Charleston residents are usually asleep or at least winding down and on their way to bed at 2:30 in the morning, but at this hour, Patricia Craig’s day is just getting started.

The life-long Charleston resident and owner of the South Side Cafe on Jackson Avenue, wakes up each day at 2:30 a.m. so she can be ready to open at 5 a.m.

“I usually bake the biscuits, make the gravy,” Craig said. “I get the doughnuts out, and they have to be baked and iced.

“And anything else that has to be made for the day. If we have pies that need to be made, or chili, or just whatever needs to be done.”

By 2 p.m. weekdays or 1 p.m. on Saturdays, she is set to close up.

But the 54-year-old Craig is no stranger to these unique hours. She’s been maintaining them since she was in high school, when she began working for her father at Snyder’s Restaurant and Donut Shop.

“I did part time after school … ” Craig said. “I would come in and help them make doughnuts in the back room. And then gradually I started waiting tables, and then started cooking on the grill, and got to do everything.”

Craig has been in the restaurant business ever since.

After her father’s retirement, Craig and her husband became the restaurant’s owners. However, change was waiting to come.

“We got divorced, and (Craig’s husband) took the business,” she said. “I still worked here, but it was basically his. (But) he wasn’t really a businessperson, so it didn’t go. So then I came back in and took it back over, and started this for myself.”

For roughly 10 years, Craig has been the sole owner of the doughnut shop and changed the name to South Side Cafe. While Snyder’s Donut Shop held a few different locations in Charleston since it opened in the ’60s, the South Side Cafe has remained faithful to its spot on Jackson Avenue.

“It’s just comfortable. It’s just a nice, relaxing place to go,” said Kim Dalziel, who has been an on-and-off customer since 1987. “Good food, decent price, nice people.”

As for the hours, Craig is simply carrying on the family tradition.

“Basically those are the hours we’ve almost always been open,” she said. “At 5 a.m. there are several people that come in. And by 2, I’m ready to go home.”

At one point, Craig did try to alter the hours so that she could be open during the evening, but the results weren’t worth it.

“I think it’s just because everybody was used to the hours that we had,” she said.

And with the hours that it has, the South Side Cafe tends to cater to “retired farmers or retired people that come in at 5 o’clock,” Craig said. “They want their coffee, their paper and breakfast, or just to come eat with their friends.”

One such individual is James Isbell, a retired Charleston postmaster, who Craig’s family has been serving for roughly 30 years.

“I used to go to work at 6 (a.m.), and I was here every morning.” Isbell said. “And then after I retired, I just continued getting up early.”

Although the cafe does cater to the occasional group of drunken students, Twila Bridges, who is currently in her seventh year of waitressing at the cafe, said that as far as Eastern students are concerned, “99 percent of them are great.”

Just as Craig worked for her father at a young age, her daughter, 22-year-old Jamie Moffett, currently works at the cafe and has been doing so since childhood.

“I used to work here on the weekends when I was 12, helping do dishes and stuff,” Moffett said.

However, Moffett is still unsure of whether she’ll follow in her mother’s footsteps.

“I’m thinking about it, keeping it in mind,” she said.