Cafeteria comes back from ashes
Destroyed by fire last year, the haven for comfort food is ready to dish it up
George Mickelis is lousy at keeping a secret. So are his customers.
“I invited 100 people, and 500 showed up,” he said.
They filled the parking lot, some having to park blocks away. They descended on steam tables loaded with roast beef, baked chicken, fried haddock, chicken fried steak, lima beans, baked squash, broccoli casserole and pie. And they savored the moment, one they’d been anticipating for more than a year: Cleburne Cafeteria is back.
Houston’s beloved, old-school, made-fromscratch, comfort food haven — closed since a fire destroyed it on April 26, 2016 — has reopened at 3606 Bissonnet. On Tuesday, Mickelis invited some of his best customers and friends for a free meal — an “experimental run” to test the kitchen and the staff. He was expecting a crowd, but Mickelis politely called what he got “biblical” in intensity.
“This is all literally word of mouth,” he said.
And that travels fast, it seems, when it comes to Cleburne Cafeteria.
Buster Freedman, a customer since the days
when the cafeteria actually was on Cleburne Street, came with his daughter and granddaughter — three generations enjoying a return to a familial dining routine.
“I’m happy for the community and happy for George,” Freedman said. “His whole life is this restaurant.”
Jermaine Johnson was there, too. Before the fire, Johnson ate at Cleburne four to five times a week.
“Everywhere you go, the portions have gotten smaller, the service has changed and prices have gone up,” he said. “That’s never changed here.”
From Ellis Island to Houston
Tuesday’s soft opening — the restaurant officially opens to the public Thursday — resumed the Cleburne Cafeteria story that Mickelis’ father, Nick, began writing after arriving in America through Ellis Island from Patmos, Greece, in 1948.
The Greek immigrant who spoke no English arrived with $2.50 in his pocket and a piece of paper pinned to his jacket with the word “Houston” written on it. He began working in a restaurant as a dishwasher and learned to cook. After several years, he had saved enough money to buy a barbecue restaurant.
He eventually met the woman who would become his wife, Pat; they were married and in 1952 bought the Cleburne Cafeteria, established in 1941, at Cleburne Street and Fannin.
They raised their two children, George and Angela, in rooms above the cafeteria. In 1969 they moved the business to its current location on Bissonnet where Nick’s artwork — he was an avid painter who favored bucolic scenes of his homeland — graced the walls. Nick died in 1989; today George runs the business and Pat, at 93, remains a daily, visible presence in the dining room.
The new cafeteria is a stunner, a 12,000-square-foot dining hall “on steroids,” George Mickelis said, referencing the previous building that was 7,000 square feet. The space can accommodate 300 people — 45 more than the restaurant that was destroyed when an accidental electrical fire swept through it in the early morning hours of April 26.
Mickelis had hoped to reopen months ago but there were construction delays and, of course, Hurricane Harvey to contend with. Today the long road to restoring his family’s treasure is over as the cafeteria is being returned to the people who love it.
“It’s a blessing,” Mickelis said. “People in this cafeteria are like family.”
That family pressed him hard on Tuesday. Mickelis could not move through the dining room without dozens of people slapping his back and shaking his hands. Greeting people waiting patiently in the food line, he was cheered and applauded.
“I feel like George Bailey in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ I didn’t know how much we are loved,” he said.
‘Mom, they’re open again’
He’s looking forward to the cafeteria settling into its traditional patterns.
“On Sundays after church is when you see it all. The Catholics come in and then the Presbyterians, then the Baptists. The Baptists are always last. And in between you mix in the Methodists and the Orthodox Christians,” he said. “A judge could be sitting next to a UPS driver, sitting next to a priest. It truly is the United Nations. It’s a melting pot of every group and every nationality.”
And it’s where Tongula Steddum brought her mother, Katie Givens, when she was going through treatments for ovarian cancer at MD Anderson.
“She loved this place. When they burned down, she was devastated,” Steddum said.
Givens loved the liver and onions, followed by the fried chicken, followed by the fried fish. And always the pinto beans. They were meals that sustained her and brought her comfort during her struggle with cancer, Steddum said.
“During the last month of my mom’s life, all she wanted was Cleburne’s.”
Givens didn’t live to see the reopening. But Steddum was there Tuesday, thinking of her mother as she moved through the cafeteria line and took her place at a sunny window table with a fresh plate of food in front of her.
“I said, ‘Mom, they’re open again,’ ” Steddum said. “She’d be so happy to know they’re back.”