This Garner restaurant has long emphasized friendship as much as food. It’s paying off.

Late last week, on the kind of bright spring day that had people seeking the outdoors, the parking lot at Angie’s Restaurant was full while Angie Mikus sat inside, working the cash register and answering the phone. It rang often, delivering the sweet sound of business.

“Thank you for calling Angie’s, how can I help you?” she asked, answering the phone with the same cheerful tone that had helped her earn a loyal following in her days as a waitress. “What can I get for you? ... Fried squash? Mmm-hmm. ... I have pinto beans. Green beans? Mmm-hmm.

“Who am I speaking with? ... Hey Bill! I’m going to have it ready in 10 minutes.”

Mikus, 43, has run her restaurant, just northeast of downtown Garner, for almost nine years. It is something like a country diner, where regulars swear by the breakfast plates or the hamburger steak and tenderloin sandwiches at lunch. The kind of place where, until recently, the dining room offered a cross-section of the community — the tables filled with local dignitaries, folks down on their luck and everywhere in-between.

People who come to Angie’s like to say there are no strangers there. Only friends. That’s always been part of its allure. In the days before the virus, it wasn’t uncommon during busy stretches for Mikus to seat customers at tables with people they’d never met. Over the years, a lot of friendships started that way, over plates of Southern cooking and desserts of banana pudding.

Now, like a lot of restaurants, Angie’s is trying to hold on and make it to the other side of the pandemic, whenever that other side arrives and however it might look. Mikus has had to make some difficult decisions the past couple of months. She had to let go about eight of her employees, she said. Some days, though, it seems like all of Garner is trying to help her through.

“I worked 27 years for this,” she said of her journey to owning her own restaurant, one that began when she started waiting tables when she was 15. “And it could have easily been gone in three weeks, you know? And it’s just sad.”

In North Carolina, the pandemic brought an end to dine-in service at restaurants and bars almost two months ago. On March 17, the day that Gov. Roy Cooper ordered dining rooms to close, Mikus began transforming Angie’s into a drive-up, carhop restaurant. She went shopping for picnic tables to place in a nearby field. She spray-painted white numbers on the parking spaces.

“I need to make them my tables,” she’d said of those spaces, and soon they were.

It was days like today, a recent Thursday, that gave her hope that her dream would live on. The parking lot was full during lunch for a couple of hours straight, cars and trucks coming and going; waitresses in a constant cycle of writing orders on their pads and then carrying them out a few minutes later. It was days like today that sometimes made Mikus emotional, in a good way.

“I don’t want to get to crying,” she said, thankful that business had exceeded her expectations.

A dining room full of boxes

Inside, the dining rooms had become places for storage, filled with cardboard boxes stuffed with Styrofoam cups or to-go containers and plasticware. In the main dining room the tables were pushed against the wall, creating an assembly line for a takeout-only operation.

Outside, some of the regulars sat inside their cars or trucks, waiting on their orders. A steady stream of vehicles pulled into the lot, off of West Garner Road. A rooster, which one of the waitresses looked after, crowed nearby. They call the rooster O’Dell, and he had a small water bowl with his name on it outside the restaurant. It has long been part of Angie’s charm.

“It’s no surprise that this parking lot stays full now,” one of those regulars, Bud Davenport, said from the driver’s seat of his red pick-up, waiting on a tenderloin sandwich. “Because Angie has taken care of so many people, everybody says, ‘Well, we’re going to take care of her.’”

Two months into a pandemic with no end in sight, the restaurant business has perhaps suffered more than any other. In North Carolina, 300,000 restaurant workers have been laid off or furloughed amid the pandemic, according to the state’s restaurant and lodging association. Some restaurants have already made the decision to close. Others haven’t yet but likely won’t survive.

In a survey of its members, the state restaurant association announced earlier this month that nearly 80% of its restaurants had lost at least 70% of their business since mid-March. About 65% said they wouldn’t survive being closed for two months — a mark that is fast approaching.

Angie’s hasn’t been closed; not exactly, at least. And yet while Mikus has adapted to a world of call-in orders and carryout, just about every day brings a new challenge or questions — including those concerning the eventual reopening of her dining room. If the state progresses along the timeline Cooper has outlined, restaurants and bars could reopen to limited capacity on May 22.

Even so, Mikus said, pointing to her parking lot, “we’re going to still maintain that out there.”

When she’s allowed to bring customers back inside, she won’t. Not for a while.

“We’re not going to bring anybody in here,” she said, dismissing the thought of allowing the dining room to be filled to 25% capacity. “We’ve worked very hard to continue, to make sure Angie’s sees the other side of this, that I would hate for somebody to come in here that had COVID and share it with whomever.

“Then we’d have to shut down for 14 days, and then what was all this hard work for?”

They ‘watched me grow up’

She has thought about that a lot over the past several weeks, the possibility of hard work ending in heartbreak. She knows it has, or will, for a lot of people in her line of work. Mikus started in the restaurant business three years before she could vote. For 13 years, she waited tables at the Toot-N-Tell restaurant in Garner.

A lot of her customers, she said, “watched me grow up.”

“They helped me raise my children, because I was a single mother,” she said. “And then (they were) always telling me I should pursue my dream. And this has always been my dream.”

Now she looked around a bit at that dream — the tables covered in boxes of Styrofoam containers or bins of condiments; the chairs pushed under those tables and sitting empty; her staff delivering orders to the kitchen and then carrying them out, stopping along the way to include plastic silverware.

Meanwhile, outside, there were several scenes that might have fit in a Norman Rockwell painting, were he around to document these times. George Lasley, 68, created one of them while he sat behind his van in a lawn chair and ate his lunch. He’d pulled open the rear door of his van, revealing a 12-pack of toilet paper in the cargo area.

If ever there was a slice-of-life scene befitting the pandemic, it was that of a man eating outside of a closed dining room, with a supply of toilet paper nearby. Lasley, who lives in Raleigh, said he comes to Angie’s three or four times per week. Usually he seeks out the parking space closest to the road, and eats his lunch in the shade of a large tree.

Today that space was taken. Lasley, who likes the beef tips and pot roast, didn’t seem to mind.

“It’s just good country cooking,” he said. “It’s not high-falutin’. It’s not high-fancy. It’s just good food. And to me, when it’s something that big in the middle of the plate” — he pinched his fingers together, indicating a small portion — “and a drizzle on it, that’s not food.”

Around the same time that Lasley finished his lunch and packed away his chair, Al Sutton arrived to place his order. He’s been coming here since the day it opened, he said, and as much as anything — even as much as the food — he said what brings him back is that sense of family.

How many places are there, Sutton asked, where you can walk in and have a waitress playfully hit you in the head with a little pack of creamer? To him that had become a sign of affection, along with the nicknames they had for each other. All the waitresses called Sutton “Boo.”

He liked to say that Angie’s was “more than a block building.”

“Sure, there’s a whole bunch of block buildings,” said Sutton, 55. “But what she’s got inside — I don’t know where you find this.”

What will be on the other side?

By then it was past 1:30 in the afternoon, and the lunch crowd was starting to thin out. Davenport, who’d arrived in his red pick-up about 90 minutes earlier, had long finished his tenderloin sandwich. He and his wife, Cathy, ate lunch while sitting in the truck.

And even though they were outside, in a parking lot, it still felt something like home.

“I have sat in here with the vice president of Shaw University,” said Davenport, who works with the Wake County Fire Services Department and, before that, held a similar job with the town of Garner. “I ate a meal sitting next to the Ag secretary, with (Steve) Troxler sitting next to me. And I ate beside a homeless guy.

“When you come into this place, we’re all equal.”

Now it was close to 2 o’clock, and the regulars had left approaching closing time. O’Dell, the rooster, began crowing in the empty field beyond the parking lot. There, Mikus had set up a flashing electronic sign, the kind more common in a highway construction zone, that said: “ANGIE’S CAR-HOP SERVICE.” She’d set up picnic tables near that sign.

Inside, her staff began to clean, and count the day’s profits. Mikus has kept about 80% of her workers, she said, and she hopes to bring back the ones she’d let go soon enough — maybe to paint the restaurant, maybe to do something else. Days like today, among the busiest in a while, provided hope that things would be all right, that maybe the other side wasn’t too far away.

And yet, Mikus said, “I don’t know that we’ll ever go back to what it was.”

She’s a hugger, she said, and she misses giving hugs to her customers. She misses the sight of her bustling dining room, the one she’d worked to attain throughout her entire adult life. She always liked the idea that she didn’t just run a restaurant, but that she brought people together.

“And I’m kind of unsure how that’s going to go” on the other side, she said.

For now, it’d been a strong Thursday. Business was good. She’d been able to smile at familiar faces, even if the hugs would have to wait. She and her staff had survived another day, and that meant they were one day closer to returning to normal, whatever that comes to mean.

The parking lot emptied, and O’Dell crowed by himself.

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