The seven steak is not so tender, but it can inspire love.

That was the dish that Glenda Broussard cooked for a man named Horace on their first date. It was a blind date, set up by her friends at one of their homes.

“I wanted to go out to dinner. This was supposed to be a date. But my friends said ‘no, just cook for him,’” Broussard recalled. “When he went back for seconds they said ‘oh you got him, baby.’”

They got each other, that’s for sure, and Glenda and Horace Broussard have been married for 25 years now.

That seven steak is on the Thursday menu at the restaurant Glenda Broussard has run for nearly as long, Glenda’s Creole Kitchen outside her hometown of Breaux Bridge.

It’s a cut of beef from the chuck that may generously be called economical. But it is perfect for the kind of cooking you find at Glenda’s, a home style that uses the crucial ingredients of time and purpose.

Onions and peppers are cooked down so long that they’re transfigured from identifiable pieces of themselves to a brown embrace of flavor. This all sticks to the pot, then gets deglazed to meld further. Repeat, simmer, let the time go on.

“That’s just how we do it around here,” Broussard told me. “When you come visit someone we all just say ‘Let’s cook something.”

Plate lunch template

Small and low-slung, a bit ramshackle with a mix of decor and clutter and most of all utterly welcoming, Glenda’s belongs to the classic school of the Acadiana plate lunch spot.

The menu changes by day of the week, maintaining the same structure week after week. Only certain parts of the blackboard listing the day’s dishes need to be erased as those days change, because so much of the preparation is the same — stewed, stuffed or smothered, always with white rice and a ladle of gravy.

The stuffed turkey wings are on the blackboard each weekday. They’re sliced and crammed with onions and garlic and smothered with sausage and paved over with more garlic.

The smothered sausage uses links from Russell’s Food Center nearby in Arnaudville that are dense and dark with a texture that keeps unspooling meaty flavor as you chew.

The meatball stew gives orbs that are both craggily crisp and soft inside, suffused with brown gravy but still somehow keeping their form until you take the fork to them.

Dispatching flavor

At the time of the fateful seven steak dinner date, Broussard was working for the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Office, staffing the dispatch line on the night shift.

She had three young children. She didn’t have the money to eat at restaurants very often and always brought home cooking to work. She called it lunch, even though on a night shift that meal break came in the wee hours.

Whenever she would heat up her meal at the station house, sure enough, her co-workers were compelled to inquire about it.

“They’d smell it, and ask where I got it, where they can get some,” she said.

She started making extra and bringing in cartons to sell at work. The orders multiplied; her car was filling up.

“I think it was a sign that I should use my gift,” Broussard says today.

That encouragement launched Glenda’s Creole Kitchen, and it has become an institution.

Off the interstate, to the drive-through

It was a hot summer day the first time I visited Glenda’s, but even then, in the middle of a Louisiana swelter, I had the holiday season on my mind. In particular, it was the way Louisiana families cook this time of year, and how closely Glenda’s menu mirrors that throughout the year, making this taste of Acadiana home available anytime.

The slow cooking in the process belies the fast pace of service. All the magic goes into these dishes long before you order them, so meals can be ladled together swiftly.

There is even a drive-thru, with a small window cut in the side of the wall and a hand-painted menu board listing the daily offerings.

Glenda’s is a tempting stop anytime I’m nearby on Interstate 10, but I’m also thinking about it now as the holidays put many of us on the road traversing the state.

Glenda’s address is in Breaux Bridge, but it’s really on the outskirts along a rural stretch of La. 31 (called Main Highway here), paralleling the turns of Bayou Teche. People drive fast on these country roads, and Glenda’s appears as a blink-and-you-missed-it piece of low-slung white clapboard set in green country landscape.

There aren’t a lot of people who are just stopping on a whim; it’s the kind of place you know about.

A lot more people did find out about Glenda’s after the restaurant was featured on the Anthony Bourdain show “No Reservations.” That was in 2012, an eternity in digital media life cycles, and photos on the wall at the restaurant from the making of that episode show their age.

But you should know about places like Glenda’s, so closely interlocked with family and place and flavor, delicious proof that you can feel connected to all of it simply by partaking in a meal.

That is one of the gifts of Louisiana food culture. Here, you can even get it from the drive-thru.

Glenda’s Creole Kitchen

3232 Main Highway, Breaux Bridge, (337) 332-0294

Sun.-Fri. 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (closed Saturday)