‘Like family.’ Longtime homestyle cooking restaurant to close in Mooresville.
Corry Brandon knows his customers so well at Corine’s Cafe in Mooresville that he fires up their breakfasts and lunches the minute he spots them in the parking lot.
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Bill Weaner said he holds up a thumb as he enters, and Brandon immediately gets his eggs, livermush, home fries and grilled biscuit ready.
“I depend on this place,” Weaner, 83, told CharlotteFive at the restaurant during Friday’s lunch rush. “A lot of other people do, too.”
“It’s where he comes to catch up with whoever he’s looking for,” Brandon said about Weaner, who’s there six days a week.
“If they were open seven days, I’d be here seven days a week,” Weaner said.
Like other regulars, Weaner said he’s not sure what he’s going to do when Brandon permanently closes Corine’s on Friday, July 31, the day his lease is up.
Brandon has worked at the restaurant since 2014 and took over the establishment when founder Corine DeFries retired in 2021. She opened Corine’s in 2005, quickly building a devoted following with an affordable, homestyle cooking menu and friendly staff.
He’s closing because his ever more expensive lease is up, business has been down with the economy, and it’s time for “something new, something different,” the 50-year-old Brandon said.
Brandon credits the food in part for what kept people coming back, some twice a day, he said. “The country-style steak is the best.”
“And the customers,” Brandon said. With a laugh, he said, “You can find anybody you want if you’re looking for them. They’re here.”
He said he knows almost every customer by name.
Customers were stunned at the news. There’s no place like Corine’s, they said.
“It’s the feel,” Mooresville town commissioner and longtime customer Eddie Karriker said at the restaurant Friday. “You come in, you know the people. He starts making my food when I come in.”
He loves the livermush and eggs for breakfast and the country-style steak with gravy over rice for lunch. “It’s extremely tender,” Eddie Karriker aid.
When Corine’s closes, “it’s going to be an adjustment,” Karriker said.
Karriker’s cousin, Ferman Karriker, said he has dined there three or four times a week since the day it opened, and at the same table. He’s gone with friends there since his wife, Barbara, died in 2023.
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“Always good food,” Ferman Karriker said. “Everybody who comes in here knows you.”
He calls Brandon “the King of Country Ham.”
Ferman Karriker, 85, had a picture taken with Brandon and DeFries one day, got it framed and then gave it to Brandon, who displays it at the restaurant.
Also on display are dozens of framed pictures of NASCAR drivers and their cars.
The place became famous over the decades.
NASCAR legend and Mooresville High graduate Dale Earnhardt Jr. filmed a commercial there, and part of an episode of the TV series “The Hunting Wives” was shot in the restaurant over two days recently.
Pro bull rider J.B. Mauney did a YouTube video at Corine’s.
Corine DeFries named a menu item for Mauney, who was born in Charlotte and grew up in Mooresville: “J.B. Mauney: two biscuits with gravy and choice of bacon or livermush ($7.90).”
Besides the J.B. Mauney, customer favorites include, for lunch, pork tenderloin over rice (a Tuesday special for $10.75); salmon patty with hush puppies (an every-other Friday special for $9.99) and country-style steak with gravy over rice (a Sunday special, $9.99), Brandon said.
Two other favorite breakfast items are the Dutch Treat, two eggs any style, with bacon, sausage or livermush and hash browns, home fries or grits and a pancake ($9.95) and the Stacker, a gravy biscuit topped with two eggs any style, bacon or sausage and topped with cheese ($8.65).
“The food is good, and the price is good,” customer George Roberts said. “The waitresses are real nice and friendly.”
The servers have also been there for years: Server/manager Denise Link and server Dana Morrison have been there for 16 years; server Lisa Dean for 19.
“It’s like a family,” Link said about the closeness and friendliness of everyone at Corine’s, workers and customers alike. “With us closing, it feels like a death, because we’re losing everybody at once.”
“My personal hope is someone will come in here, so we don’t lose a place like this on this side of town,” Eddie Karriker said about the much longer established side of Mooresville. The Lake Norman side is several miles to the west from Corine’s spacious brick building at 559 E. Plaza Drive.
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