Betty is known for her biscuits and gravy. Connie cooks up fattening catfish that calls in hungry grain haulers and farmers.

Both women manage South Side eateries in St. Joseph that elicit memories of grandma’s kitchen: feel-good, home-style cooking from scratch.

And with their old-fashioned food comes cleanliness. Both diners have done well on surprise kitchen inspections by health inspectors.

They face obstacles, however. Both restaurants are housed in aging buildings that are harder to keep clean. And they lack the oversight and food safety training afforded to some national franchise

diners that have consistently done well during health inspections.

What they have going for them is a decades-long good name as a neighborhood diner and thrice-yearly visits by the St. Joseph-Buchanan County Health Department.

Inspector Kim Costen said mainstay, locally owned establishments like Betty’s Cafe and Hap’s Place rely on improvement through inspection.

“A lot of locally owned restaurants that have been here for awhile base their food safety knowledge on experience and education we offer when we do our inspections,” Ms. Costen said.

In the last year, the cleanliness at Hap’s Place — a husband-and-wife-owned restaurant on South Fourth Street that has seen the good and bad times in the Stockyards area — has faltered at times. Last August, the place racked up seven critical health code violations, the term health inspectors use to define a violation that has the potential to make someone sick.

In seven prior inspections, they’d been cited only twice. Owner Connie Wertin was concerned.

Buyoed by the News-Press making health inspection files public earlier this year, the kitchen was cleaned up. Ms. Costen could not find a single violation in her February inspection.

“It makes me feel good to know I’m doing good,” Ms. Wertin said. “Some of the beer delivery guys see how clean our kitchen is and say you can’t believe some of the kitchens they visit in town.”

At Betty’s Cafe on King Hill Avenue, Betty Ball, 78, has eased most management responsibilities to her co-owner daughter, Patricia Gardner,

“We just do what she (health inspectors) tells us to do,” Ms. Ball said, adding that “everybody does their share,” referring to her eight-person kitchen staff.

Ahmad Safi can be reached

at ahmadsafi@npgco.com.