ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — On a Saturday morning, things are hopping in the dining room of Perdido Beach Resort in Orange Beach. Guests and visitors enjoy the buffet as a parasail takes off from the blue Gulf, just beyond the windows.

In the center of the hubbub on the buffet line is Glinda Pope and her three omelet pans. The pans are seasoned, heated to just the right temperature and waiting for a customer’s choice of eggs and fillings.

Pope knows just when to give the eggs a little flip to create the perfect folded-over omelet. She spends time making sure the peppers and other items that go into her fluffy creations are just right.

And she spends a few minutes while she works talking to her customers and getting to know them.

“You come back, now,” she tells a diner as they take a ham and cheese omelet to their table.

“We get tons and tons of comments on her,” said Tony Marzullo, director of operations at the resort.

Pope says she’s been at the resort for 16 years. And cooking was something she “just fell into.”

“I wanted to be a nurse,” Pope said. But, a stint preparing food for a nursing home got her into commercial cooking.

“I like cooking. I like making things look pretty,” said Pope, adding that she has two daughters, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Her daughters became nurses. Pope worked at a number of other restaurants before coming to work at the resort.

Pope gets frequent requests from people wanting to learn how to make her delicious omelets, Marzullo says.

“Well, the pan has to be hot,” said Pope. “Then the eggs go right together.” If the pan is cool, Pope explained, the eggs will not join up to form an omelet, making the dish more scrambled eggs than omelet.

Pope enjoys cooking, even at home.

“I like to make macaroni and cheese, collard greens and cornbread,” she said. Chicken-fried steak, a “beefsteak with light breading and country gravy” is a favorite.

Pope is also active at Believers Life Center in Pensacola, which is how she had an almost-disastrous cooking incident of her own.

“I almost set my whole home on fire,” she said, explaining that she was wrapping a batch of fudge brownies for a church bake sale when a pan of oil she was heating to fry chicken caught fire.

“I went to get water, but someone covered the pan,” Pope said. If water had hit the grease fire, it could have spread and caused parts of the kitchen to catch fire.

“God was watching for me,” she said.