This downtown Pensacola lunch spot is 20 years old and still one of Pensacola's hidden gems

Not even a half mile away from the hustle and bustle of downtown Pensacola’s Palafox Street is a place where time slows, and the small joys of life are savored.

Ice-cold mason jars are filled with blackberry lemonade. Fresh grown flowers fill the backsplash of Cottage Café’s patio. Friends gather over fresh green salads, curry chicken salad and homemade quiche.

“We’ll have ladies come in here and spend the afternoon,” said Chuck Major, who owns the place with his wife of over 30 years, Barbee Major. “They’ll come in at 11 o’clock and stay up ‘til 2 p.m. We’ll get groups like the ‘red hat ladies’ and teacher associations and just all kinds of different groups that will come."

It’s one of the easier places in town to accidentally stay past closing time, since the small café, based out of a former carriage house at 203 W. Gregory St., is only open three hours for lunch on Monday through Friday. Even so, the café staff celebrated their 20-year anniversary this month the best way they knew how: with a few extra slices of their irresistible St. Louis-style gooey butter cake.

‘She always wanted to do a bed and breakfast’

When the Majors called St. Louis, Missouri, their home many years ago, Barbee Major had a habit of pointing out some of the more charming historic homes, saying something along the lines of “that would make a great bed and breakfast” in passing to her husband.

During a late-summer vacation to Pensacola, her husband grabbed her a few free real estate brochures off the rack of a Tom Thumb gas station. As she serendipitously flipped through, they found one property that checked all the boxes for a bed and breakfast. They didn’t have much money, and a young son to keep in mind, but they weren’t ready to give up.

“All of our friends invested in it,” Barbee Major said. “And they were like crying (because) they didn’t want us to go.”

By December, they made what is now the Pensacola Victorian Bed & Breakfast their new home.

‘We were going to turn this into a custard stand’

As they began thinking up ways to supplement the income to fund the bed and breakfast, they reminisced over a beloved custard stand back in St. Louis and set out to replicate it in Pensacola. They soon discovered that they would have to sell a lot of custard to cover the costs of the retail spaces they were looking at.

“One night, we had pretty much given up on it,” Chuck Major said of their custard stand dreams. “We were in bed and Barbee just had a flash, and she goes, ‘How about the cottage?'"

Along with the main house came a carriage house, which they were renting. When they began to realize its potential as a small restaurant, they began remodeling and rearranging it to be the home of their new custard shop. They had no idea it would soon become one of Pensacola’s hidden treasures for lunch.

‘We can still remember the first day we broke $100’

Once they settled on the name, Cottage Café, they began collecting a hodge podge of décor items to fill it. Sentimental artwork, thrifted kitchen gadgets like old juicers and toasters, rich wood tables and delicate dishware inherited from Chuck Major's mother.

If the cafe fills you with the warm nostalgia of your grandparents’ home, that means they’re doing something right. Cozy and comfortable is what they’re aiming for. But it wasn't just cozy for guests, it was quite cozy in the kitchen as well.

“The two of us stood together in this little kitchen, side by side, at one sandwich rail and that's how we worked,” Chuck Major said. “Then we grew and grew, and I sold all the custard equipment and all the stuff that was in there because that was not going to happen, and put in two sandwich rails in there, and the refrigerator and this whole setup. And it took off.”

“We can still remember the first day we broke $100,” Chuck Major added.

Their sole source of advertising was the green Cottage Café logo slapped onto their delivery van, that to this day, will drive around downtown Pensacola offering free meal delivery.

They serve fresh, simple, affordable food, with the whole menu under $10. But the recipes are all homemade with intention. Chuck Major still spends three hours every Saturday, hand-picking his groceries to his liking.

Chuck Major tends to tinker with the savory items on the menu, like slow-smoked, southern-style shredded pork sandwich with homemade barbecue sauce, while Barbee Major handles the baking, like their many varieties of bread pudding.

Their gooey butter cake, offered in vanilla and chocolate pecan, is one of the more famous items on the baked goods menu, and is based off the recipe of a friend of Barbee Major's from the gooey butter cake birthplace itself: St. Louis. The Majors like to say it's “world-famous” since it is sliced up in a case each day for guests of the bed and breakfast, who come from all over the world and nibble on it. It’s almost always gone by the morning.

One of their best-sellers on the savory side, the “MAX” Wrap,” was simply a blend of their son Max’s favorite things: thinly sliced mesquite smoked turkey, bacon, avocado, Swiss cheese, cucumber, lettuce, tomato and creamy cucumber dressing wrapped in a flour tortilla.

Two decades of regular customers

When looking back at all the bad and good (mostly good) memories spanning two decades, the Majors' best memories are tied to the people that come in for lunch every day. It’s “once in a blue moon” that they will get an unkind customer.

The Majors can take turns doing impersonations of different customers voices they can recognize over just a phone call just by a tone or New England accent.

“We have people that the minute they walk in, you start making their lunch because you already know what they're going to order. They never change. They never deviate,” Chuck Major said. “Once in a while they'll fool you and they'll order something else, and you already have their lunch made.  You're sitting there going, ‘Well, shoot.'”

“We know so many people by their first names and what's going on in their lives,” Chuck Major added.

Longtime customers Connie Baldwin and Ann Albino have spent half of their 40-plus year friendship around the Cottage Café tables, indulging on slices of quiche and catching up on life. They used to "meet friends here for lunch" in the early years, and now continue to lure family members in. While they like to venture out to new places, Cottage Café is always one they find themselves coming back to for consistently good food and service.

"I can't believe its been 20 years," Baldwin said in disbelief.

Benedeane Blake-White, a regular customer of about two years, met up with a few friends of her own Friday afternoon to catch up on the patio in a "calming, relaxing atmosphere."

The cafe has become a regular spot for Blake-White, who lives within walking distance of the restaurant. Her usual order varies between sandwiches, wraps and salads, but there isn't an item she doesn't like. Especially the bread pudding.

The concept of never having a bad meal is something you'll hear often within the Cottage Cafe's walls but is a compliment that never grows old on Chuck Major.

“You have to wrap your head around the fact that we make food. and people are paying for it and they really like it," Chuck Major said. "That's just such a compliment to somebody that cooks."

For more real-time updates and information, follow Cottage Cafe on social media. Cottage Cafe can be reached by phone at (850) 437-0730.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Cottage Cafe celebrates 20 years in downtown Pensacola