working at Teresa’s in 1994, when the restaurant was still on Fifth and Center streets. Evans has reigned over these same 12 tables on Gordon Avenue since 1998.
“I love my customers to death. I’ve had them for so long,” she says. “They are family to me.”
Two women get up and call out their goodbyes to Evans. She stops wiping the table to lift a hand in return. She nods and looks around at her section.
“I think it’s a good thing to be close to people,” she concludes.
In the main section beyond a half wall, Kelleen Bollinger scratches an order on a paper pad and slips the pad back into her apron pocket.
She’s known the men at this particular table since they were 6 or 7. They grew up with her four daughters.
“We know everybody on this side of town,” she says.
Bollinger graduated from WKU and worked at Dillard’s department store. About three years ago, she ran into Teresa’s current owners, Ricky and Heather McGuffey.
“They told me they needed a waitress for that Friday night. Then that Friday night turned into Tuesday, Friday and Saturday,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve only missed two Fridays in the last three years.”
She nods in the direction of the counter, where Heather McGuffey stops to check on an elderly patron. The man nods at her question, and McGuffey’s face erupts into a grin.
Born in Ohio County, McGuffey spent her early years focused on sports—mainly basketball. She spent 13 years working at Stoody Company, a Bowling Green factory that makes welding wire.
“From the beginning, I never thought I would end up in something like this, but it supports the family, and it supports the employees real good,” she says.
McGuffey and her husband took over the business in 2014 with a lease and then an outright purchase two years later.
The staff together numbers 17. Monday through Friday, they feed anywhere from 80-100 people for breakfast and 120-150 people for lunch each day. Friday’s catfish dinner feeds upwards of 150 people, and Saturdays easily see crowds of 400 or more patrons. The restaurant is closed on Sunday.
The majority of McGuffey’s time is spent in the kitchen. Like most of Kentucky’s small business owners, though, she goes where she’s needed.
She gives where generosity is needed, too.
No M-E in Community
When the sales rep for her food service company introduced pink chips, McGuffey jumped on an idea and then implemented it.
Teresa’s served free pink chips and homemade queso for Breast Awareness Month in October 2017.
When Bollinger’s cheerleading squad needed T-shirts, Teresa’s pitched in and bought the shirts.
When the Warren County North All-Stars Little League baseball team needed a sponsor, Teresa’s again stepped up to the plate.
The restaurant even offered a free meal of choice to any kid in the league who hit a home run. This past summer, that meant a dozen free meals. To McGuffey, with her sports background, the incentive was worth it.
The philosophy at Teresa’s is that folks who come into the restaurant hungry will not leave that way. People who are low on funds, down on their luck, or find themselves homeless can go in and get a hot meal of either biscuits and gravy or soup beans, regardless of their ability to pay.
At Thanksgiving, everyone who finds a seat also finds a meal.
“If it wasn’t for the community to come and eat with you, you wouldn’t be able to feed your family when you come home,” McGuffey says. “They come and support us so we can feed our family all year, and one meal gives back to everybody.”
Just like homes across the Commonwealth, where families prep for a Thanksgiving Day feast all week, Teresa’s Restaurant staff does the same. They cook a dozen turkeys, eight or nine hams, gallons of gravy, and bushels of beans, potatoes and corn. Folks in the community often bring in their own donations of meat, vegetables and desserts.
McGuffey and her staff prep for days for the buffet-style meal that feeds much more than just empty stomachs.
“I know all these people who come in [for Thanksgiving] don’t come regularly and support the business and my family. But those people—even if it’s one visit a year, or 200 visits a year—it’s our way to give back to them and my way to say thank you for helping us figure out what we are doing in life,” McGuffey says. “It’s been a roller-coaster ride going from a good-paying factory job and jumping into something like this, not knowing where we are going to end up. But the community … they come in and they support us, daily, weekly, monthly. It’s our day to give back to them.”
McGuffey begins Thanksgiving Day in the restaurant at 6 a.m., and by evening, she and her family have served several hundred people at no charge. They’ve also taken the time to sit and visit.
This is a tradition passed on by the woman who started the community phenomenon 20 years ago this month: Teresa Blair Reno.
Welcome, Friends
Reno grew up cooking for her farming family in Butler County. At 13, she took a waitressing job for 70 cents an hour at a soda shop on Morgantown’s Main Street. In 1989, divorced and with four children, Reno decided it was time to take the next step. A friend told her of a little place in front of a trailer park in Rockville.
Reno took the plunge into the restaurant business. She bought groceries by the day and had 60 seats, a counter and a kitchen. Reno did the cooking, while her little sister, Connie Blair, waited tables.
“God made me a good guesser,” she says of the daily grocery trips. “When you cook things like beans and mashed potatoes, you can make it go a long way. We put it on the plate, just like you were eating at home. That’s the atmosphere we wanted. That’s just who I was, and it ended up being what Teresa’s was.”
On opening day in April 1989, the place was packed.
“I had waited tables so long that, when I was going in business for myself, I went down to Bell South, into the back door, and told them. I went to the construction sites and told them,” she recalls of publicizing her new eatery.
Each morning, Reno arrived at the restaurant at 3 a.m. and was ready to open by 4 a.m. Two years later, Reno moved Teresa’s from Rockville to Fifth and Center streets in Bowling Green. Again, she did the legwork to announce the move.
“I’d take a cooler of iced tea on break time and go to these construction sites and give them tea,” she says. “I’d say, ‘We are down the street here. Come have breakfast and lunch.’ And they came.”
Teresa’s opened in Bowling Green in April 1991 with 60 seats and what would become the signature counter. She remembers those early days.
“RC [Cola] furnished signs back then, and the head painter painted ‘Teresa’s’ on my sign. I remember pulling up at night,” she pauses to laugh. “I said, ‘Oh, there’s my name in lights. Now we have to get home and go to bed because I have to get up at three and make biscuits.’”
Over the next six and a half years, Reno added on to the building three times, increasing the seating area from 60 and the counter to 120. Reno’s children helped her roll biscuits and peeled 100 pounds of potatoes a day.
By 1998, it was time for another move—this time, to Gordon Avenue.
In renovating the building, Reno’s sons and others pitched in to cut up concrete, lay pipe and tile, and construct a kitchen.
The week before opening day, Bowling Green experienced a hailstorm of biblical proportions. Hailstones the size of softballs were recorded. Millions of dollars’ worth of damage was reported across a huge swath of southern Kentucky.
At the restaurant, water poured out of every light fixture due to severe roof damage. Reno remembers sitting on the floor, bawling.
The entire region’s mettle was tested that April, and most folks would agree they passed with flying colors.
“This community has been so good to me,” Reno says. “We grew up together. The people who were young in business, starting their companies, we just helped each other out. Somehow, we got it open.”
On opening day, Reno again demonstrated her generosity—partly because she really wanted to say, “Thank you,” and partly because she had learned over the years that unseasoned grills could be unpredictable.
Breakfast consisted of pancakes, sausage and coffee. At 11 a.m., the restaurant gave away beans and corncakes. Even though Teresa’s offered meals for free that first day on Gordon Avenue, the restaurant received donations totaling $3,000, which Reno split evenly between a Christian youth center named Joshua’s Place and the Salvation Army just down the road.
Seven months later, Teresa’s planned another free meal—this one to celebrate Thanksgiving. Dr. Steve Ayers of Hillvue Church teamed up with Reno to plan a feast of gratitude based on Reno’s one condition: that the dinner be open to the community, no matter their income.
“That’s how we promoted it,” Reno says. “If you don’t have anybody to eat with, we want you to come eat at Teresa’s on Thanksgiving.”
Now, like then, Teresa’s feeds 300 to 400 people every Thanksgiving holiday. The staff fills the hungry, offers company to the lonely, and builds a family of grateful community members one bite at a time.