BOULDER • Jacquie Meyer was sipping tea one recent morning at the bar of the restaurant she owns, The Buff, when she struck up a conversation with a regular.

“I get this every single time,” the man said of his breakfast plate, “and my eggs are like this every single time.”

Which helps explain why customers have been coming back for nearly 30 years now.

Also helping are the 99-cent mimosas and bloody marys. It’s a tradition beloved, of course, by Boulder’s college kids — a tradition dating back to when Jacquie and her husband, Chris, started their business attached to a former motel across from the current spot here along Canyon Boulevard.

The boozy special is not exactly to the Meyers’ financial benefit. “But it’s one of the things The Buff is known for,” Jacquie says. “And one of the things we believe in is consistency.”

Consistency in the eggs, yes. And in more surprising menu items.

Chris is partial to the Buffaquiles: homemade corn tortilla chips beneath chili con carne, pork green chili, basted eggs, cheddar, sour cream and guacamole. Others go with the French toast, thick-cut brioche dipped in a custard batter — popularly served with chicken and bacon.

The former host of the show “Man v. Food,” Adam Richman, once took on piles of pancakes called Saddlebags, filled with bacon or sausage. Other pancakes are filled with white chocolate.

As for Barack Obama, he once went with the Olé — the skillet loaded with chorizo, potatoes, onions, jalapenos, green chiles and topped with cheddar and pork green chili.

There has been no shortage of other notable guests to The Buff. Most notable recently has been the celebrity football coach in town.

Coach Prime has continued another tradition at The Buff, Jacquie explains. Since serving as secretary to Bill McCartney, CU’s football coach from 1982-1994, she has kept up connections in the athletics department.

“We tell the coaches now we’re an unseen player on the team,” she says. “We want to help land these recruits; we want to contribute to a really strong impression of the city and community. So the recruits and parents come to The Buff right when we open.”

They join a tradition almost 30 years in the making. Read a local magazine not long ago: “Eating breakfast at The Buff is almost a Boulder rite of passage.”

Which is not exactly what Jacquie and Chris had in mind when they took on the business in 1995.

“It was never anything other than we wanted to give healthy, wholesome food to the community, and we wanted to make a living doing it,” Chris says. “That was really our goal.”

For healthy and wholesome, the owners point to beef tallow in their fryers, the avocado oil for cooking potatoes and the butter for eggs — no seed oil in the kitchen.

As to the other part of the Meyers’ early goal, the part about making a living, that’s a longer story. That’s a story 30 years in the making.

“They say restaurant years are like dog years, so I think we’re at like 187 years,” Jacquie says.

She shakes her head at the thought. “All I know is we worked every single solitary day. … I remember Chris saying at one point, ‘What do normal people do on a Sunday?’”

The years were anything but normal. Normal was not meant to be for the couple who had met at the former Le Peep breakfast and lunch restaurant in Boulder. Chris was a manager, representing Le Peep’s founding family, and Jacquie served tables as a mother of three young boys.

They set their sights on transforming the Golden Buff Grill. The former landmark had been struggling and looking for a new vision.

“We wanted The Buff to be like a lodge, with a warm, homey, special appeal,” Jacquie said in 1996, a year after moving in. “We wanted you to feel like you’re coming home. We wanted to treat people like they’re a guest in our house.”

Jacquie’s and Chris’s actual homes struggled. Their marriages would crumble.

“The business had taken a very heavy toll on our families,” Chris says.

He and Jacquie deepened their relationship through the hardship of the restaurant. They leaned on faith, they say, gaining strength as well from each other’s kids who became their own. They leaned on something Chris always said: “There’s always tomorrow’s sales.”

But would it ever amount to paying off debts? they wondered. How many more times would they have to borrow against their mortgage?

“We lived on borrowed money, working every day with no ability to finance our income,” Chris says. “Around maybe 2002, we started seeing a situation where we could actually give ourselves some pay. … And then something really amazing happened.”

The Buff got a call from “Man v. Food.” Richman, the host, said to prepare for business.

“Sure enough, our lives changed,” Jacquie says.

The years would see Obama and more of the rich and famous passing through Boulder. But more than anyone, The Buff’s owners talk about locals, the everyday regulars they hoped would come to that “homey” place they built — “like one big happy family,” Jacquie says.

Family is at the front of the house this morning: Jacquie’s son Jaxson is greeting guests, like his older brothers did in The Buff’s early days.

“I look back at those days and can’t believe it,” Jacquie says. “Financially, timewise, trying to care for the kids, missing games because of where we needed to be … there’s some regret in some instances.”

In other instances, she thinks of stories from over the years. She has thought of a young woman who reached out after her father died.

“She said she came into The Buff because she needed something to feel like home. She said, ‘That’s what you guys gave me.’”