When Joy Austin Beber opened Joy Café in Atlanta four years ago, she never thought she would be entertaining Food Network host Guy Fieri in her kitchen one day.
    But that's just what happened a few months ago, and last Friday, the Statesboro native and Georgia Southern alumna — along with her co-owner and husband, Jon — enjoyed 15 minutes of fame when Joy Café appeared on a new episode of the Food Network's popular show "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives."
    "I never really saw myself ending up where I am, if you know what I mean," she told the Statesboro Herald, laughing, as she often does. "It's kind of an interesting story of how you end up doing what you love but never thought you could do for a living."

An "interesting story"
    While The Joy Café will be 4 years old in October, its owners' love affair with food goes back to Beber's childhood. She learned to cook traditional Southern recipes under the instruction of her mother, Carol Cobb, and her grandmother, the late Madelyn Willbanks, both of Statesboro.
     "My mom was a single parent, so we didn't go to babysitters or anything like that," Joy said. "Grandma picked us up from kindergarten, and we went to stay with Grandma until Mom got off work. I always loved to cook and just basically hung on their apron strings — both my mom and my grandmother. But I definitely have to credit my mother, because she really encouraged me to cook the way she did."
    "Joy started out with simple cooking when she was about
6 or 7," said her mother, Carol Cobb, who used to teach home economics at Georgia Southern University. "Joy always seemed to have an interest (in cooking) … so I just welcomed her into the kitchen."
    Joy cultivated her love of the kitchen through years of tagging along with Cobb in her professorial duties, and continued to cook with her grandmother throughout Joy's undergraduate career at Georgia Southern, where she graduated with a degree in small business management.
    Joy eventually moved to Atlanta to work a job in telecommunications. There she met Jon Beber, a co-worker with a passion for food to rival Joy's own enthusiasm. The two started dating, nibbling their way through Atlanta's food scene. When Jon got a promotion that placed him as Joy's boss, Joy refused to continue dating someone she worked for. But rather than break up, she quit and opened up her own catering business. They married, and years later, Jon left his job and joined Joy as co-owner of Joy's new restaurant, Joy Café.
    The little café, which seats about 35–40 patrons at a time, is often completely full, and the staff of 25 people stays busy all week long. The Bebers think the secret to their success is all in the preparation: everything they serve is made from scratch.
    "When we say we make everything from scratch, we mean we cure and smoke our own bacon, we make our ham from scratch," Jon said. "We make our own sauerkraut. All of our dressings are made from scratch, all our soups are made from scratch. Literally, if we don't make it from scratch, we don't do it."
    Their dishes have earned accolades from several regional media outlets, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Simply Buckhead, Living InTown and Jezebel Magazine. Recently, Joy Café was included in Yelp's list of the Top 50 Places to Eat in Metro Atlanta, coming in at number 15 overall.
    But even before the café appeared on Yelp's list, it had attracted the Food Network's attention.

"Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives"
    The episode, titled "Homeland Favorites," also features a Greek restaurant in Denver, Colorado, and a taqueria in Richfield, Minnesota. Joy Café's segment appears at the end of the episode, in which Beber whips up her version of two classic Southern dishes: shrimp and grits, cooked in her own homemade barbecue sauce, and biscuits and gravy, a recipe she learned from her mother and modified with her own flair.
    "They had me in full hair and makeup, and I am a working chef," she said, laughing. "I laugh and tell my customers, 'You aren't going to recognize me! This is the first time I've made the biscuits with my hair down and in full makeup!' "
    Joy and Jon had been fans of Guy Fieri and his show for years, using his recommendations as a starting point when they looked for restaurants to try during their travels. Once he was in their kitchen, Joy said Fieri was as fun to work with as he was to watch on his show.
    "He made it real easy, because he was so funny," she said. "Literally, my stomach was hurting after our first 30 minutes on set together, because he's just so funny."
    The film crew shot footage over two 12-hour days for the roughly 10-minute spot. One of Joy's favorite moments ended up on the cutting floor, although it remains a funny story from the filming process.
    "I made my husband's homemade hot sauce, and I accidentally put in three times the number of habaneros," she said.
    Joy doesn't usually make the hot sauce, so she was not aware of her error — but John, who was watching from the other side of the kitchen, was. Unfortunately, because the filming demanded absolute silence from everyone but Fieri and Joy, he was not able to interject, and could not save Fieri from a much hotter bite than he was expecting to take.

The future for Joy
    Since the episode aired on Friday, Aug. 28, Joy said the café has seen "a definite uptick in the amount of business, both during the week and on the weekend." The weekend brunch crowd has been so overwhelming that Joy and Jon are seriously considering extending brunch throughout the week at their next restaurant, which they intend to open in May of next year.
    They have also enjoyed the company of friends from Statesboro, who have driven up to try the restaurant. Joy said her mother's hairdresser had come up to eat, and that she received a surprise when her childhood babysitter stopped by one day.
    "It's just kind of fun," Joy said. "Statesboro's a good 3 1/2 to 4 hours, depending how fast you drive, but it's just interesting that we've gotten on the map, as far as Statesboro residents are concerned, to visit."
    At the moment, Joy, Jon and their staff are buckling down and working long hours, getting "very little sleep and very few days off." But that's also just part of Joy and Jon's personalities: Cobb describes them both as hard workers with tenacious work ethics, who love to please and to make people feel at home.
    "I am really happy for Joy and Jon both, because they've worked so hard for this," Cobb said.

    Brittani Howell can be reached at (912) 489-9405.