Cheers Without the Beer: Megan Custeau Packs Them into The Lunch Box

John Hoffman of Lemon Grove has loyally followed Jennifer Tanner to four restaurants, and now is a regular at the latest in La Mesa. “It’s like Cheers without the beer,” he says. Hoffman can remember when Tanner was pregnant with her daughter Megan and always remembers her birthday–because it’s his, too.

Adds Terry McIntyre, another regular who was sharing a table with Hoffman: “It feels like you’re walking into home. I like to support good people.”

What establishment rates such praise? What dining mecca keeps them coming back?

The Lunch Box.

The tiny eatery near the eastern end of La Mesa Boulevard is run by Megan Custeau, who was a first-grader when she plotted her career path. She looked into her little crystal ball, reached for her crayons and spelled it out.

“I have a drawing from when I was 6 that says, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a waitress,’ ” she says with a laugh. “Good prediction, there.”

Little Megan missed a few details about Grown-Up Megan—like the part about being a business owner. But she was mostly on target.

Custeau, 30, followed her mother into the restaurant business at an early age. She started waitressing at 13 and has been working in the business ever since. She and her mother previously had the popular Megan’s Café in San Carlos and now co-own The Lunch Box.

It’s a small but busy operation, open just for breakfast and lunch five days a week—a schedule designed to allow Custeau to have time for her two young children and husband, Kyle, a state firefighter.

She’s the one behind the counter—taking orders, answering the phone, working the register and delivering food to the 20 or so people who can fit at tables inside the shop or (on a warm day) those at the outside tables. And doing it all while talking and joking with customers, many of whom she knows by name.

That fill-the-room personality is something the 6-year-old Megan—even though she wanted to be a waitress—couldn’t have imagined.

When she started working at 13, Custeau says, she was “very, very shy” and even needed a co-worker to go with her to tables because she was so timid.

“People laugh at me now when I tell them I used to be shy,” she says. “I can talk to anyone now.”

Her Path to The Lunch Box

Custeau’s introduction to restaurants came when she was just a baby and her mom would bring her to Country Comfort, the restaurant she and her husband opened in Spring Valley in the 1970s. 

“I’d sleep in her office,” she says.

Tanner eventually sold the place—it’s since moved to El Cajon—but stayed in the business.

Eventually, she opened Megan’s Café in San Carlos in 2002, where she and her daughter worked side-by-side until they sold it in 2007. At that point, the success of Megan’s had become too much, especially since her life had evolved to include motherhood. Her son, Nathan, is now 6 and her daughter, Kyla, is 5.

So Custeau, a Jamul resident, took two years off to spend more time with her family.

As her children approached school age, however, she and her mom started looking for another location where they could operate a restaurant with a small staff and a limited schedule that would allow for family time.

Both had their eyes on La Mesa, a place they love. They came upon the location for The Lunch Box at the same time.

“It was funny,” she says. “We both had driven past this location separately but on the same day and called each other that night and said, ‘Hey, we found this one.’ ”

They also started eating out about five days a week, testing menus and seeing what they liked and didn’t like. Thus they came up with their own offerings.

When they first opened 2½ years ago, it was a six-days-a-week schedule to help get the business off and running. Now it’s back to five days a week (closed Sundays and Mondays).

“It’s way busier than we could have every imagined,” Custeau says. “The business came really fast. It’s been a very supportive community. We have fire, police, city employees. The mayor is here all the time. 

“We get the same customers five days a week. It’s kind of like at Megan’s. You know everyone’s name. It’s neat.”

Former Country Comfort and Megan’s customers started coming, too.

“Now we’re getting customers from 25 years ago,” Tanner says. “That’s been really nice.” 

And taking a cue from the diner’s name, customers donate their own childhood lunch boxes. A couple dozen are displayed. Custeau says it makes folks feel a part of the place, having helped decorate it.

Busy, Busy, Busy

During the week, The Lunch Box is open from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., with shorter hours on Saturdays—9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Breakfast is served until 11, and then the lunch crush hits. About 80 percent of their lunch business is takeout.

“We usually have a line out the door,” she says. “We do phone orders, fax orders and it’s just crankin’ from about 11:30 to 1.”

Looking back, Custeau isn’t quite sure how she worked that original six-day schedule. It all seems like a blur now. Having two days off has allowed her to regain some sanity.

“For the first year and a half, I did this by myself,” she says. “So we would be completely full and I would be taking phone orders, doing the counter and people would come in and say, ‘I just like watching you because it’s just so amazing.’ I don’t know how I did it, because if my assistant’s gone for like 10 minutes (now) I’m like  ‘I need her, where is she, where is she?’

“But you know you just do what you’ve got to do and I loved it. And people loved to watch it; I guess it was really funny. But you’ve just got to be super-duper organized.”

Behind the Scenes

There’s more to running a restaurant than running around like a crazy woman, however.

“People say ‘8:30 to 2:30? That’s a piece of cake,’ ” she says. “But it’s a lot more than that.”

To run a restaurant takes a lot of behind-the-scenes work that most people don’t realize. Because it’s a small operation—two staffers in the kitchen at breakfast, four during lunch and an assistant at the counter to help Custeau during the lunch crush—not much time exists during the day to restock supplies out front—utensils, napkins, beverage machines and ice.

So that has to be taken care of long before the first customer comes through the door. Then there’s cleanup after the doors close, and bookkeeping and other assorted paperwork.

Plus grocery shopping.

“In order to keep food costs down, we do a lot of our own shopping,” she says. And because there isn’t much storage space, the shopping has to be done every day or at least every other day. 

“With our volume, we go through a lot of food, and we’re constantly having to replenish it,” she says.

For now, Custeau says the business still feels like a work in progress.

“I think the day that I get to not be here for the day and go on a field trip with my children, I think that will be the day I consider it successful,” she says. 

She knows, though, that all the work she and her mom have put in is paying off. 

“There’s so much I’ve learned from her,” she says. “Probably the No. 1 thing is that your hard work pays off. Also, you’ve got to treat your customers like your family.”

Now Custeau’s son and daughter are learning from her.

They come in on some Saturdays to watch their mom (and eat their favorite things).

Nathan says he wants to be a cook. Kyla says she wants to be a waitress.

“She’s a little bit shy though,” Custeau says. “She reminds me a little bit of me.”