Family Food

It’s not that Morning Glory Café is a “family-style” restaurant in the industry’s sense of the term—they don’t serve things in giant bowls that you pass around the table or focus on food “like mama used to make” (unless your mama made rosemary crusted shaved leg of lamb with a mango glaze).

Morning Glory is a family restaurant because chef and owner Jules Lieb thinks of her customers as family.

“I rarely think of my customers as customers,” she says. “I regard them as family and I love seeing the kids grow up, people marrying, having babies… It’s such a great community we’re building and I particularly love Lafayette.”

Her love of food and family started with the meals provided by an eccentric housekeeper who fed, clothed, and cared for Lieb, her three brothers, and her father. She was introduced to the intertwining dance of food and family, ritual and culture at her housekeeper’s Passover table and began dreaming of someday owning a restaurant. “I love making a party happen every night at my restaurants,” she says.

She became interested in natural food as a teenager and became dedicated to the ideas of vegetarianism and natural foods as she worked the front of the house at her first boyfriend’s restaurant in Nashville.

“I didn’t always want to be a chef,” she says. “I became a chef because necessity is the mother of invention. When I opened my first place in 1992 in Nashville I couldn’t afford a chef, so I went back in the kitchen and just started doing it—and thankfully I had a knack for it.”

Returning from a stint living and working abroad in Dubai, Lieb brought all of her personality and passion to bear creating Morning Glory Café and its sister restaurant, Poppy Café.

“Everything about the restaurants screams Jules,” she laughs, “from the décor to the menus to our wine dinners to how I hire employees. My rather hippie background is found in the details.”

Details like gluten-free pancakes and waffles, local eggs, organic potatoes, and soy-sausages made from scratch keep loyal customers—or family-by-food, if you like—coming back time and time again.

“I’m proud I have had the stamina to withstand not just the physically hard work, but the emotional toll of running a restaurant, which is, in my opinion, harder on a woman,” she admits. “We want everything perfect all the time and when you’re dealing with 300 people a day that’s kind of hard to achieve.”

Morning Glory has become a warm gathering place for Lieb’s vast extended family to visit with her and with one another. It’s the culmination of a great deal of physically and emotionally hard work, and Leib hopes the love that’s gone into it is obvious to everyone.