Homemade meals, affordable prices key to Audrey's Downtown Restaurant

“We were on Route 20 about 18 years,” Goins said. “Then we got the opportunity to lease here, and we had been out of the restaurant business for a few years, but we’ve been here for two years. There’s been better parking and access for the elderly.”

Now, Audrey’s is preparing to move again. This time, it will move right down the street to the location of the old Station restaurant at 38 North Kanawha St. Goins’ daughter and current owner of Audrey’s, Michelle Crites, said the move will be a good one for the restaurant.

“We’ll be able to serve more people,” Crites said. “Hopefully, it will be more efficient.”

The long-standing success of Audrey’s isn’t by chance, in Goins’ opinion. She says the restaurant was built on the idea of feeding people good food at a reasonable price.

“We started 20 years ago at the old place, and carried everything over from there,” she said. “We try to have everyday food at good prices. We have people that eat three meals a day here.”

She added that another important feature of the restaurant is the ability to choose freely what you want off the menu.

“We try to make the menu where people can pick and choose what they want,” she said. “We try to have an atmosphere where everybody knows everybody. Everybody here has seen the girls (Goins’ daughters) grow up. It’s a family atmosphere.”

Both Goins and Crites agree that the mission of the restaurant is to make eating as a family not only possible, but affordable in the modern-day.

“It’s important (to have affordable prices) so that the average person can afford to take their family to eat,” she said. “It’s a busy world — who has time to cook? We have affordable meals and kids meals too, and so people can feed their kids. And we don’t do fancy food, just good, old-fashioned food.”

Crites concurred.

“We’re mostly here so that you can afford to take your family to dinner,” she said. “They can afford to eat, and it won’t kill their wallet. We have a lot of kids that get the choice of fast food and here, and they choose here.”

The prices at Audrey’s are affordable for most families. However, Goins says that the quality of the food is still very high and care is given to make sure as much is homemade as possible.

“We try to stick to homemade,” she said. “We patty out our own burgers. We’re famous for our breakfast and our burgers. We hand patty the burgers, and a 10-ounce burger here is $6.29 right now. If you go away hungry from here, it’s your own fault.”

She continued.

“There are some things we can’t do homemade, but for the most part we try,” Goins said. “We hand cut our home fries; we have homemade sausage gravy.”

Crites believes the biggest dishes offered are the omelets and pancakes, the latter of which are notably large.

“I would say our omelets and our pancakes are our signature dishes,” she said. “We have some college kids that will come in and eat two pancakes, and they’ll order three or four next time, so we’ll make them even thicker and bigger. When we first opened, we had smaller plates. We tried fixing pancakes, and then realized that we needed to buy bigger plates.”

Familiarity and personalization are themes at the restaurant, according to Goins.

“You can order the food the way you want it,” she said. “Sometimes the waiters just write the name of the customer on the ticket, and the cooks will just know what to cook and how to cook it for that person.”

She also mentioned that it is important to Audrey’s to buy from smaller, local food vendors rather than large companies.

“We buy everything locally,” Goins said. “We get food from A.F. Wendling in Buckhannon, sausage grinded at the Rock Cave IGA.”

Some customers, including Ron McVaney, have frequented the restaurant throughout its entire 20 years. McVaney, who’s favorite dish at the restaurant is a breakfast including any variation of grits, eggs, bacon, sausage and home fries (what he calls the “standard breakfast for a working man”), said the family atmosphere really makes every visit personal.

“It’s like home,” he said. “They’re the kind of people that know you well enough to even ask you to take out the trash. It’s friendly, and the food’s excellent.”

He said it’s the best homestyle food option he knows apart from just eating at home.

“This is probably as near to home cooking as you could get,” he said. “They’re friendly, and the people that frequent the place are friendly. Most people come to a restaurant for quality of food, but you get them both (quality and friendly atmosphere) here.”

Crites said that kind of family-style atmosphere is very important to her in her restaurant.

“I have a large family, so I know how it is,” she said. “I bring the kids in, and they like to help. My daughter is 6, and she loves to come in and say hello to customers, take their orders. She knows more about restaurants than most adults.

“Not many families get to sit down and eat together. So it’s nice to see families come in and do that,” she said.

Audrey’s is also notable for what they give to the community. According to Goins, they offer a special Thanksgiving meal to locals.

“We give free Thanksgiving dinner,” she said. “It’s for anyone who wants to come. The first year we did it, I just thought I was blessed for the business we have, and wanted to give back to our customers. We do take donations, but we give them to families who need it.”

All in all, Crites said, Audrey’s is a place that revolves around the relationship between staff and customer.

“It drives me crazy sometimes,” Crites said of running the restaurant. “But the customers make it special. We have customers from the beginning that still come in from when I waited on them when I was 15 years old.”