The menu at Carver's Grocery and Country Kitchen — Tuesday's included pot roast, meatloaf, fried chicken, catfish, barbecue, baked ham, turnip greens, field peas, mac and cheese, sweet potato casserole, broccoli rice casserole, beefy potato cheese casserole (you lovin' this or what?), Coca-Cola cake, strawberry cake, coconut cake, banana pudding — this homemade menu at Carver's, it doesn't grow on trees.

It often grows out of improvisation.

Johnny Crawford/jcrawford@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Sharon Carver gets a cake ready for serving sizes Tuesday at the restaurant that prides itself on filling up people.

Johnny Crawford/jcrawford@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Nilda DeLeon flours chicken, and Sharon Carver prepares pulled pork Tuesday inside the Carver's Grocery and Country Kitchen near Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Fried chicken, catfish, barbecue pork, turnip greens and Coca-Cola cake are among the menu items.

Like at 5 a.m. Tuesday.

"All my ovens just went off," said Sharon Carver, who with her husband, Robert, arrives each weekday before sunrise to run the Howell Station corner restaurant dedicated to filling people up the old-fashioned way.

Seemed a fuse had blown. The ovens went on and off all morning, but no matter: The Carvers — he's 73, she's 69 — have learned to ad lib during the 16 years they've served food here.

The modest brick building along an industrial patch of West Marietta Street once housed a drugstore on one side, a grocery store on the other.

Robert took it over in the 1970s and turned it into a full-fledged grocery. He and Sharon, both divorced with grown children, married in the mid-'80s. Tired of selling real estate, she said, "Let's do something together."

They added a luncheon deli that served fried chicken, hot wings, hot dogs. With Sharon in the kitchen and Robert behind the register, the food business took off.

"I never trained," said Sharon, raised in Idaho. (Robert's from South Georgia.) "My grandmother and mother were wonderful cooks. Like any art form, you can learn how to cook, but that doesn't mean you're going to be good. You have to be born with a taste for how to season things."

The secret to Southern comfort food?

"Sugar, butter and salt."

The place seats 40 around seven communal tables. A line often snakes out the door by noon. Customers range from a state Supreme Court judge and Atlanta police chief to construction workers and college students from nearby Georgia Tech.

Grocery shelves and ice boxes still fill half the restaurant, but they're stocked mostly with ingredients the Carvers use for lunch. Among the handful of other items still for sale: toothpaste, Preparation H, Tampax. Nobody's bought them in years.

"Once in a while, a neighbor will buy some flour or a quart of milk," Sharon said. "Men come in looking for bottled beer or cigarettes, which we used to sell. They look confused. They'll say, 'Aren't you a grocery store?' "

With one oven working Tuesday morning, and another working only sometimes, the kitchen crowded with pots and pans, and containers of ingredients soon spilled out into the dining area.

Barbecue pork simmered in a slow cooker. Two more were found for casseroles. A strawberry cake and carrot cake were set on a table, where they were frosted, sliced and packed in plastic containers. Tea brewed in two five-gallon pots.

Wisecracking signs the couple picked up during trips and vacations fill the yellow walls. One example: "Never Trust a Skinny Cook."

Robert, who had a pacemaker installed six weeks ago, peeled 50 pounds of potatoes, then ran to a store to buy more Nilla Wafers for the banana pudding.

Nilda DeLeon, 28, started frying chicken around 9:30, and later the catfish. Lisa Newby, 45, troubleshot the casseroles. Fermin Tobar, 22, washed pots and handled the heavy lifting. Charles Terry, 56, grew up in the neighborhood. He arrives at 9:30 every morning to clean the floors, put out the condiments, set the chairs.

At 9:58, Sharon recorded a message on the store phone to tell customers that they were open (they take a week off about every five weeks), when they're open (11 a.m.-3 p.m.) and what's on the day's menu (Tuesday featured 15 vegetables).

She then rewrote the menu on a dry-erase board with a blue magic marker.

By 10:30, the place was ready for business. Sharon was behind the kitchen counter. Robert was at the register. Everything looked like it had been that way forever.

"It goes from being one huge kitchen to, when we're done, we use it as a restaurant," Sharon said. "It serves two purposes."

The first three customers arrived at 11:01. Their orders: meatloaf, catfish, catfish. Another customer followed: fried chicken.

Then Cathy Silva, a regional manager for L'Oreal beauty products and a Carver's regular, scanned the menu board.

Her first words: "Ham day!"