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 Your favorite place for breakfast is the Breakfast Club. Where else? With new ingenious omelet's and other specials turning up every week, almost everyone will consider it worth the drive. They're all there, all right. in a line winding around the storefront. All except those who got there at daybreak, then took a sunrise walk on the beach.... 

THE BREAKFAST CLUB ON TYBEE ISLAND GA

Photo: 10 a.m. June 18 2000

 You only have to look at the line winding around the block to know how popular this place is. 

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Photo shown lower left :
THE BREAKFAST CLUB
 ON TYBEE ISLAND GA
" The line "
 10 a.m. June 18 2000

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Of course, some of those people are there to experience the beach, but most of them are there for the food. The Breakfast Club is the only place we can think of where a select core of regular customers comes for breakfast and lunch nearly everyday.

 TYBEE ISLAND, Ga. --- The Breakfast Club on Tybee Island, Ga., is neither as grand nor as exclusive as its name might suggest.
  It is nothing more than a cluttered little breakfast-only restaurant  on a street corner one block from the beach.
  The front part has a few booths and a wraparound bar, lined with stools, that separates the customers from the grill and the hyperactive cooks who turn out eggs, sausage, grits, pancakes, omelets... In the back is a small dining room.
  The restaurant has established itself as the place to have breakfast on Tybee. Even in the off-season, it is usually crowded with locals, tourist and people who have driven 17 miles from Savannah for no other reason than to eat at The Breakfast Club.
  Customers often have to wait in line. It is not uncommon for the line to include people who have disembarked from a tour bus parked nearby.
  The building has been used as a restaurant since the early '70s. It became The Breakfast Club in 1976 and quickly became embedded in the culture and folklore of Tybee. (Tybee is an Indian word for salt.)
  Michael Elliott has written a book, part fact and part fiction, about Tybee and its people. Elliot is a native of Savannah who moved his family to Tybee.
  The Breakfast Club and it's lore make up a good part of Elliott's book, Running With the Dolphins and Other Tybee Tales. He writes with obvious affection about the ordinary people and the extraordinary characters who populate Tybee and who frequent The Breakfast Club.
  Elliot is a regular customer. He notes that regulars prefer a seat at the counter to a booth. At the counter, they can observe  the antics and the banter of the cooks working at the grill amid what appears to be carefree chaos, moving in symphonic harmony and shouting orders when they are ready.
  From his vantage point at the counter, Elliot has heard what he calls "some astute queries" from customers, particularly tourist. He list some of them in his book. One of them is this: "What is a grit?"
  The Breakfast Club Menu list grits of course, but it does not say what they are, let alone what one might be. For the benefit of tourist, though, it supplies the Southern pronunciation, "gree-its."
  Elliot depicts The Breakfast Club as a sort of headquarters for an uncharted Tybee benevolent society whose unofficial members know each other, care about each other, help each other in times of trouble and celebrate with each other in times of joy.
  Elliot is a minister whose work is in Savannah. His description of returning to Tybee after each day's work says much about the allure of the island:
       "Each day I ride into Savannah where I continue to work with homeless people, those struggling to recover from substance abuse, and persons living with AIDS. It is an intense and, often, public life. At the end of the work day, my car sails across the causeway connecting Tybee to the mainland. After crossing the Bull River Bridge, I can almost swear that big door closes, shutting out that portion of my life. On Tybee I am in another world. I am a homebody on the island, preferring to work in the yard, hang out at the Breakfast Club, take walks with my wife, or sit on the beach. I grow resentful when something intrudes upon these goals. It is a reflective and slow-paced life. It is also the best of two worlds. 
  Framed near the entrance to The Breakfast Club is this quotation from Elliot's book, in a chapter titled "In The Church of the Breakfast Club":
    "I believe no matter how bad a particular day may prove to be, The Church of the Breakfast Clubwill be there to sustain us through the trails and tribulations of life.It is the type of church God would be comfortable in, and I am sure he visits often."

---Richard Creed
Creed is a regular Sunday columnist:

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His breakfasts are embellished in more ways than a belly dancer moves and customers stand patiently in lines stretching down the sidewalk waiting for a seat in his restaurant.  "It's crazy," he says, observing clientele standing in pouring rain or blazing sunshine while nearby restaurants have space to spare and could serve them immediately. Early mornings, or in the off season, the restaurant is a gathering place for local residents who sit at the counter exchanging jokes and catching up on the latest gossip on an island where gossip easily edges out TV and newspapers as the favored form of entertainment.  Jody frankly admits that he's not sure why his place is so popular, but reckons it's because he offers good food at good prices. "Food is my life," he says. "I have a genuine concern for my product and for the needs and desires of my customers." It's more than that, however. You can get a pretty good meal at similar prices nearby without waiting in line. The mystique of the name may be part of it.

Returning tourists say they make it a point to stop at the restaurant on their island vacations and newcomers feel obliged to eat at a world famous place when they have the opportunity.
The "World Famous" part of the name was Jody's own idea, added 15 years ago when he took over the little Breakfast Club restaurant previously operated by his mother.
"A professor who taught a business course at the Culinary Institute in New York said 'everyone in here is world famous because it's impossible to disprove'," Jody laughs, noting that this statement was about all he remembers from that class.
"That always stuck with me and as soon as I took the place over a Gypsy type sign painter came through and I told him to paint me the biggest ass carnival type sign he could with those words on it and I slammed it up there. I think it cost me fifty bucks...I bought the plywood.
"The sign upset a lot of people but they couldn't disprove it!"
Given its present popularity and the thousands of world travelers who have eaten there, it would be pretty easy to prove the place has grown into its name. 
And its proprietor has become somewhat famous himself.
Jody was picked to handle chef's duties for one of the most exclusive weddings in recent memory...John F. Kennedy Jr.'s nuptuals at Greyfield Inn on Cumberland Island.
"They wanted someone who could think on their feet and make do with a minimum of resources...someone who could work quickly and efficiently with a smile on their face and get along with folks," he says. "It was a very tight group. They wanted somebody to break the ice."
Like one of his omelets assuaging early morning hunger pangs, Jody was made to order for the job.
"I had a blast," he smiles. "I worked 18 or 19 hours a day...I was only supposed to do a small amount of work but I wound up taking over."
Far from working with few resources, Jody says "they had ordered gross amounts of food. Every refrigerator was just filled to the brim with everything. Some of the items I'd never seen before!
"It was very hard work with long days and long hours but as you worked--the kitchen at Greyfield Inn is central--the guests would come and go and you couldn't tell the guests from the workers."
With his ice breaking expertise, group loosened up rapidly.
"We even took showers together," says Jody.
Well, not exactly together, but since there were only tubs inside, most stood in lines for the outside shower wearing fuzzy slippers and bathrobes, chatting informally as they waited their turn.
Jody said he was surprised--"being a conservative and spending a weekend with a bunch of liberals and waiting on them hand and foot--to find them to be very thankful and gracious.
"I was treated very well and so was everyone else...across the board. They didn't hesitate to ask questions or converse on a personal level. We made a lot of small talk. I was shocked."
On the day the newlyweds departed they got Jody up at 4 a.m. to prepare their breakfasts and he wound up chatting with them intimately as he cooked.
"We talked about football and all kinds of neat things," he says.
Once finishing their meal the Kennedys vanished almost instantly.
"They took off on a boat or a helicopter or whatever and got the hell out of Dodge!" says Jody, reflecting, "it would be cool if they showed up at the Breakfast Club one day." 
He doesn't preclude that possibility.
That's pretty heady stuff for a kid left his home just outside Chicago at 18 and shuffled up the highway with no plans, no money and no preconceived destination. 
Jody had been, and remains, a self-starter his entire life. 
When he was just 7, he worked around his aunt's tavern in the rough, tough southside Chicago area, cleaning up and arranging goods behind the bar. 
"That was my first exposure to the work ethic," he says. "I'd go over there with my older brother and sister and we'd be put to work right away. I swept the floor a lot better than they could and I was put to work stocking the bottles."
While still a kid he worked on farms southwest of the city and was once hired to groom, feed and water the famous Budweiser horses, expanding his chores into cleaning the barns and stables where mammoth animals were housed.
When he got a bit older, he worked in several Chicago pizza parlors.
Jody's early inculcation of the work ethic made him a success behind the pizza ovens where he recalls doing "pretty good at that work and making a lot of money at it. After a couple of month's they would let two people go because I was doing the work of three!"
Following his parents' divorce, while still working and attending high school, he became the principal housekeeper for his father, an airline pilot, in their large suburban home. 
"It generally required about 40 hours of labor a week," he recalls. "I was a teenager doing laundry, dishes and house work and going to school and working on the side. I was a busy boy."
That hectic schedule--and a knawing concern that he would get caught up in the burgeoning drug scene which had entrapped so many of his buddies--utimately got "to be too much and I dropped out of school at 18 and headed out of town on foot," he says. "That was May 16, 1976." 
After walking north for a day and a half with no food and no money, he spotted a red, white and blue U.S. Army recruiting van and went inside to ask for help.
The next thing he knew he was taking basic training at Ft. Knox, Ky.
Jody's proclivity for hard work and respect for organization paid off again when he donned a uniform.
"I loved the army," he says. "I loved the military life. It was very structured. Things were spelled out. They were very organized. It was a wonderful thing when you were 18 with no place to go."
He excelled at soldiering and was screened out of basic training after only a couple of months, given two rapid promotions, underwent Special Forces training and became a Green Beret.
Jody was stationed in Panama at the time President Carter signed the agreement to turn the canal over to that country.
"That was one of the most interesting, challenging, rewarding times of my life," he recalls. "Some day I might go back. I loved it. That's where I discovered who I was and what I was capable of doing."
Jody was promoted to E5 (sergeant) in under three years. 
"Unfortunately, I got transferred to the 82nd Airborne Division at Ft. Bragg, which was short of personnel at the time," he says. "I made 76 jumps but I discovered right away that I wasn't going to be as successful as I thought I could be."
Frustrated, he applied for admission to the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in New York "because I was always really good at cooking, was always faster than any of my co-workers and felt I could make a career of it." 
Once accepted, he opted out of the army after three and a half years, only to learn that his final admission was delayed.
Always persistent, Jody says he solved the problem by "sitting in the admissions office and making a real pest of myself until my file got on top."
While at the institute he learned pastry preparation, baking, food management, menu writing, building design, accounting "and just about everything you could ever imagine," he says. "Once completing the program, if you adhere to the protocol and go through all the levels you can become a master chef."
Jody, always on a fast track of his own, did not to adhere to that extended regimine.
"I chose to expend my energy developing my skill working for others and giving them everything I had," he says.
"To tell you the truth I didn't learn anything at the school. It's like taking your first Karate lesson. You may have been a good fighter before the class but afterwards you go out and get the crap beat out of you and I got it beat out of me on my first job!"
That was in Tucson, Ariz., where he was hired as assistant kitchen manager for a franchise restaurant.
"It was a great place with great people but the owner gave his buddies the good jobs," says Jody.
The best thing about that job occurred when he found his wife, Cheryl, in the restaurant. They had grown up together in Chicago where they went through catechism together and served as officers of the same high school class. 
Back then, they were just friends, having dated only once over the years.
"But we both needed something when we met again in Tucson, and we've been together ever since," smiles Jody. "She's the Big Kahuna, not me. She's the one who straightened me out. If it hadn't been for her, who knows where the hell I'd be."
Ultimately, he was promoted to the position of kitchen manager in the chain's restaurant in Phoenix, but that spot left something to be desired as well.
Workers who had been there long before his arrival felt they should have gotten the job.
"They took me out of another unit and put me in charge of a kitchen I'd never been in and that's not right," he says. "I found out the hard way. I was an outsider and I was sabotaged...my ovens were turned off, things were missing and I got beat up real bad. 
"The guys there knew everything about the place and one of them should have been put in charge and I told them so."
Jody was subsequently employed by several restaurants, including one in the big Marriott Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
"That was cool," he says. "It was a huge, institutional kitchen and that's where I learned a lot and honed my skills."
Later he handled a large kitchen for a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Ariz. 
"They had virtually no employees and I was cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner," he recalls. "I'd go through a pair of shoes in a month. The food business is rough!"
While in Arizona, Jody got a call from his mother, Helen, who said she was about to sell the little Tybee restaurant she had operated since 1976, along with a sandwich shop she opened later across the street.
"I had just landed a great job and had gotten a nice apartment and things were looking really good but I asked her to give me a shot at it," Jody recalls. "We talked for two or three hours and we settled on some ideas about how we would handle it and she said OK.
"I was out of there and headed to Tybee with everything I owned in a U-Haul. I ran out of gas at a sign saying it was 11 miles to the island with only seven cents in my pocket.
"I had to panhandle a quarter from a cop to call Helen to come and get me. She came with a gas can and when I got to the island, after driving for hours, I sacked out. Six hours later she got me up and said it was time to get to work."
Jody has been working ever since, at one point going almost four months without a day off. 
His mother had made many friends and was doing relatively well at the restaurant, but once he took over and added "World Famous" to the name, business skyrocketed.
His hard work, outstanding cuisine and the force of his gregarious personality helped transform the place into what is by far the most popular breakfast establishment on Tybee.
Helen continued to work in the restaurant for awhile, then moved to a large estate she had purchased in Florida for a number of years before returning to Tybee.
She's now employed by her son and "at 72 she can still work circles around everybody else," Jody smiles.
He has expanded and renovated the place three times and recently acquired an adjoining building on Butler Avenue.
Jody's culinary ingenuity has resulted in unique dishes which have been written up in books and national publications, including the New York Times.
"But for awhile there all I did for a long time is work, work, work and try to think about how to improve the place," he says. 
"For the first three years I was the only cook...a one man show. I was part of the frying pan standing there like an octopus. It took a tremendous amount of concentration and preparation. It was extremely intense. Sometimes I'd get in there at 4 in the morning and by 11 my brain wasn't working any more.
"My wife does all the thinking now. She's one of those behind the scenes workers who doesn't get appreciated. She works more hours than I do. Our house is her office and she does all the accounting and has done a darn good job for us and our family."
Jody also attributes his growing clientele to his fellow chef, Joel Worth, who he says "can make an old boot taste good. He may not make it look pretty--I can make things look pretty--but I don't care what you give this fella, he's one of the best I've ever met."
Reflecting on his enormous success, Jody says while he always hoped, and to some extent anticipated, he would be a success, "I never visualized having 35 people standing at 45 degrees in a 40 knot gale waiting to get into my restaurant. 
"Are they crazy or what? I would never do that! You can go to the Tybee Market and get yourself a box of Total and a gallon of milk and a paper."
Another factor contributing to his success is his credo:
"I have one motto...do unto others as you would have them do unto you...period," he says, adding:
"I take pride in taking a loser and developing any ability he may have. I've got three guys out there in charge of their own kitchens who never cooked a lick in their lives. I'm probably prouder of that than anything else."
While he makes no show of it, Jody has also helped many islanders who were down on their luck, many of whom have become regular customers.
Casting bread on the water frequently brings handsome returns. 
One of the main problems the Breakfast Club and other island businesses have nowadays is finding low cost labor, he says, noting:
"I predicted that five years ago. Tybee is suffering what Hilton Head went through. They built themselves out of a labor force and now, with high rents, there are no $250 to $500 monthly apartments left. They built them out. They woke up one day and found they had no cashiers, no bus boys, no waitresses, no cooks and now it's happened to us. We're in the middle of it right now.
"Tybee has changed but I'm not so sure we've improved. I don't like seeing change for the sake of change...that's what got Clinton elected. I don't want to hear change. I want to hear improvement! Let's make it better than it was." 
Despite these problems the ever energetic entrepreneur is forging ahead with a pot full of new plans.
Jody is considering opening a lunch and dinner restaurant in the adjoining building and is putting together a sequence of culinary videos, using the gourmet kitchen he installed in his home as the set for the filming.
He's not sure whether the videos will be sold alone or used to market a cooking show for television but one day you may be able to relax at home and watch without standing in those long lines. 
Unfortunately, you'll still need to fight your way into the World Famous Breakfast Club to catch up on the latest gossip and sample the succulent food.
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---J.R. Rosenberry
5/3/99