Fresh, home-cooked meals are a scarce commodity for most college students. Luckily, for USC students, there’s Jacks N Joe, one of South Central’s only breakfast restaurants, which serves homestyle cooking in an environment that can only be described as “a home away from home.”

Located near the corner of West Adams Boulevard and Figueroa Street, Jacks N Joe looks out of place in a sea of fast-food franchises and corporate-owned eateries. Yet the restaurant has remained a pillar in the community for almost 13 years. 

Vianney and Mark Bednorz founded the restaurant in December 2010, inspired by the love and passion of their late daughter. Nearly five years after her passing, realizing they hadn’t made good on their promise to live a life that they knew their daughter would have been proud of, the couple decided to open Jacks N Joe — a play on pancakes and coffee. 

Since then, the restaurant has been a staple in the local community, serving traditional breakfast cuisine to hungry police officers and USC students alike.

To Vianney Bednorz, Jacks N Joe provides a space that is unlike many others in the USC community.

“We are definitely a cornerstone here,” Bednorz said. “We are home away from home for a lot of students. That’s what we offer is a home-cooked meal, kind of like your mom or dad would have made. I think this area definitely lacked it 13 years ago.”

The homey feeling that only a breakfast diner can provide is hard to come by in South Central, as Jacks N Joe remains one of the few eateries of its kind in the area. The restaurant’s menu lives up to its slogan of “a breakfast all day kind of place,” offering 13 different types of pancakes with variations like peanut butter banana “Pudgie Elvis” and cinnamon apple and brown sugar “Ruby Belle.”  

Alex Lam, a senior majoring in social sciences, said she enjoys the restaurant’s comforting atmosphere, and that it’s “better than most [restaurants] in L.A.” 

“Every time I go there, they show a lot of gratitude,” she said. “There’s also always family there and it’s really cute, just being able to enjoy the presence of other families or just talking to someone who is sitting next to you at a booth.”

Kevin Marcus Eberhart, a server at the restaurant, said the work atmosphere created by the owners is what makes Jacks N Joe an enjoyable place for the employees and the customers. That, along with the “good and authentic” quality of the food, is what brings customers back time and time again. 

“We make our pancakes with real buttermilk. We have good coffee … we make it good, and we make it simple,” he said. “We don’t do a lot of extra, over-the-top things, and it’s just stable. I think that’s a recipe for people to just keep coming back, that it’s good, it’s reliable, it’s dependable, it’s quality.”

Inside, the restaurant looks like a cross between a diner and a breakfast house, all with a Hawaiian flare — a nod to Mark Bednorz’s Hawaiian heritage. 

With an all-day breakfast menu, Eberhart describes Jacks N Joe’s patrons as the morning crowd, the restaurant being especially popular among police officers. To show their appreciation for their loyal customer base, the register counter displays dozens of different police badges. 

Eberhart emphasized the restaurant’s appeal for those who want high-quality food from a family-owned business. 

“Anybody looking for breakfast here that’s not IHOP or something, they’ll come here,” he said. “So we kind of get that clientele and yeah, it’s not super big, it’s not corporate. So we have that kind of small, intimate, mom-and-pop kind of feel at the restaurant.”

Despite its dedicated client base and unmatchable family quality, Jacks N Joe was never intended to be a lifelong business endeavor. For Bednorz, the restaurant’s future will be approached with love and care, one pancake at a time. 

“I don’t know if it was necessarily our dream to do it, but I think it’s always a stepping stone to something else into another chapter,” she said. “Who knows what the future holds for Jacks N Joe. But as long as we’re here right now, we’re good.”