Editor’s Note: This is the first in a five-part series on Small Business Survivors, longtime local businesses that have weathered changing economics and times.

In a day when businesses are folding left and right, it’s refreshing to walk down Broad Street and turn in to a business that has been operating continuously since 1933.

The Partridge Cafe has been feeding Romans “home-cooked” meals for 76 years.

John Jacobs, the son of Lebanese immigrants, started the business. He died in 1986, but his wife, Karemy Jacobs, took over the business and can still be seen visiting with customers every day.

Chances are, if you haven’t been into the restaurant in a couple of years, or even a couple of decades, that you’ll remember your waitress. Demi Toler has been toting trays out of the kitchen since 1974.

Gaynelle Pilgrim has been attending the cash register for most of the past 37 years.

Back in the kitchen, Minnie Knox cooked for decades. Now her daughter, Barbara Knox, is cooking salmon patties, roast turkey and fried chicken six days a week.

The restaurant initially opened where the Wells Fargo (Wachovia) Bank parking lot now sits. Jacobs moved to its current location, 330 Broad St., in 1964. Jacobs was convinced to move by the owners of the old Gordon Theater, who shut it down, remodeled the building and talked Jacobs into moving in.

During the ’70s and ’80s, The Partridge was the scene for backroom wheeling and dealing by Rome and Floyd County movers and shakers.

Karemy Jacobs’ daughter, Angelle Thornton, and Angelle’s husband, Joel, help with day-to-day management of the business, but Karemy Jacobs still drives downtown six days a week to make sure the business is carried on the way her husband would have wanted.

For years the menu featured just one price. That’s not the case anymore, but Jacobs has been determined to keep prices close to the $5 benchmark that her husband thought was the most anyone would be willing to pay for a meal.

That’s getting tougher and tougher every year. Minimum wage is up, food costs are up, utilities are up.

“It’s a juggling act,” said Joel Thornton.

Still, it’s not unusual to visit the Partridge for lunch and see familiar faces day after day. Thornton said you could tell how attendance was in the downtown church by the number of folks who showed up for lunch after services were over.

One of those who show up on a daily basis is Roman Addie Rollins. She’s been eating at the Partridge for 53 years, two meals a day.

“They have vegetables and things I think are good for you to eat,” she said. “The food must be good for you, since I’ve been eating it so much for so long.”

Rollins said one would have to “look a long way to have a menu like they do and prepare it the way they do.”

Her favorite food at the restaurant is a tie between the crabcakes and the turkey and dressing.

“It’s always good,” she said. “They never fail.”

It’s that kind of consistency that has kept the Partridge a fixture in downtown Rome for 76 years.

Staff writer Kevin Myrick contributed to this report.