Charlotte Magazine April 2020

The Preservation Guru’s New Project p. 15

A Native’s First Cut at Beef ’N Bottle p. 42

Rubbing Shoulders With Golf Pros—and the Sea p. 28

REAL ESTATE

Where Can We Live?

The booming ’burbs and the ongoing crisis in affordable housing

APRIL 2020

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CONTENTS CHARLOTTE / APRIL 2020 / VOL. 25, NUMBER 4

THE REAL ESTATE ISSUE

50

RENTAL ROULETTE A recent college graduate on the hunt for a decent, affordable place to live

62

BY CRISTINA BOLLING

54

WHERE WE’RE GROWING The suburbs that analysts eye as high-growth spots for 2025— and beyond

BY TAYLOR BOWLER

66

BY GREG LACOUR

56

CRISIS PLANNING Land is getting too expensive for many people to afford to live on it. Can we solve the city’s most complicated problem?

BY GREG LACOUR

HOME STRETCH A homeowner gives a dated Myers Park ranch a second chance

Features

THE COST OF EXPENSIVE DIRT Land prices, especially near uptown Charlotte, are forcing even some affluent homeowners to flee for the sticks

BY CHUCK MCSHANE

Plus 70

STUCK IN NEUTRAL In a city where getting ahead is practically a religion, Cheryl Potts has done a lot right—and she hasn’t gotten far

BY PAM KELLEY

ON THE COVER: 1225 South Church Apartments in South End. Photograph by Rusty Williams.

ON THIS PAGE: New construction near the light rail’s Arrowood Station.

Photograph by Logan Cyrus.

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

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24 32

04 20 CONTENTS

JACY PAINTER KELLY; CHRIS EDWARDS; PETER TAYLOR; CASA DE CAMPO RESORTS & VILLAS

IN EVERY ISSUE 10 From the Editor 13

Connect

96

You Are Here

THE BUZZ 15 Life Lessons At 82, historic preservationist Dan Morrill aims to build something new 18

THE GUIDE 84 Arts + Culture What’s happening around town 88

Restaurants The city’s savviest restaurant listings

39

28

19

People Stuart Watson’s podcast challenges men to drop the mic and let women say their piece Remembrance A UNCC student reflects on the school shooting one year later

THE GOOD LIFE 21 Education Davidson College professor Andrew Rippeon teaches the art and craft of letterpress printing

24

Art Holly Keogh uses her McColl Center residency to capture images of women as newborn mothers

28

Direct Flight Golf on a Pete Dyedesigned course in the Dominican Republic

32

Room We Love Designer Jacy Painter Kelly transforms her 10-year-old daughter’s bedroom

FOOD + DRINK 39 Now Open The Goodyear House promises a good time—and a really good meal 41

The Story Behind Dressler’s cheesecake

42

Served History A native Charlottean visits Beef ’N Bottle steak house for the first time

44

Local Flavor Chef Jenny Brulé discovered her own strength building Davidson Ice House

34

Seen The city’s best party pics

46

36

Playlist What to do and see this month

On the Line Shai Fargian is the force behind Yafo Kitchen

47

Bite-Sized News Foodie news on a small plate APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

9

Volume 25, Number 4

APRIL 2020

F RO M T H E E D I TO R

GAINING GROUND

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Home ownership, like an exploding real estate market, drops you in a pool of complications you didn’t plan for ON A WINTRY DAY IN 2015, another symphony of grunts and curses proceeded beneath our feet. It was our fifth consultation, a new pair of brave souls venturing under our 1951 mill home to investigate a concerning pool of water. The crawl space, which barely met the regulatory height minimum, was so restrictive that every plumber who entered came out a changed, more cynical man. Each time, the professionals theorized a different culprit for the water. This final crew gave the most accurate yet most disturbing diagnosis: Our bathroom’s shower did not have an exit pipe.

No, really. Each time we washed, soapy Andy Smith water went down the drain and collected in a andrew.smith@charlottemagazine.com big hole in the crawl space. The man who had flipped our house and sold it to us six months earlier cut many corners, but this was his magnum opus—a sterling tribute to the gods of negligence. Also, the empathetic plumbers related, some, if not all, of your pipes need to be replaced. At least this crew had earned their $100 consultation fee.

To save money, I pumped out the pool of water myself. (The pros took care of the other stuff.) As I twisted and crawled, now the one grunting and cursing and staring down massive insects, I thought about the things we homeowners take for granted: a dry crawl space, heat and air conditioning, a holeless roof. Even owning a home is a privilege, though it sometimes doesn’t feel like it.

Home ownership is just one multifaceted component in that massive machine of real estate that propels Charlotte into the future, a labyrinth inside a much larger labyrinth. Depending on who you are, the forecast can either be encouraging or foreboding. In this year’s Real Estate issue, the many-sided field is unpacked in several different narratives: a family at the center of a perilous renovation in Myers Park (p. 62); a young professional searching all over town for her first apartment (p. 51); the suburbs set to explode in the near future (p. 54); the state of land prices (p. 67); and what the upcoming 2040 Comprehensive Plan could mean for all of us (p. 56).

At the center of all of it is this concept of “home,” and what that means beyond the slogans hand-painted onto your grandmother’s rustic decor.

Is “home” where the heart is? Sure. Is “home” where you hang your hat?

Yeah, but some of us just pile them in the closet.

Is it a place where you simultaneously forge treasured memories and confront your emotional and financial limitations, conjuring a constant, low hum of anxiety that spikes every time a board creaks? Now, for me, that one lands a bit closer to “home.”

10

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Andy Smith SENIOR EDITOR Greg Lacour LIFESTYLE EDITOR Taylor Bowler ART DIRECTOR Jane Fields ASSOCIATE ART Melissa Stutts DIRECTOR CONTRIBUTING Allison Braden EDITORS Jen Tota McGivney COPYEDITORS/ Lillian Austin FACT-CHECKERS Carl Moritz Polly Paddock CONTRIBUTING Daniel Coston PHOTOGRAPHERS Logan Cyrus Chris Edwards Rick Hovis Andy McMillan Peter Taylor Rusty Williams CONTRIBUTING Shaw Nielsen ILLUSTRATORS CONTRIBUTING Cristina Bolling WRITERS Michelle Boudin Allison Braden Virginia Brown Grace Cote Mike Dojc Pam Kelley Chuck McShane

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Volume 25, Number 4

APRIL 2020

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ONLINE EXTRAS, EVENTS, AND CONVERSATIONS

REACT

Responses to the February issue of Charlotte magazine

@charlottemag, I am so very grateful for you and your lovely team helping to shed light on #selfcare and the importance of tapping back into your mind and body Loved seeing what other amazing #CLT folks are doing in the community and big shout out to @meredith.connelly @getfitwithchrys and all of the other amazing humans that were highlighted in this issue of #Charlotte #Magazine Instagram comment from @traveling_gypsy Readers from seemingly everywhere—including food writers at The New York Times and The Washington Post—had something to say about “Accounting For Taste,” Keia Mastrianni’s essay on food “influencers” and their effects on Charlotte’s restaurant scene. This is just a small sampling of what it stirred up on social media: Charlotte NC is one of many mid-size cities with a growing restaurant scene but no critic to help sort it out. This is a smart, fine-grained piece on how that plays out.

Tweet from @pete_wells

What a great piece by @keiaishungry. It’s so good that I, a major influencer, will share it with my dozens of followers at a deeply discounted rate.

Tweet from @costellowv

I’m glad @keiaishungry reported out and wrote this essay. It’s worth your time to read how a city’s dining scene is influenced (and, for better or for worse, shaped) by those who cover it. Question for everyone: do you trust Instagram influencers? If so, why?

Tweet from @timcarman

I agree—reliable sources that cover restaurants in a thoughtful way are necessary and we need more, especially right now as new places open in Charlotte every week. In the meantime, people should give near-zero weight to negative Yelp or OpenTable reviews. It’s so much more useful to hear from people who’ve gone out of their way to write a rave review about a place (generally with no real incentive to do so).

Facebook comment from Richard Goldberg

It’s a complex story to tell. Good job, @keiaishungry, for telling it.

Tweet from @kathleenpurvis A looooooong overdue look at the state of restaurant reviews. I hope this is widely read. Thanks @keiaishungry Tweet from @thelesak Extremely well-done piece by @keiaishungry on influencer culture and food criticism in Charlotte. “Now, what passes for ‘information’ in Charlotte’s dining scene consists of carefully choreographed photos and videos for social media feeds—and little else.”

Tweet from @CLTLedger

Your “Accounting for Taste” article was eye opening. Thanks so much.

Over time I’ve noticed the fancy pictures/write ups in my IG feed didn’t align with my restaurant experiences. It makes sense now that I know their objectivity is soiled with cash and free food.

Instagram comment by @hokie02vt

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APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

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INSIDE: LIFE LESSONS / PEOPLE / REMEMBRANCE

BUZZ

THE

WHAT MATTERS NOW IN THE CITY

LI F E L E SS O N S

DAN MORRILL

At 82, the embodiment of historic preservation in Charlotte aims to build something new

RICK HOVIS

BY GREG LACOUR

THESE DAYS, Dan Morrill works in a quiet first-floor bedroom in the 88-year-old Eastover home where he and his wife, Mary Lynn, have lived since 1967. Surrounded by books and antiques and warmed by a gas log fireplace against the far wall, Morrill leans forward in a gray recliner as he taps away at his laptop on a chilly late January afternoon.

“We have three bedrooms upstairs, but it’s always good to have a downstairs bedroom,” he remarks, “especially when you get old.”

He’s 82, a lifelong North Carolinian, and his old-school Old North State accent takes that last word, drops it an octave, and draws it out for emphasis: ooooollllllld.

Morrill sticks with his commitments over decades. He’s the longest-tenured faculty member ever (51 years) at UNC Charlotte, and for nearly a half-century has been Charlotte’s undisputed expert on and leader in historic preservation, an area that fast-growing Charlotte wouldn’t seem to embrace. But Morrill says there’s more of it in town than people think, and he recently left behind a position he’d held for 46 years— director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission, a county agency—to tackle preservation via the nonprofit route. Last year, he and a friend started Preserve Mecklenburg (wepreservemecklenburg.org), a 501(c)(3) organization that raises donations to try to preserve properties like the John and Idella Mayes House at 435 East Morehead Street in Dilworth, a Victorian-era gem that Preserve Mecklenburg may pick up and move if it means saving the house.

Dan Morrill, for decades the director of the CharlotteMecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission, has co-founded a new organization that tries to save historic properties like the John and Idella Mayes House at 435 East Morehead Street in Dilworth.

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

15

THE BUZZ We sat down with Morrill to discuss the new nonprofit, his departure from the Landmarks Commission, his years in an often frustrating field, and the state of preservation in Charlotte. His words have been edited for space and clarity.

THIS IS ONE THING people really get wrong: They think everything gets torn down in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. I’ve heard that for 50 years. It’s not true.

If you look at NoDa, Fourth Ward, Optimist Hall, all of these places, Charlotte-Mecklenburg is alive with preservation. But a lot of people still just don’t get it.

I THINK MOST PEOPLE, when they think of a historic place, they think of a sort of intact urban center. They think of Charleston, Savannah, Pensacola, Annapolis. Whereas, here in Charlotte, the center city is dominated—except for Fourth Ward—by skyscrapers and glass towers and all that stuff, and therefore it doesn’t have that sort of image.

Much of what is going on as far as significant preservation in this city is in some of our early 20th-century suburbs: Wesley Heights, Wilmore, Myers Park, Elizabeth, Plaza Midwood, those kinds of places.

I WAS BORN IN CHARLOTTE, but as an infant, I moved with my parents to Winston-Salem. I don’t know if you know about the Moravians and Old Salem. It was a German-based organization in the 18th century, and they were very organized, and they did not bury people by nuclear family. They buried people by gender and marital status and age. All the little girls were buried together, the little boys, the married women, the married men—and all the stones are the same.

I had relatives buried there because my mother was from Winston-Salem, and we would go down when I was a child at Easter to scrub their graves. When you’re a kid, and your parents take you, with a brush, to scrub the graves of your ancestors, that’ll give you a sense of history.

HOW DID I GET TO CHARLOTTE? Pure happenstance. I got a Ph.D. in history at Emory University, and I happened to get a job in 1963 at what was then Charlotte College, which morphed into UNC Charlotte. Purely the luck of the draw.

16

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

EXCEPT FOR SOME ISSUES of gender and ethnicity, Charlotte really hasn’t had a fundamentally new idea since the 1880s.

It’s boosterism. We want to be a New South city. We want to be a big place. We want to be progressive. We want to show that even though we’re a Southern city, we can be a big dog in the pack. That really started in the 1880s with the textile industry and a very interesting man, Dan Tompkins, who came here in 1883.

He championed boosterism, economic growth. He was a social Darwinist: We either move forward or we slip backward.

There is no resting place with progress.

We’ve certainly seen changes in ethnicity and gender, but really, it’s simply to give more people access to boosterism.

Charlotte’s always trying to “get there.”

It’s dominated by money, dominated by commercial and industrial enterprise. It’s a businessperson’s town, and it’s been that way ever since the 1880s.

HISTORY IS NOT THE PAST. History is the present looking at the past. So it’s constantly changing. What’s valuable one day, venerated one day, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be venerated later.

intensive development you can according to existing zoning. When you’re doing something that does not easily make money? Tough. Tough.

I’D SAY THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I’ve learned is that you cannot expect people to work against their economic self-interest. You’ve got to make preservation make economic sense to people.

THE PRIVATE SECTOR has two great advantages over the public sector. Because the public sector is spending taxpayers’ money, understandably, there are a lot of procedural things that you have to do. The law requires that you be very, very meticulous with the expenditure of taxpayers’ money, so you cannot move fast. You can’t respond very effectively to an emergency.

Preserve Mecklenburg doesn’t spend taxpayers’ money. We spend money that we raise, and therefore we can move very fast. I mean, I could make a deal with you this afternoon. Preserve Mecklenburg is a baby. I think we’re going to survive. But we’re all-volunteer, and we need donations. Any money we make is just going to be used to save more stuff.

IN 1974, I became a consultant with the Historic Landmarks Commission.

Historic preservation is much more vigorous, larger, and more diverse than it was then. The initial experience was basically picking out Old South, imposing buildings like plantation houses and trying to ensure that they were preserved: Hezekiah Alexander House, Latta Place, Rosedale, which is up on North Tryon Street. Very elitist, sort of the old, traditional concept that preservation was picking out beautiful, old buildings. Now, it’s very different, understanding that everybody’s history is important, be they rich, poor, middleclass, white, black, whatever; that we need to be more inclusive in what we preserve.

I THOUGHT IT WAS NEEDED. I was the one who initiated the idea because I felt that I had pretty much accomplished everything I could with the Landmarks Commission. And I knew being the age that I am—I’m so damn old; I’m 82—you know, how much time do I have left?

THERE’S NO QUESTION about the fact that preservation is a losing proposition, because all you do is delay defeat.

Everything’s going to be destroyed. It’s just a matter of time. The market drives everything. With something like the Mayes house, all the market factors are against it. It’s on an extremely valuable piece of land. Taxes paid on that land are based on what’s considered highest and best use, which means, get the most

YOU MIGHT ASK, “What’s it like being 82?” It isn’t a damn bit of difference from being 50. You’ve got to get up in the morning. You’ve got to decide what you’re going to do. You’ve got to brush your teeth. You know, life doesn’t come prepackaged. As long as you have your health, you’ve got everything.

I’VE NEVER BEEN ONE TO REGRET. I’m just glad that I have my challenges, but I can still function. I’ve got about five canes around the house here. My brain’s still good. I still have my faculties. So I’m just glad to be, as someone told me, in the arena. I have no desire to spend my life fishing and playing golf and watching football games on TV.

GREG LACOUR is the senior editor for this magazine.

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THE BUZZ

Veteran journalist Stuart Watson started his ManListening podcast after his wife told him he was absolutely not an “empathic listener.”

P EO P L E

EAR OPENER

Veteran journalist Stuart Watson’s podcast challenges men to drop the mic and let women say their piece

AFTER FIVE EPISODES of his ManListening podcast, veteran Charlotte journalist Stuart Watson arrived at a stage common to anyone’s self-funded, self-driven venture: He was ecstatic about what he’d done and the enthusiastic reception from friends and loved ones—and horrified at the possibility that his passion project, which he’d worked on for the better part of two years, would lose money. When we speak in early February, he struggles to focus on the idea that animated the project in the first place: that women have stories to tell, and men need to learn to shut their traps and let women tell them.

“You have to know why it is you’re doing something,” he says. “I’ve had to say, ‘I’m doing this because I genuinely want to learn to listen better.’ Once I’ve committed to doing that, at the end of the

18

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

year, if I’ve spent a whole lot of time and energy and money, and all I’ve done is lose money, I have to be at peace with it.

As soon as I go down that path, I’ve sold myself out. The reason I’m doing this is that it’s the right thing to do.”

ManListening—it’s a play on “mansplaining”—launched in early January with its first full episode, a 52-minute conversation with “Tina,” a recovering crack addict, “about life and death and new life.” Subsequent episodes relay similar stories of growth through difficulty: a Nashville teacher who persisted through school gun violence; the struggles of a fellow investigative reporter over a long career. Watson, who turns 61 this month, has driven that kind of road himself. He was a fixture for 16 years at WCNC-TV, where he worked as the station’s pri-

mary investigative reporter. He specialized in breaking stories about high-profile figures and their financial excesses, like the $1.6 million Waxhaw mansion of Elevation Church pastor Steven Furtick and the more than $1 million pay-andbenefits package of former United Way of Central Carolinas CEO Gloria Pace King.

In 2015, the station fired him as part of a newsroom downsizing, and he turned to more personal work, including a 2016 documentary that traced his own history as an adopted child and recovering alcoholic. (He’s been sober since the early 1990s.) Watson jokingly refers to himself as a “media mogul” but in reality owns a “very, very, very, very tiny media company,” he told me. “And this is the first product.” When he decides on others, he says, he’ll share the details.

ANDY McMILLAN

BY GREG LACOUR

It started a couple of years ago when he took an online personality test, which revealed that he was an “empathic listener.” Watson did what any empath would do in that situation: He rushed to his wife, Lorraine Jivoff, to brag about it. She scoffed. “And he got this look on his face,” she says, “like, ‘But the personality test!’”

He was quickly set straight, then began to reach out to women he knew: friends, family, colleagues. Before the launch, Watson recorded conversations with 38 women about what they’d been through, achieved, overcome, and learned, and he discovered something astonishing: Many women, especially from older generations, are so conditioned to think of themselves and their life stories as nothing special that they were surprised at his interest. In the fourth episode, Watson speaks to a friend, “T Mack,” once the fiancée of an unidentified Carolina Panthers player who believed, falsely, that she was cheating on him. She suffered the emotional upheaval of his paranoia, jealousy, and breaking off of the engagement.

He didn’t abuse her physically, but that’s part of the episode’s point: Every woman has a compelling story, and it doesn’t have to shock to matter. “I don’t know if I have anything interesting to say,” T Mack says early in the episode.

Watson pauses, as if taking it in, and responds: Yes, you do. “It’s been a huge learning experience for me,” Watson says. “Unless we’re climbing Everest, we don’t give ourselves any credit. I love the idea that behind every woman—every woman—there’s a great story. It’s just up to me to listen well enough for that story to come out.”

He’s committed to 52 episodes, a year’s worth. During his launch party at The Evening Muse in NoDa, he asked a crowd of about 75 to return on January 12, 2021, and celebrate whatever happened, financial success or failure, podcasting sensation or not. “There’s no such thing as a loss,” Watson says. “Everything is a lesson.”

ManListening is available for subscription on Apple Podcasts and on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as @manlistening.

R E M E M B R AN C E

Walking Through the Dark Stretch

A UNC Charlotte student reflects on the campus shooting that left two dead—and forced her to live in a more frightening world I HAVE TROUBLE GRASPING THE THOUGHT of being a member of what’s been called “The Lockdown-Drill Generation.” It presents me with realities about society that seem to contradict each other. I want to see the good in people and believe they mean well—because they usually do. I don’t want to perceive people as malevolent or dangerous. But, for my own safety, I need to.

It’s been almost a year since the shooting at UNC Charlotte, where I’m a student. I wasn’t close by, but it hit home—Riley Howell, one of the victims and the hero who rushed the shooter, and I were members of the Class of 2016 at T.C. Roberson High School in Asheville.

Afterward, as my mind raced with memories of Riley walking through the blue-and-gold hallways, I was forced to accept that what happened to him could have happened to me or any of my classmates.

I was always taught to be mindful of my surroundings. Since April 30, 2019, I’ve thought twice before I round the corner with my dog to a dark stretch alongside my apartment complex. I call a friend before I walk so someone will hear immediately if something happens to me. If I know I’ll be spending a long night in the library, I park in a lot with plenty of cars and lights. I try to block fearful thoughts, and I usually succeed. But they’re still with me. I don’t like them, but here’s something just as unsettling and scary—in a way, it’s good that I feel them.

Who knows what could happen, anywhere, at any time?

Students in my generation have to live with this fear every day. Will the one after mine be forced to live with it, too? My children? Will there ever be another generation in this country that doesn’t? I don’t know the answers or how to solve the problems. I do know that I won’t let these thoughts hold me back. You can’t sit in a turtle shell and think the world’s out to get you. It’s OK not to know what might happen. I’ll walk side by side with the uncertainty. I’ll have to. Everyone will. — Margaret Rawlings

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S AT U R D AY, M AY 16, 2020 THE WESTIN CHARLOTTE

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APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

19

GOOD LIFE

INSIDE: EDUCATION / ART / HOT LISTINGS /

DIRECT FLIGHTS / ROOMS WE LOVE / SEEN / PLAYLIST

THE

MAKING THE MOST OUT OF LIVING HERE

Andrew Rippeon, an assistant writing professor at Davidson College, uses a pair of mid-century letterpresses in the lab he runs on campus.

E D U C AT I O N

LEARNING WHERE INK MEETS PAPER Davidson College professor Andrew Rippeon teaches the art and craft of letterpress printing

BY ALLISON BRADEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY RUSTY WILLIAMS

THROUGHOUT GRETA GERWIG’S 2019 ADAPTATION of Little Women, protagonist Jo March works on her writing.

She moves from inspiration through drafts to revisions to selling. Toward the end of the film, we watch as a book is meticulously constructed: the leather cover cut and adhered, the pages folded and stitched together, and each letter of type set by hand. A book, the movie makes plain, is crafted in more ways than one.

Continued on next page 

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

21

THE GOOD LIFE

Rippeon prepares letters for printing (left) and cleans them afterward (top right). (Below) A final print from one of his workshops.

Davidson College professor Andrew Rippeon researches the materiality of information, the place where these crafts meet. Sunlight streams through the tall windows of the Davidson College Letterpress Lab, which Rippeon runs, on a Tuesday in late January. Cabinets of type crowd the room, and two mid-20th century letterpresses—which Rippeon, a visiting assistant writing professor, brought with him to Davidson—sit under the windows. The walls are a collage of prints: an event poster, a Valentine’s Day poem, an appeal to vote—experiments in form and color. An Art 201 class gathers in the hall outside. Students

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

have selected phrases from Matthew Kirkpatrick’s novel The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art. Today, they’ll set the phrases in type.

Rippeon came to Davidson in 2018 from Hamilton College in New York state, where he also founded a letterpress and book arts lab and discovered one of the two letterpresses in a basement. He came to letterpress printing by way of literature, after he published an avant-garde literary magazine with a letterpress-printed cover in graduate school. Since then, he’s found that printing exists at the crossroads of

many other fields. It was “interdisciplinary” long before the term became an academic buzzword.

Printing involves math and chemistry.

He’s learned from art students to be bold with color. He works with students of writing, studio art, graphic design, and STEM. Last semester, he did a workshop with an entomologist: Iron gall ink, an enduring form, is derived from oak galls, where a wasp has laid an egg on an oak branch.

The art students circle the cabinets in the lab as Rippeon warns them not to touch the type, which contains lead, then touch their mouths. He explains how

the letters are laid out in the type cases and demonstrates how to arrange their characters, or “sorts,” in their composing sticks, so their phrases will come out right-side up on paper. He mentions that capital letters used to be stored in the printer’s upper case, hence “uppercase” and “lowercase.” In digital design programs like Photoshop, the distance between lines of type is called “leading”; Rippeon shows the class the namesake pieces of lead. He gives them a tour of the typefaces he has set up, then lets them peruse and choose a favorite.

“This is media, even though we’re used to saying that the digital is media.

I want them to always be aware of themselves as active participants, if not creators, in that process and not purely recipients and not purely passive sponges of information,” Rippeon says.

“Something like this gives people the opportunity to slow down and think about information in a different way.”

In the Letterpress Lab, students gain a new way to perceive information— more tactile and sensual. Olivia Conley, a senior studio art minor, has chosen Hellenic Wide type and carefully sets her phrase (“circadian dysrhythmia”) in her composing stick. “I don’t know where I would have found an opportunity like this outside of school,” she says. She occasionally checks that she’s doing everything right with Richard Farrell, a studio art major who works at the tray next to her. He’s setting his phrase (“family of rats”) in Egyptian Expanded type. “Since we’re doing digital art,” he says, “it’s really interesting to see the real, physical side of it—especially when it’s very much a throwback.

Trying to incorporate that into a digital art piece will be really interesting.”

When they’re happy with the way their letters look, packed tight in their composing sticks, they set them by the sink.

To Rippeon, there’s a luxury in holding the type and feeling the texture of printed images. As he talks, he moves around the room, picking up prints to illustrate his ideas. He flips over a small print to show me where the type has pushed through the paper to create an impression on the reverse side. That’s called a “bite.” When the press leaves no impression, it’s known as a “kiss.”

“To be reminded that it’s that threedimensional object that exists in space.

It’s not on the screen; it doesn’t disappear when you scroll up. You can’t email it to somebody,” he says. “That’s not a nostalgic thing—I think that’s a way of remembering that we’re embodied.”

The class members gather around the press as Rippeon shows them how to distribute ink and fasten paper to the roller.

The students take turns tentatively opening and closing the press, wheeling the paper across a galley tray of type to make a background for their prints. They walk along the press as they turn the roller, arms in motion, and some comment on

the muscle it takes. There’s a satisfying thunk as the press fully opens and closes.

Sometimes the thunk is a little too hard, and Rippeon reminds them to “remember where the press stops and starts.” When they pause to re-ink, the professor draws attention to the sound. There’s a hissing, a little like sizzling bacon. “That’s the ink,” he says, “adhering to itself and releasing.”

The students lean in and listen.

ALLISON BRADEN is a writer, translator, and contributing editor for this magazine.

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APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

23

THE GOOD LIFE

ART

Postnatal Portraiture Holly Keogh uses McColl Center residency to capture images of women as newborn mothers

BY GRACE COTE PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS EDWARDS

UNTIL RECENTLY, painter Holly Keogh’s main subjects were family members, typically pulled from discarded images of the past: her mother as a child, or herself as a frowning, black-eyed girl. Using subjects so known to her is a comfort zone of sorts where she’s free to alter compositions until something new emerges. “It’s not about creating a likeness to my own personal family members,” she says. “I’m widening that scope and making it more about the mood.”

During her spring residency at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, running through the end of this month, the figures in her paintings have been strangers to her. Yet her current project still works within that familial theme: She paints mothers as they recover in the hospital after they’ve given birth.

The project is a partnership with Atrium Health, which has funded Charlotte-area artists for several years and helped select Keogh for the McColl Center residency.

“We were reviewing some amazing artists from all over the globe,” says Matt Roden, Atrium’s community relations director, “but realized we had a thriving art community here in our own backyard.”

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

Now, through Atrium, Keogh builds relationships with pregnant women, photographs them after they give birth, then uses those photographs for her paintings.

She meets soon-to-be mothers through prenatal classes, Maternity Center tours, and pregnant acquaintances. For the first time, she doesn’t intimately know her subjects, which creates a politeness barrier to overcome.

Delivery is a complicated business, and the modern pressures of motherhood, plus the specific setting of a hospital room, equal stress. Keogh enters the room to

photograph mothers Holly Keogh's postnatal who juggle the beeping paintings machines and parade of came out of visitors—all while trying her residency to enjoy their newborns. at the McColl Center.

She is aware of the sensitive environment. “It is very brave, it is very human … I definitely respect this moment,” she says. “Hopefully they are paintings that these women can relate to.”

Keogh is a locally sourced resident at the McColl, which features artists from across the globe. The Charlotte native

graduated from UNC Some of Charlotte in 2014 with Keogh’s paintings are degrees in painting based on and art history. Keogh stills from her was in residence at grandfather’s '60s-era Super Goodyear Arts in 2015 8 films. and is now represented by SOCO Gallery, one of the city’s most high-profile arts venues. When planning her proposal for the Atrium Health residency, she remained rooted in figurative painting and instinctively landed on Madonna and Child iconography. However, she is interested in motherhood beyond the noble, humble figure portrayed in the canon of art history.

As she gets this project off the ground, she works towards a solo exhibition that opens at SOCO on April 29. That series of paintings is based on stills from her grandfather’s 1960s Super 8 films.

Over the past few years, Keogh has started experimenting with her process while remaining loyal to the figures. She does not discriminate when it comes to materials, as evidenced by her recent velvet paintings. Her poured paintings make use of a folded flat canvas that she pours paint through to create a figure.

When unfolded, the figure is mirrored.

All of these efforts are an attempt to answer the questions eternally on her mind: How do you paint a portrait and make it new? How do you see or represent the figure in a new way? After all, the most important thing about art is to create something that is your own.

Otherwise, she says, “The photograph itself would be enough.”

GRACE COTE is a writer in Charlotte who specializes in visual arts coverage.

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

25

THE GOOD LIFE R E AL E STAT E

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2/4/20 9:18 AM

THE GOOD LIFE

D I R EC T F LI G H T

Flossing the Teeth of The Dog

A brush with a golf superstar, and a nearly broken bar, in Pete Dye’s Dominican dreamscape

BY MIKE DOJC

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

The course is a jewel among the more than 100 designed by Pete Dye, the renowned American course designer and architect who died in January at 94. El Diente opened in 1971 after teams had used oxcarts to move soil and pickaxes, chisels, and other rudimentary hand tools to tame the rugged landscape, which includes jagged seaside rocks that workers thought looked like canine teeth.

Starting in the early ’70s, Dye and his wife kept a home at the Casa de Campo resort while Dye developed three other courses on the property. El Diente, ranked 32nd in the world in Golf Digest’s latest biennial ranking, remains the standout, though. Holes 5 through 8 and 15 through 17 unfurl alongside the azure Caribbean, often with just 20 feet of elevation separating the immaculately groomed fairways from the lapping waves below.

The course is packed with diabolical par-four holes that force golfers to think deeply about risk and reward before they attack the greens.

Dye considered El Diente his best design. “I created 11 holes,” he famously said, “and God created seven.”

While travelling golfers tend to fixate on 5, 7, and 16, a trio of water’s-edge par-threes, there’s an extra,

Hole 15 on El Diente de Perro, one of the renowned Pete Dye course’s seaside holes.

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CASA DE CAMPO RESORT & VILLAS

IF YOU NEED CONFIRMATION that you’re playing on one of the planet’s top golf courses, you could ask for few tells more obvious than bumping into Miguel Ángel Jiménez at the bar during a rain delay.

Fresh off a PGA Tour Champions victory the week before, the 21-time European Tour winner smokes a cigar and sips what looks to me like whiskey, his graying blond locks pulled into a ponytail behind a Ping cap that shields one of the most recognizable mugs in professional golf. The rain that interrupted his round did the same to me and my golf buddies, and we’re all taking shelter. Jiménez graciously acknowledges every starstruck golfer who approaches. My friends and I, on vacation here in the Dominican Republic, try to play it L.A.-cool for a couple of minutes—like this kind of thing happens every day—before we surrender to our fanboy impulses and dive in for backslaps and selfies.

The moment passes, the rain abates, the warm Caribbean sun—even in October—quickly erases all vestiges of the downpour, and we get back to what we came here for. We clamber into our carts and join our forecaddie, Juan, on the back nine of El Diente de Perro—Teeth of the Dog.

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THE GOOD LIFE

STAY

Casa de Campo Resort & Villas This 7,000-acre resort at the southeastern end of the island has lured former U.S. presidents (Bill Clinton, both George Bushes, and Jimmy Carter), marquee athletes (Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter), and the famous-forbeing-famous set (the Kardashians).

But whether you choose to mimic the A-list experience, with a villa overlooking the Caribbean and decked out with a private infinity pool and butler service, or bed down in an elegant and well-appointed casita, you’re only a short golf cart ride away from the marina, stables, shooting center, beaches, and a trio of Pete Dye courses. La Romana-Higüey Highway, La Romana 22000, casadecampo.com.do

EAT

MIKE DOJC is a Columbia, South Carolina-based golf writer who has covered the game for more than 15 years for Forbes.com, Esquire.com, SCOREGolf, and other publications.

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

DO

See a Baseball Game This is a baseball-obsessed island, and there’s a fiesta feel in the grandstands during Dominican Winter League play, as drummers pound on snares and fans dance in the bleachers. The stadium of La Romana’s club, Los Toros del Este (the Eastern Bulls), is just a 20-minute shuttle ride from the gates of Casa de Campo. The regular season runs from mid-October through December. Cheer “Vamos Toros” and moo, moo, moo for the home team.

Estadio Francisco A. Micheli, La Romana

PLAY MORE GOLF

Casa de Campo has three other courses. Dye Fore, a 27-hole, cliff-top roller coaster on a plateau 300 feet above the Chavón River, where some scenes from Apocalypse Now were filmed.

The Links is the kindest of the three but still a challenge—players still have to shape their shots to navigate bends, and inland lagoons and greenside bunkers stymie those whose approach game needs work. La Romana, which opened in 1990, is members-only.

CASA DE CAMPO RESORT & VILLAS

just-for-fun setup off the 16th hole—a flag-bearing pin on a rock 100 feet offshore. You can challenge someone to a closestsplash-to-the-pin contest that doesn’t count on your scorecard.

I try it from behind the tee box, and a swirling trade wind snatches my overzealously executed wedge shot and plops it into a nearby Olympic-sized swimming pool. My playing partner then proceeds to plunk a quixotic, low-flying breezebeater a mere pool table’s length from the flapping flag.

(Top) Casa de Thankfully, it was a low-stakes Campo Villa. wager: Loser buys the next round (Bottom) The pool of Presidente Lights. at Image Minitas After I play El Diente a couple Beach Club. of times, I learn that the key to a good score is to minimize your shots on the more forgiving inland holes to offset the penalty strokes you incur when your shots decide to go for a swim at the tougher, seaside holes. I also learn that when a caddie who has been looping these fairways for decades tells you that you’re using too much club, heed his words.

On No. 18, lying in the first cut some 120 yards from the cup, I pass my pitching wedge back to Juan and grab my nine iron. This harebrained decision creates an even bigger scene than the one Jiménez generated an hour earlier.

My approach shot flies over the dance floor and ricochets off the cart path onto the open-air, second-floor balcony of the crowded clubhouse bar. A quick-witted cocktail slinger snatches my errant ball one-handed before it can shatter any of the bottles behind him.

“That was some trick shot,” jokes a patron as I walk over, meekly, to retrieve my ball.

Minitas Beach Club & Restaurant Watch the waves lap against the shore while you nibble on stone crabs, scarlet prawns, and charcoal-grilled octopus, topped off by guava cobbler garnished with vanilla chantilly cream or (my choice) roasted coconut crème brûlée served in an actual coconut.

Minitas Beach, Casa de Campo

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THE GOOD LIFE RO O M W E LOV E

A Cool Girl’s Bedroom

LAST SUMMER, designer Jacy Painter Kelly, owner of Jacy Painter Kelly Interiors, took her family on a trip to New York City. Her 10-year-old daughter, Lucy, went crazy for the urban vibe of their downtown hotel room. It gave Lucy the itch to make over her own bedroom in their Fort Mill home. She wanted more mature accents, like silver wall sconces and velvet pillows, paired with punk rock elements like a graffiti-inspired bedframe and pink neon sign. Luckily, her designer mom knew exactly how to tie it all together. —Taylor Bowler

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

FUNKY COLORS Jacy wanted to keep the bedroom’s walls white to match the rest of her custom-built, 3,400-squarefoot Dutch Colonial home. So she painted the ceiling pink for an unexpected touch and let Lucy choose the zebra patterned wallpaper for an accent wall. The pink shag butterfly chair and neon “girls do it better” sign helped achieve the fun, edgy aesthetic, and the pink velvet pillows and drapes added bold pops of color.

ROOM TO GROW Lucy insisted on keeping the light fixture, which they found at Ikea when she was two years old.

Otherwise, nothing about the room gives off a “little girl” vibe anymore. “Before, she didn’t have a room she could grow into,” Jacy says. “Now she can ride this out a bit more.”

JACY PAINTER KELLY

STATEMENT PIECES For the bed, Jacy wanted a funky statement piece, so she had West Elm create a custom upholstered bedframe in a black-and-white, graffiti-inspired pattern. Hanging above the bed is a round pendant light covered in white paper flowers, and, underneath it, a charcoal shag rug.

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THE GOOD LIFE

PART Y P I C S

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1. Steve Wilson 2. Irina Toshkova and Loy Vang 3. Liz Hilliard and Lee Kennelly 4. Clary Gray and Hardin Minor 5. Keren and Dovy Klarberg

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

Jazz at the Bechtler Birthday Bash

1. Regine and Andreas Bechtler 2. Bruce LaRowe and Amy Blumenthal 3. Maria Howell 4. Ziad Rabie and Bob Lilien

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Crossing the causeway to Callawassie Island changes one’s mindset in a positive way. Here you can reestablish your connection to nature, your neighbors, and even to yourself. Just 3 hours from Charlotte, we invite you to come discover the deep sense of warmth, the balance and connection that we have found on Callawassie Island.

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THE GOOD LIFE ART S + E V E NT S

The Playlist

TUCK FEST RETURNS TO U.S. NATIONAL WHITEWATER CENTER April 24-26

In 2019, 48,000 attended the annual Tuck Fest at the Whitewater Center. The music is a major draw: This year’s line-up includes Lake Street Drive, ZZ Ward, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real, and several others.

Here are three other reasons to check it out.

9 BEST THINGS TO DO AND SEE THIS MONTH

The Competitions The competitions, with both youth and adult categories, run a sporty gamut: adventure and obstacle, stand-up paddleboarding, biking, swimming, climbing, deep water polo, trail running, rafting, and kayaking. The Night Obstacle Race, for adults, has teams of two to five members on a scavenger hunt with headlamps.

The Food USNWC has a few formats for its eateries: a sitdown restaurant named River’s Edge; a taproom-style spot called Pump House Biergarten with 60 drafts and made-to-order food; and the grab-and-gostyle The Market. Various other spots near activities sell snacks, water, coffee for the extra jolt of energy, and, yes, beer.

Register for any of the above activities on tuckfest.usnwc.org.

THE BECHTLER MARKS 10 YEARS

Through May 3

It’s been a decade since the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art opened its doors. Since then, this uptown museum has hosted more than 30 exhibitions. Ten pulls work from 16 of those displays, including Wrestling the Angel: A Century of Artists Reckoning With Religion; Niki de Saint Phalle: Creation of a New Mythology; and The House That Modernism Built. Among the marquee names seen throughout the show: Pablo Picasso, Alfred Manessier, Victor Vasarely, and Sam Francis.

MIXTAPE: ON STAGE IN APRIL

These seven musicians and groups are coming to local venues this month. Our favorite tracks from each act: 1. Shovels & Rope, “Birmingham” Neighborhood Theater) (April 22, The Underground) (April 2, Neighborhood Theatre) 4. Brittany Howard, “Stay High 7. Jimmy Buffett, any song but 2. Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, (April 18, The Fillmore) “Margaritaville” (April 25, PNC “Big Country” (April 5, Belk 5. Andrew Bird, “Roma Fade” Music Pavilion Theater) (April 19, Knight Theater) 3. Angel Olsen, “Lark” (April 14, 6. Vanessa Carlton, “Operator”

Find more events happening in Charlotte this month in our GUIDE, starting on page 84.

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

THE BECHTLER MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

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FOOD DRINK

INSIDE: NOW OPEN / THE STORY BEHIND / SERVED HISTORY / LOCAL FLAVOR / ON THE LINE / BITE-SIZED NEWS

EXPLORE THE TASTES OF CHARLOTTE

Each meal at The Goodyear House begins with complimentary pull-apart sour cream and onion brioche served with honey butter.

N OW O P E N

THE GOODYEAR HOUSE Chef Chris Coleman promises a good time—and a really good meal

BY TAYLOR BOWLER PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER TAYLOR

THE GOODYEAR HOUSE in NoDa teased its February opening for months—and it was worth the wait. The historic mill house, under construction for more than a year, stretches into multiple dining rooms modeled on different eras. It’s a nod to the early 1900s, when a family would add a new room to the home after a successful year.

On a warm evening, grab a table in the botanist room, which brims with green potted plants and framed floral prints. Its glass garage doors open to a patio with string lights and an outdoor bar that serves drafts, TKTKTKTKTKt bottles, and cans. Inside, another bar serves cocktails like the Highland Park Mill ($12) and Caldwell Street ($11), named for well-known spots in the neighborhood.

Continued on next page APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

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FOOD+DRINK

THE GOODYEAR HOUSE

3032 N. Davidson St. 704-910-0132 thegoodyearhouse.com

LUNCH: 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. daily DINNER: 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Sun-Thurs, 11 a.m.-1 a.m. Fri-Sat BAR: 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Sun-Thurs, 11 a.m.-1 a.m. Fri-Sat

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

(Clockwise from top) Goopy onions, Fat City Noodles, prime rib with horseradish crust. (Opposite page) Marinated East Coast shrimp served with mignonette butter and saltines.

Leading the kitchen is Chris Coleman, former executive chef at Stoke and recent Chopped winner. Each meal starts with complimentary pull-apart sour cream and onion brioche with honey butter, which might last five minutes at a table of four.

(You can order another for $4.) The dinner menu has a “Bites” section with shareable snacks like marinated East Coast shrimp ($9), served with mignonette butter on a saltine cracker. In the “Smalls” section, plates include smoked cashew mac and cheese ($8), a dish you’d never guess is vegan, and pork schnitzel ($16) with apple mustard, apples, arugula, and cheddar.

The “Biggies” section has grilled mountain trout ($28 for half fish, $50 for a whole) and a prime rib dinner ($32 for 8 oz., $64 for 16 oz., and $90 for 24 oz.).

The menu demonstrates Coleman’s talent for taking simple, straightforward ingredients and creating complex yet familiar flavors. His lemon chess pie ($5), a combination of eggs, butter, sugar, and lemon juice, does exactly that. And if you were a fan of his legendary one-pound doughnut at Stoke, the apple fritter doughnut ($5) drizzled with sour cream glaze is another culinary triumph. You won’t need eight friends to help you with this dessert, but if you can’t finish it in one sitting, take the rest home and eat it for breakfast.

Don’t leave without trying: BBQ pork skins ($5) on the bar snacks menu. Each bite-sized skin is filled with a dollop of French onion dip.

T H E STO RY B E H I N D. . .

Dressler’s Cheesecake JON DRESSLER opened his first restaurant in Birkdale Village in Huntersville in September 2003. His mom, Joan, offered to make her cheesecake for a weekend feature. She used her grandmother’s recipe, which she’d perfected in the Bronx in the early 1900s. Joan made eight cheesecakes that sold out in two nights, and Jon made it a regular menu item after he fielded requests from nearly 200 customers to make more.

In those days, Joan would make eight to 10 cakes, one at a time, every week. But each time Jon added a new restaurant to his Rare Roots Hospitality Group portfolio, the cheesecake anchored the dessert menu. Now Joan has a bakery team that makes 50 original cheesecakes each week, plus 30 of the week’s special. Depending on the season, customers can order the famous Dressler cheesecake in Oreo, chocolate, peanut butter chocolate chip, and pumpkin. —T.B.

TAYLOR BOWLER is lifestyle editor of this magazine.

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

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FOOD+DRINK

S E RV E D H I STO RY

Legend Has It

A native Charlottean visits Beef ’N Bottle steakhouse for the first time

BY VIRGINIA BROWN PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER TAYLOR

IN 1958, the U.S. was toe-deep in the Space Race.

Ike was serving his second term. Golf great Arnold Palmer had earned his first green jacket, and “At The Hop” rocked the transistor radio waves. The same year, in Charlotte, the first steaks sizzled at one of the city’s most legendary restaurants.

Beef ’N Bottle is a Queen City staple, a standalone steak joint with the vibe of a ’60s cigar club. Before my husband and I enter, we smell summer: ribeyes sizzling on the grill—a solid start. “I’ve been coming here for 45 years,” says a portly man in the parking lot. I’ve lived in Charlotte since 1982, and this is my first time.

In the compact foyer, black-and-white portraits of Hollywood greats hang on the walls. Elvis near Elizabeth Taylor. Ava Gardner, sultry, by a pensive Katharine Hepburn. Giants from a bygone era. The classics, they never die.

A casually dressed older couple sits across from us at a table next to a large family celebrating a birthday. A few younger couples, dressed a bit more elegantly, walk in and take seats in booths. Next to them, a man date—two good ol’ boys out on the town, sipping drinks as they await their steaks.

Benita is our waitress. She’s a sturdy woman with a commanding warmth. I tell her I’ve never been to the restaurant before. “Never?” she says with highpitched surprise. “Well, you’re in for a treat.”

Each steak ages in house for 21 to 28 days, she says, and the salad dressings are homemade, too.

Tonight’s special is the Delmonico, a 12-ounce ribeye—with shrimp.

BEEF ’N BOTTLE 4538 South Blvd.

704-523-9977 beefandbottle.net

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

(Top to bottom) Shrimp cocktail; the Delmonico, a 12-oz ribeye with shrimp; hand-breaded onion rings.

Benita Delaney is a beloved server at Beef ’N Bottle. The escargot appetizer (below) is served in six mushroom caps.

At our corner booth next to the kitchen, white linen tablecloths and napkins set off dark wood paneling.

Appetizers reflect the same affection for contrast: onion rings with escargot, plus seafood starters from shrimp cocktail to Gulf oysters and homemade clam chowder. Entrees include chicken, large salads, and pastas, plus a slew of steak combos. Lobster tail, shrimp, scallops, and oysters can accompany any filet.

Benita’s back. We’re considering frog legs to start. An order of two comes fried or sautéed. “The fried ones just taste like chicken wings,” Benita says. “Sautéed is the way to go.” After asking where they’re sourced (Vietnam), we opt for Benita’s way. They arrive in an ovalshaped dish, swimming in an oil-based blend of sage, garlic, and other spices to cut the wild flavor. “Paprika gives it that red color,” Benita says. The portion is larger than I’d expected, and though the flavor is good, I’m ready for the main event.

I struggled to describe the way I want my Delmonico, medium-rare-ish, but not too red or too pink. “Medium-rare plus,” Benita said when I ordered. Yes. And topped with a signature onion ring, my Delmonico is cooked perfectly, which isn’t always the case in steak houses.

Walking back to the car, I recall the online reviewer who had a two-hour afternoon layover at the airport “but stayed overnight [to eat] at Beef ’N Bottle.” That seemed extreme before tonight. Now I understand.

VIRGINIA BROWN is a native Charlottean and local writer whose work appears in Departures, AAA Go magazine, USA Today, and BBC News Magazine, among others. Reach her at @virginiarbrown or vbwrites.com.

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

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FOOD+DRINK

LO C AL F L AVO R

NEW LIFE IN AN ICE HOUSE Chef Jenny Brulé discovered her own strength building Davidson Ice House

BY MICHELLE BOUDIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER TAYLOR

JENNY BRULÉ is a classically trained chef, cookbook author, and host of a weekly television segment on WCNC. But for years, the 51-year-old single mother of four struggled to make dinner for her family. Fifteen-year old Tess is a vegetarian; identical twin sister Mimi eats only meat and cheese; 20-year-old Camille is a pescatarian; and 22-year-old Claire doesn’t eat dairy.

“I was constantly making meals where I would put out lots of small dishes and they would compile them into meals, whether it was a rice or sushi bowl or a

DAVIDSON ICE HOUSE

416 S. Main St., Davidson 704-895-5555 davidsonicehouse.com

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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

burrito or even a pizza,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’m not the only mom that must do this.’”

This nightly struggle inspired the concept for Davidson Ice House, which she opened in 2018 in what was once the town’s actual ice house. The 98-year-old building has its original pine floors and exposed brick walls. Today the counterserve restaurant specializes in healthy, build-your-own bowls and burgers with toppings like firecracker pimento cheese, kale slaw, and chickpea salad.

“There’s no more meat and potatoes,” Brulé says. “Everything is much more curated now with big, bold flavors.”

Each ingredient that passes through Brulé’s kitchen is nutrient-dense, and her team makes everything in-house, like the sauces that customers drive out of their way for: tangy apricot, spicy jalapeño and parmesan green sauce, and lemon tahini. And while it’s generally health-

conscious, the restaurant has a reputation for their French fries and crunchy mushrooms, too.

The author of Learn to Cook 25 Southern Classics 3 Ways: Traditional, Contemporary, International came by her love of cooking early. Both her mother, a retired minister, and her father, an international executive, took leaves of

absence in their 50s to attend culinary school in Paris. Brulé later graduated from Baltimore International Culinary College and did post-graduate work in recipe development at the Culinary Institute of America. She says cooking has always consumed her; she once met an astrologer who told her she starved to death in a past life, so she’s spent every lifetime since trying to feed people.

But Brulé put her culinary dreams on hold for a few decades to raise her family. “I’ve always been ambitious, but I always put my husband’s career and my kids first,” she says. “Now the kids are old enough that I can focus more on me.”

These days, she compares running Davidson Ice House to having a fifth child.

“It’s a blessing and a curse to have this to focus on,” she says. That’s because six days after Brulé opened her restaurant, her husband of 25 years left her. “I had to decide, was I going to get a pizza and drink a bottle of wine and hide under the covers, or was I going to fight to keep myself together and make the restaurant a big success?”

She chose to fight, but she didn’t always win.

“I would go in the office and cry, or I’d offer to cut onions because I could cry while I was cutting them,” she says. “(The girls and I) moved five times in 10 years to two continents in three countries and three states. With each move, they only had each other in the beginning. I’m really fortunate that all four girls are so close.”

Brulé talked a lot about her girls—and her divorce—during the casting session for the Food Network competition show The Ultimate Thanksgiving Challenge, which she appeared on last fall. She didn’t win. But she and her fellow contestants keep in touch through group text, and several have plans to come to Davidson and eat at her restaurant.

Her oldest two daughters are out of the house now, but when all five Brulé girls are under one roof, the Mama Chef still cooks multiple meals to make everyone happy. This time, though, she can shrug off the stress. “I’m stronger than ever, focused on the restaurant and my daughters,” she says. “For the first time, I feel untethered, so I can be totally who I am.”

(Opposite) Jenny Brulé opened her restaurant in Davidson’s former ice house in 2018.

(Opposite, below) A classic burger with “fancy sauce” and Sidewinder fries.

(This page, top) The 98-year-old building has original pine floors and exposed brick walls. (Below) A build-your-own bowl and two of Brulé’s cookbooks.

MICHELLE BOUDIN is a reporter for NBC Charlotte and a frequent contributor to this magazine.

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

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FOOD+DRINK

O N T H E LI N E W I T H

SHAI FARGIAN

The Israeli-born chef is the force behind Yafo Kitchen, the popular Middle Eastern-inspired restaurant with three locations in Charlotte

BY TAYLOR BOWLER

Age: 35 Relationship status: Married with three daughters, ages 4, 2, and 1 Hometown: Israel, in a small town in the center of Galilee Currently lives: South Charlotte Currently reading: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat Favorite sports team: I lived in Boston when I first came to the U.S., so I like the Patriots, Bruins, Red Sox, and Celtics. I’m a big Panthers fan, too.

Where did the inspiration for Yafo’s menu come from? It’s a lot of the food I grew up eating. Our chicken schnitzel is one of the most Israeli dishes you can get. It was originally made with pork, but when the Jews came from Eastern Europe to Israel, they interpreted that dish into a chicken dish. For me, it’s the essence of Israeli food, and what a melting pot is about.

What’s the hardest part about juggling three daughters and three restaurants? I don’t get to see my kids as much as I would like. I used to think I’d never co-sleep with my kids—I really like my own bed—but after 14- to 16-hour days at work, I sometimes fall asleep in their beds, or let them sleep in ours.

Does cooking energize or exhaust you? It 100 percent energizes me. I sometimes cook after I get home at the end of the night. I love to cook with my daughters. If I’m really upset,

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peeling some carrots calms me down.

What’s your kids’ favorite dish that you make? The Greek yogurt mac and cheese. They’re still kids. (laughs) Are you raising them bilingual? Both of my older girls are bilingual.

My oldest daughter’s been to Israel four times. I speak to them in Hebrew as much as I can. My older one speaks back now, and my middle one understands most of it.

What’s your favorite restaurant in Charlotte, other than your own?

Stagioni. I think all of Moffett’s restaurants are really good. What Eric

THE TOUGH STUFF: Chocolate or cheese?

Cheese Coffee or tea?

Coffee—I have two shots of espresso every day Beer or wine?

Beer Ketchup or mustard?

Mustard Cake or pie?

Cake Dog or cat?

I have two 80-pound dogs—one came with us from Israel More sleep or more free time?

Free time Carowinds or Whitewater Center?

Whitewater Center Facebook or Instagram?

Instagram

(Ferguson) does there is really incredible. You don’t often see a restaurant change head chefs and stay that consistent.

What’s your favorite adult beverage? I’m into Queen Charlotte’s rum—it goes really well with our coconut limeade.

What would be your last meal?

I really like food, so that’s hard.

I’d probably say steak and pasta, something with truffles on it. That’s if I want to indulge. I also love when a restaurant can execute really good roasted vegetables—the sweetness and caramelization you can get out of roasted vegetables is incredible.

What are three things you can’t live without? My wife, my kids, and salt.

COURTESY

How do you describe your approach to cooking? I’m a big believer in techniques, not recipes.

B I T E - S I Z E D STO R I E S

Foodie News on a Small Plate

Don’t be afraid to show your smile.

Peppervine has named WILL STEPHENSON its new chef de cuisine. Stephenson was previously executive sous chef at Artisanal, the Banner Elk farm-to-table restaurant owned by the same team.

CHARLOTTE BEER GARDEN is open at 1300 South Tryon Street in South End. It’s the sister of Raleigh Beer Garden, which has won three Guinness World Record titles for its vast beer selection, The threelevel venue has a greenhouse-style rooftop bar, more than 300 beers on tap, and a full menu of bar bites, salads, and pizzas.

Restaurateur JIM NOBLE will renovate the former Nolen Kitchen space in Myers Park. Jason Neve, executive chef at Noble-owned Rooster’s, will oversee the menu, which promises casual fare with European influence.

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Wine Enthusiast magazine named Corkbuzz owner LAURA FIORVANTI its Sommelier of the Year. Fiorvanti owns three Corkbuzz locations, two in New York City and one in SouthPark. —Taylor Bowler

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

47

For much of the past decade, developers have hurled houses and apartment complexes onto increasingly valuable land to accommodate the tens of thousands who move here every day.

But the boom’s cost practically defines this era in Charlotte’s 251-year history: a city where land and housing threaten to grow too expensive for anyone but the rich to live here. So where are we going?

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WHAT GROWTH COSTS

LOGAN CYRUS

BY CRISTINA BOLLING, TAYLOR BOWLER, GREG LACOUR, AND CHUCK McSHANE

Indian Land in Lancaster County, S.C., is one of the Charlotte area’s fastestgrowing suburbs because of its relative affordability—and even here, new singlefamily homes sell for $300,000 or more.

WHAT GROWTH COSTS

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

49

Erin Hampson, a 22-year-old college graduate, searched all over town for her first apartment in Charlotte.

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Riding with a recent college graduate on the hunt for elusive prey: a decent, affordable place to live

BY CRISTINA BOLLING PHOTOGRAPHS BY LOGAN CYRUS

ERIN HAMPSON steps onto the balcony. “Ooooh,” she says.

Around the corner are breweries, shops, and restaurants that cater to young professionals like her. She imagines living here, in one of the 406 units of 1225 South Church Apartments in South End, and thinks about how much fun it’d be and what that would cost her: counting rent and fees, close to $1,400 per month, the limit of her budget.

A recent college graduate, Hampson has spent the last two years with three roommates squeezed into a snug two-bedroom apartment near American University in Washington, D.C. Now, like so many other young professionals who move to Charlotte every month, she has her first real job, a paycheck, and the possibility of the glorious freedom that comes from living on one’s own.

When we meet in late January, she’s living with her mother in the Matthews home where she grew up, but the 45-minute commute to her job at a health care nonprofit in Myers Park is getting old. So on this brisk afternoon, I join her to see what apartment hunting is like for the kind of renter these complexes are presumably being built for.

Spoiler: It’s a hassle. The process started days earlier, when she downloaded the Apartment List app to her iPhone. It works remarkably like a dating app: She plugged in personal information (job location, salary, desired features and amenities, and projected rent budget), and the app delivered a list of options, which she swiped right to pursue or left to dismiss. She picked four complexes to explore in four Charlotte neighborhoods: South End, Plaza Midwood, Elizabeth, and SouthPark.

On this Thursday, Hampson, 22, is polished and jaunty, and she’s chosen her footwear well—leopard-print flats to go with her olive sweater, black skirt, and wool coat. After a moment on the balcony at 1225 South Church, staged with a bistro table and two chairs, she walks back inside and considers the brightly decorated 740-square-foot unit: the kitchen with stainless steel appliances, the floating wall that separates the bedroom space from the living space, and the closet that houses a full-size washer and dryer.

She stretches out her arms to envision where her TV would mount on the wall. “This could work,” she says with a grin.

WHAT GROWTH COSTS

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

51

SOUTH END:

1225 South Church Apartments

This 10-year-old complex instantly shows promise because it’s a five-minute drive from her job. In the leasing office, Hampson rattles off her five requirements, which she’ll repeat everywhere she goes today: Spend no more than $1,400, roughly a third of her after-taxes pay, on rent, fees, and utilities; a unit on the second floor or higher; in-unit washer, dryer, and dishwasher; secure parking; and a commute of 15 minutes or less to work.

She has a would-be-nice list, too: ample closet space, a balcony with enough room for a small table and chairs, and a bedroom separated from her living room by a wall—better yet, a door. The leasing agent, Joshua Widner, nods as he takes it all in, then delivers stunning news about prices: Unlike the apartment hunts of yesteryear, which consisted of newspaper or Craigslist listings with set rents, renting an apartment these days is like playing the stock market. Rents change by the hour.

A studio that rented for $1,100 yesterday is priced at $1,200 today, he says. If Hampson waits until June, the price could rise to $1,300 or higher, Widner says, because new college grads will drive demand. On top of rent, Hampson would pay $180 to $200 per month for water, power, pest control, trash removal, and the required “technology package” of internet and cable.

Hampson swallows hard and hands over her driver’s license. On the way to the furnished model unit, she and Widner tour the amenities: a bank of Tide laundry lockers for those who want to pay an outside company for laundry service, a free coffee station near one of the complex’s three gyms, an eight-seat movie theater, two pools, two recreation rooms, and outdoor fire pits and bocce ball courts. On her way out, she’s stunned and, she says, “impressed.”

NOTE:

1:30 P.M.

PLAZA MIDWOOD:

The Gibson

Hampson pulls into the under-building parking garage off Central Avenue, where a giant mural pays tribute to famous Reflection Sound Studios, which once occupied the site of this 250-unit building that opened in 2017.

The proprietors pipe in a pleasant scent. “It’s called waterclover,” the leasing agent says.

The agent, Jeffrey Barrow, slides Hampson a promotional folder that mimics a record album, with “Hi Erin!” and his signature written in Sharpie. “It feels so hip over here,” she says. She tells Barrow her budget. He pulls out two floor plans for one-bedroom apartments and takes her to see two units, passing along the way what he calls the “weekend brunch” doors that residents exit to walk to local restaurants on weekends. (His message: You’re close to stuff.) Hampson chuckles. There’s also a pool and lounge area, a bar with a pool table, and on-site laundry pickup.

The first apartment is triangular and 737 square feet, with “wood-styled plank flooring,” tile backsplash, and a walk-in shower. Hampson fawns over the three big closets and jokingly imagines entertaining guests with a cheese board on the island’s granite countertop.

Today, this unit is priced at $1,382 (plus an estimated $188 in fees, utilities, and internet), but Barrow tells her the prices will likely fluctuate within her budget if she’s willing to wait. Rent prices are posted online and change in real time, he says. “If somebody rents an apartment, then it will change the price of all available apartments,” he says. “But if three people give their notice tomorrow, all those prices will go down. The trick with me is, if you ever see a generic email from me, that means it was an e-blast, and you probably want to hop on it.”

Hampson sighs. “What if somebody else calls before me?”

“You do gotta act on it,” Barrow says.

Average rent for an apartment in Charlotte was $1,238 in September 2019, according to the most recent data available from Charlotte-based RealData, which tracks apartment markets throughout the Southeast. The vacancy rate was 5.5 percent.

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COURTESY (3); LOGAN CYRUS

12:30 P.M.

3:30 P.M.

(Above, left to right) Bank of America Stadium is a short distance from 1225 South Church Apartments; The Gibson is near shopping and restaurants in Plaza Midwood; The Langston in Elizabeth includes a dog spa.

(Below) Cameron SouthPark is nestled within a bank of trees next to the Harris YMCA.

2:30 P.M.

ELIZABETH:

The Langston

Hampson is starting to feel weary as she pulls into a 91-unit, three-year-old complex called The Langston, on East Seventh Street. She turns down the leasing agent’s beverage offer, and they get down to business.

A one-bedroom apartment here with utilities and internet would run about $1,480 per month, beyond her budget. She decides to look at an available unit anyway. There’s no pool, but on the way she peeks into a white-tiled “dog spa” (Hampson has no dog), a patio with lounge chairs, and a small gym. The available one-bedroom unit still has that new-house smell, with hardwood floors, a stacked washer and dryer, dark cabinets, and granite countertops. Hampson walks onto a covered wooden balcony that overlooks Seventh, takes in a killer skyline view, and gasps. “I could live out here,” she says in amazement.

Within a few minutes, she’s out the door, having crossed The Langston off her list. Too pricey. “It just seems like a lot,” she whispers.

SOUTHPARK:

Cameron SouthPark

Hampson has to make some tough left turns and steer past annoying road construction on the way—welcome back to Charlotte!— but relaxes when she parks at the leasing office. The complex of 23 buildings, built in 1985, is next to the Harris YMCA, where Hampson played soccer as a kid. She knows this place.

Leasing agent Lorrie Johnson gives a quick overview, and they hop in a golf cart to see an available apartment and a furnished model. Four deer graze in a bank of trees along the parking lot. Johnson takes Hampson to an available one-bedroom unit with a wood-burning fireplace and a big balcony overlooking the pool. At 788 square feet, it’s the biggest apartment Hampson has seen all day, and the cheapest—$1,175 per month, plus $24 in trash and pest control fees. Hampson would handle her own utilities and internet, which would likely cost at least $120 a month. Well within budget.

“Are you ready to move?” Johnson asks, leaning over the sink.

Hampson blinks hard. “I’m not really in a rush,” she says. She tells Johnson about the spring work events she’s responsible for, and it dawns on her that moving before June would be hard, even if she wanted to spend the money.

“Call me when you’re ready,” Johnson says.

When I check back with Hampson a few days later, she tells me she’s decided to wait.

She likes the idea of a financial cushion to help pay for furniture and entertainment.

And, frankly, there’s comfort in living at home. “My mom,” she says, “is a good roommate.”

CRISTINA BOLLING, a Charlotte writer, has reported on Charlotte’s immigration, arts, and popular culture scene since 2000.

WHAT GROWTH COSTS

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53

Mooresville

Iredell

Denver

Davidson

Lincoln

Cornelius Huntersville

Concord

Cabarrus

Gastonia

Harrisburg

Mount Holly

Gaston

Locust

Charlotte

Mecklenburg

Cramerton

Stanly

Mint Hill Stallings

Matthews

York

Pineville

Indian Trail

(S.C.)

Union

Growing Tega Cay

Weddington

Fort Mill

Rock Hill

Where We’re

Indian Land, S.C.

Lancaster (S.C.)

Monroe

Waxhaw

The suburbs that analysts eye as high-growth spots for 2025—and beyond

IT CAN BE AS HARD TO FIND an affordable place to live in Charlotte’s suburbs as in the city, and places where rents and home prices have stayed somewhat reasonable are bracing for their own growth surges. We picked four suburban communities that analysts for Metrostudy, a national firm that researches and analyzes home-construction industry data, say are primed for the next development wave. “We have to realize that with every job we add, we have to add housing,” says Jenifer Gooch, Metrostudy’s Charlotte-area regional director, “and we haven’t been doing that.” —Greg Lacour

LANCASTER COUNTY, S.C.

MEDIAN NEW HOME PRICE: $373,840 MEDIAN EXISTING HOME PRICE: $305,000 POPULATION IN 2019: 28,840 PROJECTED 2024 POPULATION: 33,849 THE STORY: Until recently, this unincorporated community just off U.S. Highway 521, in the uppermost “panhandle” of Lancaster County, was eclipsed by the overwhelming growth of Fort Mill and Tega Cay in York County to the west. That growth has been ferocious enough to compel those towns’ officials to adopt impact fees on developers—which sweetens the allure of areas like Indian Land, which happens to lie just a few miles south of the state line and the O.G. big residential development in these parts: Ballantyne. (Some real estate marketers have been trying to get the nickname SoBa, for “South of Ballantyne,” to catch on.) Projects underway include the 512-home Sugar Creek subdivision on Harrisburg Road.

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Indian Trail

UNION COUNTY

MEDIAN NEW HOME PRICE: $329,000 MEDIAN EXISTING HOME PRICE: $260,000 POPULATION IN 2019: 41,035 PROJECTED 2024 POPULATION: 44,746 THE STORY: This is a town just southeast of I-485 that was building in a hurry until the recession hit in 2008; an underdeveloped water and sewer system and the continuing tangle of traffic on Independence Boulevard/U.S. Highway 74 has kept development at bay ever since. But it’s about to get rolling again thanks to improvements to Independence and the November 2018 opening of the Monroe Expressway—and Indian Trail’s proximity to the eastern terminus of the planned Silver Line light rail line in Matthews. Among more than 3,000 lots in the development pipeline are 543 planned homes in MT Land’s Poplin Village mixeduse complex next to the expressway. The company expects to finish the first of those this fall.

COURTESY

Indian Land

A rendering of the River District project, planned for the Catawba River’s eastern bank and the largest land development in Mecklenburg County since Ballantyne in the early 1990s.

Cramerton

GASTON COUNTY

MEDIAN NEW HOME PRICE: $275,000 MEDIAN EXISTING HOME PRICE: $173,000 POPULATION IN 2019: 51,193 PROJECTED 2024 POPULATION: 55,011 THE STORY: We’re centering on Cramerton, but really, all of eastern Gaston County—including Mount Holly, McAdenville, and those parts of Belmont that aren’t built out already—is the most obvious contender for Charlotte’s next development boom. It’s the product of inexpensive land and planned

housing and transportation options to lure people there: a widened I-85; a new U.S. Highway 74 bridge over the Catawba River; the aforementioned Silver Line, to link uptown Charlotte and downtown Belmont; and, above all, Crescent Communities’ River District project, a massive urban village on the river’s eastern bank. Westernmost Mecklenburg County, between Charlotte Douglas International Airport and the Catawba, is the county’s last large section of undeveloped land.

As it develops over the coming decades, eastern Gaston, just across the river, will transform into prime real estate.

COURTESY

Harrisburg

(Above, top) An early townhome rendering submitted by home builder Taylor Morrison for Farmington. The developer has also built single-family homes in Holcomb Woods (above) near Rocky River Road and Interstate 485 in Harrisburg.

CABARRUS COUNTY

MEDIAN NEW HOME PRICE: $389,000 MEDIAN EXISTING HOME PRICE: $300,000 POPULATION IN 2019: 22,434 PROJECTED 2024 POPULATION: 25,070 THE STORY: It’s not exactly the sticks, squatting between University City and Concord. But small new home and lot inventories, along with delays in the completion of Interstate 485—the state finally finished in 2015— have kept a lid on Harrisburg’s growth. That’s changing, and fast. As of January, Metrostudy had identified 1,226 residential lots in its “future development pipeline,” and MPV Properties’ mixed-use Farmington project—a planned community expected to open in spring 2021—will probably catalyze as much growth for Harrisburg as, for example, Birkdale Village has for Huntersville.

Source: Metrostudy Charlotte regional office

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CRISIS

This year, the city will present to the public a proposed plan—the first like it in Charlotte since the 1970s—to solve our runaway city’s biggest and most complicated problem: Land is getting too expensive for many people to afford to live on it. Will the plan be enough, or will it require even more radical measures to work?

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PLANNING

BY GREG LACOUR PHOTOGRAPHS BY LOGAN CYRUS

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The Building a Charlotte for All Summit draws 250 people across age, ethnicity, and economic class, a remarkable feat on a rainy Saturday morning in January.

The summit is part of an ongoing series of events, hosted by Charlotte Center City Partners and the city, about Charlotte’s dominant problem: economic and population growth intense enough to force poor and working-class people to live miles outside the city where they work. The slender, soft-spoken man who takes the stage in the auditorium at UNC Charlotte Center City frames the issue humbly.

“We don’t want to lose our waiters,” Taiwo Jaiyeoba says. “We don’t want to lose the people who don’t have as much money in our city.”

The ability of “the people who don’t have as much money” to live in Charlotte is determined mainly by the soaring value of the land they live on, whether they own or rent homes on it. Jaiyeoba, 51, has been the city’s planning director for a little less than two years, and he’s in charge of developing a plan to counteract the real estate market’s surge toward escape velocity. He expects this year to unveil a draft of a comprehensive city plan—the first of its kind in Charlotte in 45 years— that reflects the desire of a population as varied as this audience for all Charlotteans, not just the rich, to be able to live affordably in the city.

“We live in different geographies,” Jaiyeoba says in the lyrical cadence of his native Nigeria, “but at the end of the day, we are all Charlotteans.”

Another man in the auditorium this morning drove roads far more

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familiar to Charlotteans to get here. Peter Kelly is 62, white-haired and bespectacled, with an accent that echoes his Massachusetts origins and a fixation on numbers that reflects a career in the most Charlottean of professions—banking. He’s a member of the city’s Planning Commission and, in retirement, has founded a nonprofit called Equitable Communities CLT, which marries his career skills and his newfound passion for persuading his adopted city to find room for everyone. Equitable Communities’ slogan: “History. Data. Action.”

Kelly has a talk to deliver this morning at UNCC Center City, and its cumbersome title, “Why Charlotte Needs an Affordable Housing and Economic Equity COMMUNITY PLAN,” does not exactly sing. But an odd thing happens: He’s supposed to make his presentation in a ninthfloor classroom, and so many attendees ascend to the ninth floor that it quickly becomes clear he’s going to need a bigger space. Back down the throng rides to the 300-seat auditorium, where Kelly, in a nasal and dispassionate voice, presents a series of slides with hard numbers and an equally blunt message: Whatever Charlotte may be doing to achieve “equitable development”—a catchphrase uttered often during the summit—it’s nowhere near enough.

IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, the city has more than tripled the size of its Housing Trust Fund and trumpeted its commitment to developing and preserving affordable units, often in partnership with businesses and nonprofits. But don’t kid yourselves, Kelly says in the auditorium. “The real math is that we’re losing units much faster than we’re building them,” he says. “We built the Blue Line. But the Blue Line isn’t serving the people who need the Blue Line. It’s serving the people who don’t need the Blue Line. We have to be honest about what we’re doing. We’re not building a city for the waiter.”

His slides outline stark realities: From 2014 to 2017, according to his data, four times as many affordable homes were demolished as were built. The $39 million invested by the city and Foundation For The Carolinas for housing in 2019 will create 778 affordable units—and during their estimated construction time of two years, Charlotte will lose roughly 4,000 such units. From 2006 to 2017, the median rent in Charlotte increased 16 percent, while the median household income is only now creeping back to pre-recession levels. Any effective program, Kelly says, has to tackle issues of income, not just the number of available units. “We can’t build our way out of this crisis,” he says.

Jaiyeoba and his team’s plan is a critical document, maybe the critical document, in the effort to keep the waiters here, Kelly tells me when we meet a few days later over coffee. But it fulfills only a fraction of what’s needed. It has to have teeth, and the teeth have to be made of money. For the plan to accomplish its goal—to establish a framework for city policy that can prevent Charlotte from becoming the near-exclusive domain of the rich—the city has to find a way to pay for it, he says, probably by reserving a portion of the increasing property tax revenue from appreciated land to subsidize affordable housing along with job training, education, and minority business ventures. Without that, he argues, this plan will collect dust like the others.

We don’t want to lose our waiters. We don’t want to lose the people who don’t have as much money in our city.

—Taiwo Jaiyeoba

The real math is that we’re losing units much faster than we’re building them. We have to be honest about what we’re doing. We’re not building a city for the waiter.

—Peter Kelly

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The feedback revealed broad support for four things: investment in an additional high-traffic corridor; investment in bicycle paths and sidewalks to give people more transportation options; more goods and services in neighborhoods; and more high-density housing to reduce displacement.

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“I think the plan, the way it’s going—nothing against Taiwo—is going to hurt the community,” Kelly tells me. “Unless you change the focus to preserving communities, the plan is going to be about density and market value, and that equals displacement and dissolution of neighborhoods.”

I mention an analogy coined by a friend and colleague: that planning Charlotte’s growth in 2020 is like trying to throw a saddle on a horse in mid-gallop. “The current approach is worse than that, because it’s not even throwing a saddle on it,” Kelly replies. “We’re clearing the pass so the horse can run faster.”

People like Jacqueline Lopez get left in the dust. Born to Dominican immigrants and raised in Corona, Queens, Lopez moved from New Jersey to Charlotte in 2017 with her husband, Carlos, and two children, now 11 and 9. She was tired of the cost and aggravation of living in the New York City area—Bergen County is just across the Hudson River from the city—and

thought she’d be able to buy land around Charlotte, maybe even start a business. A cousin of hers had moved down around 2010 and said the cost of living was manageable.

An agent from Allen Tate began showing her and Carlos around.

They’d rented a two-story house in Bergen County for $1,700 a month, and they were looking for something similar for $1,000, maybe $1,100.

As the agent drove them to available properties, Lopez’s heart sank.

Anything close to that price was in an area where she didn’t want to live, and anywhere she thought she’d want to live cost as much as or more than what they’d paid in New Jersey. I might as well be back there, she thought. In August 2017, she and Carlos settled for a two-bedroom apartment for $840 per month at Arrowood Villas, a 120-unit complex near Nations Ford and East

City planners developed a comprehensive plan-themed board game to solicit opinions from a broad range of people. More than 1,800 played in person or online in July and August 2019.

Arrowood roads that accepts Section 8 housing vouchers.

They’re still there. “We don’t really go out walking the neighborhood,” Lopez tells me. She home-schools her children while Carlos does manual labor for a printing company. Her dream is to move to the country, maybe Lincoln or Union County, where they could buy land and start a farm with the help of a U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development loan. Even then, “We would have to commute,” she says.

“We kind of went backwards moving to Charlotte, you know?”

CITY COMPREHENSIVE PLANS typically look 20 years ahead. Charlotte’s last one was published in 1975.

Jaiyeoba keeps a copy, and he pulls it from a shelf as we talk in his office on the eighth floor of the Government

Center. It’s obviously a product of the ’70s—with a garish orange cover and broad, sans-serif fonts, nothing computer-generated in sight.

Why’s it been so long? Starting in the early ’90s, city planners developed “Small Area Plans” for particular parts of Charlotte, such as the Wesley Heights SAP, adopted in 1999, and the SouthEnd Vision Plan, adopted in 2018. The idea was to enhance neighborhoods by enlisting neighborhood leaders to help envision their future in detail. The city created 57 of them. But they weren’t complemented by a citywide vision—and Jaiyeoba believes the focus on SAPs contributed to the isolation of individual neighborhoods that in turn evolved into places where poor and working-class people couldn’t afford to live. “We just started—I don’t want to use the word, but it’s really the only word I can use—balkanizing different areas,” he says. “And what you find is that different areas have different ideas as to how they want to grow.”

During a series of public meetings, planners tried to solicit opinions from as broad a mix of ethnicities, ages, and income levels as they could—even developing a comprehensive plan-themed board game called “Growing Better Places” that more than 1,800 people played in person or online in July and August 2019. The feedback revealed broad support for four things: investment in an additional high-traffic corridor; investment in bicycle paths and sidewalks to give people more transportation options; more goods and services in neighborhoods; and more high-density housing to reduce displacement.

All, one way or another, reflect a desire to help people across economic classes live in and travel to, from, and within the city. It’ll be up to the City Council, to which

Jaiyeoba plans to submit a draft of the comprehensive plan in September, to create policies to meet that desire after they adopt the plan. That vote is expected in spring 2021, and a follow-up vote on a rewrite of land use regulations based on the plan is expected in fall 2021. “It’s going to have to be a heavy lift,” Jaiyeoba says, “because there will be trade-offs.”

One of those will likely be a massive further expansion of the Housing Trust Fund; voters in 2018 approved $50 million in bonds for the trust fund every two years, up from $15 million.

I ask Jaiyeoba how much bigger the fund would have to be to meet the need, about 30,000 units and counting. He laughs mirthlessly.

“That would be huge,” he says. “How willing is the community going to be? From $50 million to where?

There’s only so many times we can go to the well.”

Clearly, Kelly tells me, as he told the eager group at UNCC Center City, something has to give. The notion that building apartment complexes in densely populated areas, like those near light rail stations, will help keep rents affordable presumes that something or someone can or will cap rents—and, to this point, no one is. That means local governments and other institutions must set aside money so the poor and working-class—the waiters—can afford to live here. Otherwise, “We’ll quickly turn this into a city where nobody can live who makes below $50,000,” Kelly says. “I mean, we’re just going to push people away.”

I ask him if there’s an example of what Charlotte could become if we push people away. Without hesitation: “Atlanta,” he says. “That’s exactly what it’s going to be.”

GREG LACOUR is the senior editor for this magazine.

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The Bowler family in front of their renovated home.

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It would have been easier to tear down our Myers Park ranch and start over. But homes like these were built to last, so we gave ours a second chance

HOME STRETCH

BY Taylor Bowler PHOTOGRAPHS BY Rusty Williams

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A

COURTESY (3); RUSTY WILLIAMS (2)

W

hen we moved into our 1,900-square-foot Myers Park ranch in 2014, my husband and I were first-time homebuyers with a baby approaching his first birthday. The yellow brick house, built in 1947, had all the quirk and charm we love—the hardwood floors creaked under our feet, and an old-time telephone niche accented the main hallway—so I could overlook the lack of storage and tiny bathroom. The kitchen had been updated in the mid-’90s, and while the light wood cabinets and dark granite countertops weren’t my taste, it functioned just fine.

The house was in a good school district and within walking disthe chimney and existing plumbing, and I kept intact as much tance of Little Sugar Creek Greenway and Park Road Shopping of the home’s façade as I could.

Center. We could make it work.

My husband researched spray foam insulation and solar panA year later, we had our daughter. I soon shared a bathroom els and shopped around for maple cabinets and oak flooring. with two toddlers, and we all huddled over one sink to brush We’d upgrade to a tankless water heater and add a new HVAC our teeth. We talked about moving into a bigger house. But we system, but I resisted the urge to look at farmhouse sinks or gold loved our neighborhood and had to stay within a one-mile hardware or any other design trends that would look dated in radius to keep our kids in the school district. It was a common 10 years. We’d update our house for the 21st century, sure, but it Charlotte dilemma: We wanted a four-bedroom, move-in-ready would still look like our house. house, but we could no longer afford our own neighborhood.

After two years of planning and saving, we turned my drawWe considered tearing the house down and building a custom ings over to a drafter and designer who home, as our neighbors translated them into a full set of plans had. It seemed easier than We considered our 73-year-old brick for engineering and permits. This took working with our existing ranch, with its wood plank subfloors and another six months. footprint. We could raze We planned to tear off the roof to add a our house for $15,000 and original copper pipes, and decided to second floor, gut the interior, and replace replace it with something extend its life expectancy. every window. We’d add 1,400 square new in nine months for feet, but I didn’t want it to look like an about $300,000. But first addition. I wanted it to look seamless, and we found a conwe’d have to pay off the mortgage—in essence, we’d buy the tractor who got that. Larry would match the brick, the white house outright just to tear it down.

Georgian windows, and the crown molding. He could even As we spoke with builders and contractors, we learned that reuse our pedestal sink and keep the old porcelain-coated, castmany new homes aren’t built to last. With building codes that iron bathtub in its place. change constantly, and new materials, tools, and technology He said the project would take seven months, so we found hitting the market every year, a prefab home built today could an apartment a few streets over and signed a nine-month be outdated in a decade. Also, modern building materials like lease. (We knew this wouldn’t shake out like an episode of low-quality wood, drywall, and vinyl siding don’t last as long Property Brothers.) I chose our flooring, cabinets, appliances, as the wood and stone used in older homes. tile, lighting, fixtures, paint colors, and anything else I could We considered our 73-year-old brick ranch, with its wood select in advance, and put it in a spreadsheet for Larry. Once plank subfloors and original copper pipes, and decided to construction began in April 2019, I wanted to be hands-off. extend its life expectancy. We’d preserve the things that worked and update the things that didn’t. At first, we doubted ourselves. But I went to art school. My husband works for a strucfew weeks into demolition, a storm came through, tural engineering company, and we watch a ton of HGTV. We blew off the blue tarps that had temporarily could do this. replaced our roof, and soaked the first-floor ceiling.

Larry’s crew had to tear out the old 8-foot ceiling, found the home’s original floor plan and drew it again which set us back two weeks—but they replaced it with the and again on layer after layer of tracing paper, rearrang9-foot ceilings I wanted anyway. ing walls, windows, and stairs. I relocated the kitchen Three months later, someone stole $10,000 worth of winand added a master suite, a mudroom, and a bonus dows from inside the house. Larry told us theft happens on conroom. I blew out the tiny closets and clunky cast-iron radiastruction sites more than we’d like to think. The copper pipes tors. I considered where the kids would enter the house with in older homes like ours are often the first things stolen because muddy soccer cleats, where they’d hang their backpacks, and copper is such a valuable scrap metal. We filed a police report, where their friends would use the bathroom. I worked around but our case wasn’t exactly a priority for CMPD. Insurance came

(Top and left) Before, during, and after the renovation of the Bowlers’ Myers Park home.

By December, I wondered if we’d done the right thing. If we’d gone with a new build, we could be finished by now. Instead, I felt like we had to ask this home’s permission every time we altered or updated anything.

F through, and we ordered new windows, but it set us back four more weeks.

My plan to be hands-off didn’t hold up. I assumed each subcontractor would know exactly what to do. But before the electrician could rewire the house, I had to walk through the barely framed structure, visualize it with walls and doors, and decide where each outlet would go. When the tile and flooring were delivered, I had to put each box in its corresponding room and draw out the brick lay pattern with arrows so the installers knew which way to run it.

At times, I thought my head would explode from all the moving parts. If the plumber didn’t put the waterline in the right place, the appliance guy couldn’t install the dishwasher or refrigerator. If the countertops were cut 3/8 of an inch too long, the range wouldn’t fit. If the brick masons rested their scaffolding against the neighbor’s fence, said fence would collapse in the neighbor’s driveway. (True story.)

or the last six weeks, we were there every weekend installing closets, shelving, hooks, handles, and anything else we could to keep our momentum. To make our February 1 deadline, we had to pass what felt like a thousand inspections—electric, solar, gas—and without our final building inspection, we would be squatting in our own house.

Then, 24 hours before our move-in date, the lights came on.

We had hot water and Wi-Fi and permission from the county to move back in. The kids unpacked boxes of toys that had been in storage for 10 months, and my husband and I had our own bathroom for the first time in six years. An avalanche of furniture and pictures and books would need to be sorted, but we were home.

Some quirks remain, like the slight dip in the floor between the dining room and kitchen, where the old house ends and the new one begins. Our original fireplace mantel is there, and the old plantation shutters fit back into place. The built-in phone niche and random toilet in the laundry room are gone. But everything worth saving still stands, and the house we fell in love with six years ago is still ours.

TAYLOR BOWLER is lifestyle editor for this magazine.

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A cleared residential lot near Park Road Shopping Center.

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Land prices, especially near uptown Charlotte, are forcing even some affluent homeowners to flee for the sticks

THE COST OF EXPENSIVE

BY CHUCK McSHANE PHOTOGRAPHS BY LOGAN CYRUS

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E “The post-war ranch is getting extinct, especially anything on a half-acre lot. A lot of those people are packing up and moving to the ’burbs.”

— Jonathan Osman, Realtor

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very morning since November, my wife and I have woken to the beeps of bulldozers in reverse and the cracks of clearing brush. Across the street from our condominium complex, built in 1965, crews are leveling four lots to make way for a new development. The general process has repeated itself over the past few years along this block, tucked behind Park Road Shopping Center, four miles south of uptown. This time, it’s four houses built in the 1950s, to be replaced by 16 townhomes. Starting price for each: about $600,000.

It’s a common scene in Charlotte’s “close-in” neighborhoods, those that adjoin or are within a few miles of uptown. Investors snap up ranch-style and other houses from yesteryear’s suburbs and in their place build custom homes twice their size or, where zoning allows, townhomes and apartments that seem to fill out every inch of once-expansive lawns.

From the perspective of this block, it’s a happy story. The young couple bought that three-bedroom for $237,000 in 2014 and sold it to the developer for $465,000 last fall. They’re certainly not complaining. “Don’t mess this up for us,” the woman told a neighbor who approached her with a petition in 2018, when word spread about The Drakeford Company’s plan to ask the city to rezone the property. The neighbor feared tree loss and traffic increases. But opposition fizzled when developers noted the zoning in place allowed them to build the same number of units.

The developer sees enough upside in the acre to invest about $2 million in the land alone. Even the petition-wielders are quiet, having accepted the inevitability of the development, and soothed by the increased value of “comps” in the neighborhood should they decide to sell. The family of renters in one of the old houses on this block, where some older duplex units still rent for $950 per month in a city where the average rent tops $1,200, was likely less enthusiastic. But they’re gone now.

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n a city with an acute affordable housing crisis, where 1,000 people wait in line at one new complex to apply for 129 subsidized apartments, where officials say there’s a shortage of as many as 34,000 affordable housing units, the loss of a few average-cost rentals on an affluent block might not register as a serious issue.

What’s happening here, though, reflects broader trends that ripple throughout the Charlotte region, reshaping where we live, how we get to work, and who our neighbors are. Continued population growth, disappearing developable land in Mecklenburg County, and tighter credit requirements have combined to restrict supply, leading many people with jobs in the city to stretch their budgets and commutes.

“The post-war ranch is getting extinct, especially anything on a half-acre lot,” says realtor Jonathan Osman of Tryon Realty Partners. “A lot of those people are packing up and moving to the ’burbs.”

With land prices in town rising, lots are often worth more than the homes that sit on them. The average price per acre in the Charlotte metropolitan area grew from around $195,000 in 2014 to more than $325,000 in 2018, according to a UNC Charlotte study published last year. To recoup the cost of expensive dirt, developers are going high-end. “You see spec builders who were selling at $600,000 three years ago at $800,000 now,” Osman says. “It’s the same product, just $200,000 more expensive. You can’t develop anything in town for less than $800,000 today.”

Stricter lending requirements for consumers and tougher investment standards from companies that finance development drive prices even higher, which erodes the stock of homes in neighborhoods like mine. “By not supplying homes in that $200,000-to$400,000 range,” says John Curry, who co-founded Spire Residential, “we’re not providing opportunities for people to build equity.”

The real estate finance company specializes in debt and equity financing for homebuilders to supply housing in the range he cites—market-rate but still affordable for median-income earners. A buyer who earns $55,300 per year—the median income for a single person in Charlotte, according to city housing data—with no other debt and good credit would qualify for, at most, about a $230,000 mortgage. Median home prices surpassed $270,000 in Mecklenburg County in December 2019, up 7 percent since 2018. That year, the UNCC study found that a family that earns $50,000 per year or less could afford less than 15 percent of the homes for sale in the Charlotte region.

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t’s no wonder, then, that towns and communities with abundant and relatively inexpensive land—like Indian Land and Fort Mill, Indian Trail and the city of Belmont—teem with new subdivisions. In 2011, as the economy was just beginning to recover from the recession, 68 percent of the region’s population growth occurred in Mecklenburg County. By 2018, that trend

had reversed: Only 36 percent of the region’s population growth occurred in its core urban county, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. The fastest growth has come in York and Lancaster counties in South Carolina.

“My biggest surprise is that it’s taken as long as it has for the exurbs to gain traction,” Osman says. “You drive out to Gastonia, for the same costs, you pretty much own the town. In Rock Hill, every unit we’re putting on the market, we’re setting neighborhood records with it.”

For once-rural towns like Lake Wylie, where home sales increased by 20 percent last year, growth pressure has hit a breaking point. Resistance to rapid growth swept new members onto the York County Council, which passed a moratorium on new rezoning petitions, townhomes, condos, and apartments through March 2021. Fort Mill and the Indian Land section of Lancaster County, which borders Ballantyne, have experimented with building moratoriums and impact fees in recent years.

Even with the attempts to restrain it, suburban growth is not likely to stop. But it adds one more impediment to new units in a region, and nation, where supply is already constrained. It would take only about seven weeks to sell all available homes in the Charlotte region, according to Canopy (formerly Charlotte Regional) Realtor Association data. Ultimately, economists say, adding density by building apartments and townhomes in place of single-family homes should help reduce housing costs throughout the region. Homeowners hesitate to sell in such a tight market because they’re unlikely to find comparable homes in similar in-town neighborhoods, which leads experts to predict more sales of highdensity townhomes—like the ones that will replace the ranch houses on my block.

“If you’re selling at $400,000, even if you walk away with $300,000 cash, you’re probably moving into a townhome in the city, or you’re going over to one of the new neighborhoods like Lockwood” in quickly gentrifying North End, Osman says. Not long ago, buyers preferred detached houses to townhomes, which usually come with expensive homeowners association fees.

“It was almost like buying something $40,000 more expensive. There was always an equivalent single-family (home),” he says. “That’s not true anymore.”

With land prices in town rising, lots are often worth more than the homes that sit on them.

CHUCK MCSHANE is a writer in Charlotte. Reach him at chuckmcshane@gmail.com or on Twitter: @chuckmcshane.

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Cheryl Potts with her niece Jameelah.

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For generations, economists, pundits, and holders of public office have told the poor that pulling themselves out of poverty was just a matter of acquiring the right skills, making the right choices, and having the right attitude. In a city where getting ahead is practically a religion, Cheryl Potts has done a lot right—and she hasn’t gotten far

STUCK IN NEUTRAL

BY Pam

Kelley Cyrus

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Logan

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

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The list grew bleaker with every term Wanda added—grief, loss, domestic violence, health issues, depression. One woman was in recovery for addiction. One had lost a lung but couldn’t quit smoking.

Another, Cheryl Potts, described how she hid bouts of sadness from the three-year-old niece she was raising: “I go into the house and take a shower so the little one won’t hear me crying.”

Southside Homes was the oldest public housing left in Charlotte, with nearly 400 red brick apartments on 41 acres. It opened in 1952, when segregation was Charlotte’s official policy. A Charlotte Observer story from the time described the new South Tryon Street development, two miles southwest of downtown, as a “low-rent housing project for Negroes.”

More than 60 years later, its surroundings had changed. Luxury apartments stood in nearby South End. The Harris Teeter on South Boulevard offered a wine bar. Lenny Boy Brewing, with craft beer and organic kombucha, operated next door. But Southside Homes was much the same. Nearly all of its residents were black. Of those able to work, only 23 percent had jobs. Many came from families who’d lived in the city’s poor, black neighborhoods for generations.

The “Getting Ahead” class was part of Jobs Plus, a federally funded program run by the Charlotte Housing Authority, now named Inlivian. It aimed to move residents into jobs and out of public housing. As a journalist focused on the challenges that face poor people, I’d received permission to observe some of the class to try to understand generational poverty and why it’s so hard to escape. That question has shadowed Charlotte since Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s 2014 study ranked the city’s level of economic mobility last out of 50 large U.S. cities.

A child born poor here was likely to stay poor, the study found. But why?

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Some blame the poor themselves, for bad decisions or moral failings. But poverty researchers point to social structures: low wages, high rents, inadequate public transportation and, in black communities like Southside, systemic racism, beginning with slavery and continuing through centuries of government policies that thwarted the ability of black families to accumulate wealth.

Southside’s program took a middle road. It acknowledged structural inequality but focused its efforts on habits that individuals can change.

The premise of the “Getting Ahead” class was that people who lack adequate resources—not just money but assets like good health and emotional strength—live in survival mode, “the tyranny of the moment,” as Wanda described it. They often act on immediate needs and feelings instead of planning for long-term goals. In survival mode, a supervisor’s criticism is countered with an angry outburst. An income tax refund gets spent, not saved. These kinds of behaviors make escaping poverty even harder.

The goal of the class was to help participants understand and follow achievement-focused middle-class habits, what the “Getting Ahead” curriculum called “the hidden rules of economic class.”

Cheryl Potts had signed up, figuring she had nothing to lose. She was making $8.50 an hour as a home health aide, working too few hours and struggling to support herself and her niece Jameelah. Though she’d worked most of her life, something always set her back—an illness that kept her out of work, an unexpected car repair, a medical bill. Perhaps the biggest obstacle was her paycheck. Even when she

PAM KELLEY

On a Wednesday morning in 2016, in the “Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-By World” class at Southside Homes, a dozen women made a list of daily challenges. As they chimed in about job stress and transportation difficulties, child-care costs and crime, Wanda Anderson, their facilitator, scribbled responses onto a poster labeled, “What’s It Like Now.”

PAM KELLEY

had full-time work, her jobs seldom paid enough to live on. The Jobs Plus program would pay $20 for each class she attended and freeze her monthly rent at $75 through 2019. It also offered a range of services, like job fairs, GED classes, child-care subsidies, and transportation assistance, to help residents find and keep jobs.

The program took aim at appropriate behavior, too. One day, students discussed proper responses when someone made them angry. Robin Anthony described a recent experience in a department store. This was just a day after the violent protests that followed the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in September 2016. The white store clerk had ignored her, she told the class, while she urged a white customer to stay safe.

“She kept going on, ‘Now you be careful!’” Robin recalled. She felt hurt that the clerk was unconcerned about her safety, she said, but refrained from cursing the clerk out.

“You handled it really appropriately,” Wanda told her. “You could have started an argument. You were using the middleclass hidden rule—the future is most important.”

Such restraint was especially important at work, Wanda said.

If you’ve got a beef with your boss, take it up the chain. And if you can’t resolve it, look for a new job.

“If I get it,” Wanda asked, “do I slap her then?”

Women replied in unison: “No.” The class ended in December 2016 with a fried chicken lunch. Wanda snapped group photos. Had there been awards, Cheryl might have won Most Likely to Succeed. She’d landed a full-time, $10.85-an-hour food service job at the airport. She’d already made Employee of the Month. I could have written about Cheryl then. Readers like happy endings.

One of America’s enduring national myths holds that anyone can succeed if they play by the rules, make good choices, and work hard enough. In fact, research shows that you’ve got a better chance of escaping poverty if you live in Canada or Australia or most other developed countries, where citizens benefit from universal health care and more robust social safety nets. But this myth was Cheryl’s operating premise. When the class ended, she committed to working and saving in an effort to better herself.

Over the next three years, I followed her progress. As we both would learn, when you live in survival mode, a single mistake or plain bad luck can derail even the most dogged attempt to get out of poverty.

Cheryl’s daughter had been gone for nine years. Crit, as Cheryl called her, was 13 on May 23, 2008, when she went out on her bike to buy candy. Crossing South Tryon Street, she rode into the side of a school bus. One minute, Cheryl was watching television. The next, a neighbor was banging at the door, yelling about someone getting hit. A police officer drove Cheryl to the hospital. There, a paramedic assured her that her child hadn’t suffered.

Ever since, Cheryl had struggled through what she calls “times when the devil takes over.” Bouts of depression left her wondering if she should even be alive. She credited prayer with helping her push on and her niece Jameelah for giving her new purpose. When her late brother’s daughter needed a caregiver, Cheryl had taken her in. Before long, the toddler was calling Cheryl her mama.

Jameelah cuddled Cheryl as we talked. Seven months had passed since the “Getting Ahead” class. Her job was going well. She worked a 1-to-10 p.m. shift at a pizza restaurant on Concourse E, picking up overtime when she could. She’d bought a car, trading in her 29-year-old Toyota Corolla for a new model. The purchase came with an 18-percent-interest loan, a $419 monthly payment. With her frozen rent and betterpaying job, Cheryl reasoned she could afford it.

Also, she had her first 401K. Every two weeks, she added $50, which her employer matched. Her goal, she said, was to leave public housing and find a house with Cheryl Potts’ a backyard in a safe neighborhood. She daughter, was focusing on the future, just as she’d Shcrissony, 13, learned in class. Cheryl smiled, bouncwas killed when she collided with ing gently on the sofa as she described a school bus while this new nest egg. “Last time I seen my riding her bicycle check stub, I think it was about maybe on South Tryon Street in May 2008. $2,000,” she said. “And I was like, Wow. It’s growing. It’s growing.”

CHERYL WAS 49 WHEN WE MET. She wore her hair short and tidy. A gold decorative crown framed her right front tooth, and it gave her smile a sparkle.

She’d arrived in Southside in 2007 with her daughter, Shcrissony; a television; and little else. She’d been living with relatives, so having her own two-bedroom apartment was a step up, even though it was nearly empty. Members of her church donated a mattress and box spring, which she and Shcrissony shared until she could get a second set.

Now it was 2017, and her once-empty living room was full.

An aquarium with goldfish bubbled in a corner. Her niece Jameelah’s pink training-wheel bike sat beside the red sofa. A table displayed a smiling photo of Shcrissony wearing a churchleague basketball uniform, a ball at her hip.

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COURTESY, CRISIS ASSISTANCE MINISTRY

THE GULF THAT DIVIDES THIS NATION’S POOR from its Of course, my family had the advantage of being white. Had affluent is so vast these days, programs exist to teach people we been black, my parents probably wouldn’t have gotten that with money what it’s like to live in poverty. Charlotte’s Crisis loan. Until 1968, the Federal Housing Administration regularly Assistance Ministry offers one regularly, a simulation in which refused to back loans to black people. Also, had my high schoolparticipants try to survive on poverty-level incomes in the educated parents been black, I suspect they wouldn’t have been imaginary town of Realville. hired for their jobs.

Last year, I watched a UNC Charlotte MBA class take part in The results of race discrimination endure. In 2016, the average the exercise. Some students played family members who lived American white family had 10 times the median wealth of the in poverty; others served as community members—banker, average black family. In Charlotte, roughly three times as many payday lender, pawnbroker, landlord. During a single intense African Americans and Hispanics live in poverty as whites. hour, families scrambled to go to work, buy groceries, and fend Advantages beget more advantages. My husband and I have off bill collectors. inherited money. My children will likely inherit money.

Afterward, they discussed how costly and time-consuming Cheryl’s mom, Mildred Potts, born in South Carolina in 1932, it was to be poor. When you can’t pay cash, high attended school for just a few years before she interest rates soak you. If you need help from chariquit to work in watermelon and cotton fields. In Bonnie Tiernan table agencies, you may be forced to miss work to Charlotte, Mildred raised nine children on her own; (standing) leads simulations during visit during operating hours. Students who’d played she and Cheryl’s father never married. She worked a Crisis Assistance family members also described how stressed they’d for decades at The Drum, once a popular diner Ministry program felt. Crisis Assistance’s Bonnie Tiernan, who leads on East Boulevard, where she was known for her that shows people what poverty is like. these simulations, hears that a lot. If you’re stressed scratch-made pies. “She was one of the best cooks I Participants often during an exercise, she told the class, imagine how ever had,” Drum owner Larry Smith told me. face “eviction” by you’d feel when the scarcity never ends.

When Mildred Potts died in 2015, there was little their third week in Some manage to get out. Wanda Anderson, for Cheryl to inherit.

“Realville.” who’d taught the 12-week “Getting Ahead” program at Southside for years, had seen it work.

During class, she often offered examples from her own life, growing up black and in generational poverty in Alabama. By age 12, she was helping out her single mom by earning money cleaning houses. By age 15, she was fending off bill collectors. At 18, she joined the Army. That was her ticket out.

As a teacher, Wanda had a go-with-the-flow style, remaining unruffled when someone interrupted or five people talked at once. Sometimes, the class simmered with the intensity of group therapy, as women shared frustrations and sorrows. At other times, the mood was lighter. One day in Cheryl’s class, the room erupted in laughter when a young woman, responding to Wanda’s directive to make goals to escape poverty, announced her plan: “I’m getting a rich white man.”

Often, discussions centered on the differences between middle-class and poverty culture. Middleclass people were taught to prioritize achievement, Wanda explained, while people in poverty focused more on relationships. When you lack money or property, she said, people become your most precious assets. “When you get a windfall, you know it’s not enough anyway, and so you’ll go and buy the kids things.”

“That’s me,” said a woman who worked at Dollar Tree. “I do that all the time.”

I found such poverty hard to imagine. I’d grown up in a middle-class family in Ohio, with parents whose jobs paid enough to cover the bills. In 1958, they bought our 1,400-square-foot house with a federally guaranteed loan that they paid off early.

When I went to college, family savings covered most expenses.

She credited prayer with helping her push on and her niece Jameelah for giving her new purpose.

When her late brother’s daughter needed a caregiver, Cheryl had taken her in. Before long, the toddler was calling Cheryl her mama.

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

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CHERYL AND I USUALLY TALKED OVER LUNCH, sometimes at the Steak ’n Hoagie near her apartment. She’d bring Jameelah, and the three of us ordered at the counter, pondering Greek salad or cheese steak or chicken with two side items. Jameelah liked vegetables and knew not to ask for soda. Cheryl didn’t believe in soda. “You got to think about your kid’s teeth,” she told me.

She is a Charlotte native, an East Mecklenburg High graduate. She grew up in Earle Village, a public housing development demolished in the 1990s, and worked more than a dozen jobs over the years: frying KFC chicken, changing diapers as both a day-care worker and home-health aide, selling giant chocolatechip cookies at the mall, and tagging inventory in a warehouse.

The most she’d ever made was $13.50 an hour, working with mentally challenged children. “I think I had to quit,” she said, “because I didn’t have a car.”

While Cheryl and I talked, Jameelah occupied herself with Cheryl’s phone or listened to our conversation, resting her head with braided hair in her arms on the table. Her father, James Potts, had died of a heart attack at 47, before she was born.

Her mother had struggled to care for her. She was two in 2015, when Cheryl took her in.

Poverty wasn’t Cheryl’s only burden. She took prescription medicine to control sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease. The ligaments in her right knee were damaged, and her right ankle, broken several years before, was held together with a plate and screws. Both swelled when she stood for too long.

She also fought depression. During one rough patch in 2017, she’d been talking to a friend on the phone and questioned whether she’d be better off dead. The friend, fearing Cheryl was suicidal, called 911. After a hospital evaluation, she went home, still depressed and with a $473 ambulance bill she couldn’t pay.

Southside Homes, In spite of everything, Cheryl often which opened in expressed gratitude—for Jobs Plus, 1952, is the oldest public housing which had helped her find the airport complex in job, and for her church, Seigle Avenue Charlotte. Its 394 Presbyterian. She loved her siblings, apartments sprawl over 41 acres. her nieces and nephews. She appreciated Johnny Hall, Crit’s father. They had never married, but they remained close friends, calling to check on each other most days.

“Before I go to bed, I get on my knees in my bedroom and pray,” she told me. “I pray throughout the day. I thank God so much. I been through a lot. For him bringing me this far.”

FOR MOST OF 2017, Cheryl’s financial fortunes seemed to improve. But in September, she abruptly quit her job. She was fed up with several young supervisors she believed played favorites and addressed her disrespectfully.

She had taken her grievances to a higher-up, she told me, as Wanda had suggested in the “Getting Ahead” class.

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But nothing changed. “It just wasn’t fair,” she said. “I hated to give up like that, but I was hating to go to work.”

In the unemployed weeks that followed, family and friends helped with bills. She liquidated her 401K. She netted less than a thousand dollars, not as much as she’d expected, but enough for two car payments. “I didn’t have no other choice,” she said.

“I just didn’t want to see my car go back.” At Southside, a Jobs Plus caseworker helped her line up interviews and sent her to Dress for Success, a nonprofit that supplies professional clothing to women. During interviews, employers commented on how nice she looked. “I said, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for Dress for Success,’” she told me.

By Thanksgiving, Cheryl had a 30-hour-a-week cashier job at the Morrocroft Village Harris Teeter. Starting pay was just $9 an hour, but it was income. She’d worked in the store’s deli before, and she tried to look on the bright side. “Once you become part of the team,” she said, “they’re like family.” Soon, she’d won the store’s award for excellent customer service. Her photo joined those of other monthly winners near the entrance.

“I try to be nice to everybody,” she said. She had special affection for several co-workers with mental disabilities who’d jockey for the chance to bag groceries at her register. “Oh, my God, I just love them to death,” she said. “It be a lot of happy and joyful.”

AS MONTHS PASSED, she remained at Harris Teeter and at Southside. In 2018, when Jameelah started kindergarten, Cheryl changed her hours so she could drop the child at school before work. On nights when sounds of gunfire sent Jameelah into bed with Cheryl, they’d pull up the covers and watch television, waiting for the shooting to stop.

In January 2019, after she’d again fallen behind on car payments, a repo man drove away with Cheryl’s Toyota. She’d been so consumed with worry about the debt, she said, that the repossession was almost a relief. She began borrowing Johnny’s car for work. The logistics were complicated, but she managed.

Briefly, she considered training to be a customer service representative at the grocery store. It would be a step up, with higher

pay. But she decided against it, convinced the job was too stressful. “It was just too much,” she said.

Before Thanksgiving, she telephoned with news.

After months on a waiting list, she’d received a Housing Choice voucher, a federal subsidy designed to cover 70 percent of her rent. She hoped it would be her ticket out of Southside Homes and into a house—nothing fancy, but something with a backyard in a safe neighborhood.

Her monthly share of the rent was likely to be at least $250, which she believed she could handle. But there were other difficulties. She still didn’t have a car.

She’d need to pay a security deposit, which the voucher didn’t cover. And she needed a landlord who accepted vouchers.

SOUTHSIDE HOMES has changed since Cheryl’s “Getting Ahead” class in 2016. That year, it became the city’s last public housing property to enact a work requirement.

Employable residents were now expected to spend at least 20 hours a week working, taking classes, or caring for a child under a year old. Those who didn’t meet the requirement would eventually see their rents rise to market rate. As of January 2020, 77 percent had jobs, up from 23 percent in 2016.

Work can provide benefits beyond income: skills, friends, dignity. But it wasn’t providing Southside residents enough income to cover market-rate rent. Pay for residents with part-time jobs averaged $8.54 an hour, “Getting Ahead” according to Inlivian. Full-time workers averaged $9.71.

It was hard to know where to start. Cheryl facilitator Wanda In Mecklenburg County, a living wage, the minimum had resolved to find work that paid more than Anderson still hourly pay required to cover necessities, is $12.58 for the $9.60 an hour she now made at Harris believes in the curriculum but a single adult and $24.69 for an adult with one child, Teeter. She had a line on a day-care job. We says it’s nearly according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. agreed it seemed unwise to choose a rental impossible for The stock market is high. Unemployment has dipped until she knew where she’d be working. So we people to escape poverty through to record lows. Yet 44 percent of all U.S. workers aged 18 dropped our plan. Instead, we had lunch and low-wage jobs. to 64 qualify as low-wage, with median pay of $10.22 an talked. I asked Cheryl about getting ahead— hour, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. Forty what did that mean to her? percent of Americans say they’d struggle to cover an unexpected “Getting ahead, for me,” she said, “is owning my own home. $400 expense, a 2018 Federal Reserve survey found.

My own car.” If she were getting ahead, she said, she’d never Wanda Anderson, the teacher who led Cheryl’s class, still put off paying a bill. She had come to regret leaving her airport believes in the “Getting Ahead” curriculum, but she says lowjob. “That’s my fault, because I do believe I’d still have my car if wage jobs make it nearly impossible to escape poverty. The I was still there,” she said. “But today is a new day, and I’m just women she teaches are “pushed into low-income jobs, and looking forward to continuing to move forward.” so they go to work,” she said. “But they’re not going to benefit After lunch, we drove to pick up Jameelah, who’d spent the from the money, because their benefits will be cut and rent will night with an aunt. The rainy morning had turned sunny. Now, be raised based on their income increase.” as the three of us headed back to Southside on Interstate 77, They aren’t getting ahead. storm clouds rolled in from the west, menacing the blue sky.

I recalled Cheryl’s classmate, the one who’d joked that her In the back seat, Jameelah announced that she’d spotted a poverty-escape plan was to find herself a rich white man. It was rainbow. sounding like a better idea all the time.

“It’s following us!” she said.

“We need to find the end of it,” Cheryl told her niece, “get us that pot of gold.”

CHERYL’S HOUSING VOUCHER, which she received in As she pulled out her phone to snap a photo, we hit a stretch November, would expire in six months. So on a Saturday in of highway flanked by noise walls. The rainbow disappeared January 2020, we met at her apartment to scout possible rentals. behind one, gone before Cheryl could take a single shot.

We began by perusing a website Inlivian had recommended— gosection8.com. It had fewer than 50 Charlotte listings, most in PAM KELLEY, a Charlotte journalist, is the author of Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South. low-income neighborhoods with low-rated schools.

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Spicy pork ramen and a chicken sausage bun at Bao and Broth.

FO O D + D R I N K

PETER TAYLOR

Take a Bao

Bao and Broth brings Asian street food to Optimist Hall

CHEF LARRY SCHREIBER began making his steamed pork buns in 2014, when he served as executive chef at Good Food on Montford, one of four other concepts that make up the Moffett Restaurant Group. The buns were such a hit that he built a menu around his most popular dish and opened a stall in Optimist Hall in 2019. He added ramen and additional bun options like schnitzel, chicken, bulgogi, and falafel. Head to the counter and order any three for $12, then decide which bun is your favorite.

SEE HIGHLIGHTED LISTING ON PAGE 89.

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

83

THE GUIDE

Arts and Culture WHAT TO DO THIS MONTH

Music: Classical, Jazz, & Opera

Music: Popular

BRITTANY HOWARD APRIL 18

STANLEY JORDAN

MANDY MOORE

The Alabama Shakes frontwoman and guitarist was

The Chicago-born jazz guitarist performs at the new

Younger fans may have first encountered Moore

Rock Song and Best Rock Performance) for her 2019 solo

uptown music venue. Known for his advanced, two-

through the TV show This Is Us. But many of us first knew

piece, “History Repeats.” Alabama Shakes had previously

handed tapping technique, Jordan has worked with

her as a pop star who broke through with the single

won four Grammys. $43.50, 8 p.m. The Fillmore Char-

Quincy Jones, Phil Lesh, Moe, and others outside the

“Candy” in 1999. $46.50-$122, 8 p.m. Knight Theater, 430

lotte, 820 Hamilton St., 704-916-8970, livenation.com.

jazz genre. $28-$36, Thu, 7 p.m.; Fri-Sat, 7 p.m. and 9

S. Tryon St., 704-372-1000, carolinatix.org.

APRIL 2-4

p.m. Middle C Jazz, 300 S. Brevard St. 704-595-3311, middlecjazz.com.

JAZZ AT THE BECHTLER: EDDIE HENDERSON

APRIL 1

SHOVELS & ROPE APRIL 2

nominated for Grammy Awards in two categories (Best

ANDREW BIRD APRIL 19

Since the mid-1990s, the prolific multi-instrumentalist

The Charleston folk duo returns to Charlotte with a

has released 15 studio records. For My Finest Work Yet,

show at NoDa’s premier rock venue. The band’s most

the 2019 album for which this tour is named, the full

recent record, By Blood, was released last year through

band played together in the recording process, bucking

Trumpeter Eddie Henderson joins the Ziad Jazz Quar-

Dualtone. $25-$99, 8 p.m. Neighborhood Theatre, 511 E.

the trend of most studio sessions in this era. $24.50-

tet for this edition of the Bechtler’s monthly program.

36th St. 704-942-7997, neighborhoodtheatre.com.

$54.50, 7 p.m. Knight Theater, 430 S. Tryon St., 704-372-

APRIL 3

He first garnered attention as a member of Herbie Hancock’s ensemble in the ’70s. $10 for museum members, $16 for nonmembers, 6 p.m. and 8:15 p.m.

BÉLA FLECK AND THE FLECKTONES APRIL 5

1000, carolinatix.org.

VANESSA CARLTON APRIL 22

Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, 420 S. Tryon St. 704-

This celebrated ensemble mixes jazz, bluegrass, and oth-

353-9200, bechtler.org.

er genres. The band includes banjoist/composer Fleck,

The “A Thousand Miles” singer returns to Charlotte with

bassist Victor Wooten, pianist-harmonica player How-

a gig at The Underground. Aside from her recordings

ard Levy, and percussionist Roy Wooten. $34.50-$84.50,

and performances, Carlton is known for her charity

7 p.m. Belk Theater, 130 N. Tryon St. 704-372-1000,

work with nonprofits like Musicians on Call, which sup-

carolinatix.org.

ports medical patients with bedside music. $20, 8 p.m.

CHARLOTTE SYMPHONY: BEETHOVEN’S PASTORAL APRIL 3-5

Acclaimed conductor JoAnn Falletta leads the CSO for this concert. The Beethoven title piece was famously used in the 1940 Disney film Fantasia, accompanied by creatures and characters from Greek mythology.

MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER AND SHAWN COLVIN APRIL 8

The Underground, 820 Hamilton St., 704-916-8970, livenation.com.

JIMMY BUFFETT APRIL 25

$19-$166, Fri-Sat, 7:30 p.m.; Sun, 3 p.m. Knight Theater,

These two respected songwriters come together as an

430 S. Tryon St., 704-372-1000, carolinatix.org.

acoustic duo during this tour. Their show is full of stories

Parrotheads unite: Jimmy is back in Charlotte. Did you

and songs that popularized each performer, like Car-

know diehard Jimmy Buffett fans are called “Parrot-

penter’s “Passionate Kisses” and Colvin’s “Sunny Came

heads”? If “Margaritaville” is the only Buffett song you

Home.” $45-$150, 7:30 p.m. Knight Theater, 430 S. Tryon

know, likely not. $75-$150, 8 p.m. PNC Music Pavilion,

St., 704-372-1000, carolinatix.org.

707 Pavilion Blvd. 704-549-5555, livenation.com.

CHARLOTTE SYMPHONY: BACH BRANDENBURG CONCERTOS APRIL 17-18

In addition to the Bach concertos, the program will include selections from Handel, Vivaldi, and Mozart.

Featured performers are flutist Victor Wang, oboist

BEN RECTOR APRIL 9

Hollis Ulaky, and trumpeter Alex Wilborn. $24-$181,

The Emmy nominee brings “The Old Friends Acous-

Fri-Sat, 7:30 p.m. Knight Theater, 430 S. Tryon St., 704-

tic Tour” to uptown’s Knight Theater. Joining him on

372-1000, carolinatix.org.

the road is singer-songwriter Cody Fry. $35-$95, 8

OPERA CAROLINA: I DREAM APRIL 19, 23, 25

I Dream is a musical drama about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that focuses on the last 36 hours of the

p.m. Knight Theater, 430 S. Tryon St., 704-372-1000, carolinatix.org.

ANGEL OLSEN APRIL 14

Theater, Dance, & Comedy CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF THROUGH APRIL 5

This iconic play was arguably the most famous work of Tennessee Williams, who once said it was his personal favorite. See how the Theatre Charlotte production breathes new life into the 65-year-old tale. $28, times

civil rights icon’s life. The powerful R&B opera, writ-

The 2019 record All Mirrors earned critical praise for

vary. Theatre Charlotte, 501 Queens Rd., 704-372-1000,

ten by Douglas Tappin, closes Opera Carolina’s 71st

the Asheville resident. Olsen is known for finding new

carolinatix.org.

season. $22-$161.50, Sun, 2 p.m.; Thu, 7:30 p.m.; Sat,

sounds with each release, and the British publication Un-

8 p.m. Belk Theater, 130 N. Tryon St., 704-372-1000,

cut called the LP her “boldest reinvention yet.” $27-$37,

carolinatix.org.

8 p.m. Neighborhood Theatre, 511 E. 36th St. 704-9427997, neighborhoodtheatre.com.

ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS THROUGH MAY 2

The Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte presents this 2011 Richard Bean play, which is an adaption of the 1743 comedy Servant of Two Masters. The narrative follows Francis Henshall, who is employed by two men who are un-

84

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

1:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Ovens Auditorium, 2700 E. Independence Blvd. 704-372-1000, carolinatix.org.

THE CROWN - LIVE! APRIL 29-MAY 3

This two-actor show is a parody of the Netflix series of the same name. If you enjoyed Potted Potter, a similar take on the Harry Potter series, you’ll surely dig this send-up. $34.50-$54.50, Wed-Sat, 7:30 p.m.; Sun, 2 p.m.

Stage Door Theater, 155 N. College St., 704-372-1000, carolinatix.org.

Museums, Galleries, & Fine Arts BECHTLER MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

This uptown venue, part of the Levine Center for the Arts, presents the works of 20th-century modern artists in a new context for today’s audiences. Curators assemble shows that pull from the Bechtler family’s famous collection and other community collections.

Ten, THROUGH MAY 3, features a selection of works from 16 past exhibits to commemorate the Bechtler’s 10th anniversary. Free for members, $9 for adults, $7 for seniors, college students, and educators, $5 for kids 11-18, and free for kids under 11 and military. Mon, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Wed-Sat, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun, noon-5 p.m.

420 S. Tryon St. 704-353-9200, bechtler.org.

CHARLOTTE MUSEUM OF HISTORY

This east Charlotte museum places the city’s history under a microscope. The continuing exhibition, Solving the Rock House Mysteries, explores the concept of preservation through the 5,000-square-foot Hezekiah Alexander House, built in 1774. The ongoing exhibit Charlotte Neighborhoods uses maps, photos, text, and other in-

Ashevillebased musician Angel Olsen will perform April 14 at the Neighborhood Theatre in NoDa.

formation to show how neighborhoods across the city were formed. Unforgettable Music Venues of Charlotte displays photos of and artifacts from iconic local music venues that have closed, including the Double Door Inn and Tremont Music Hall. Colonial Gem (APRIL 23, $125, 6 p.m.-8:30 p.m.) celebrates Colonial life on the grounds of the Hezekiah Alexander House. The museum’s premier fundraising event includes costumed historians

aware that Henshall works for the other. $15-$50, Wed-

$25, Thu, 8 p.m.; Fri, 7:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m.; Sat, 7 p.m.

and live music. Free for members, $10 for adults, $7 for

Thu, 7:30 p.m.; Fri-Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 2:30 p.m. Hadley The-

and 9:45 p.m. Charlotte Comedy Zone, 900 NC Music

seniors and children 6-17, $5 for military, and free for

atre, 2132 Radcliffe Ave. 704-342-2251, atcharlotte.org.

Factory Blvd. 980-321-4702, cltcomedyzone.com.

kids under 6. Tue-Sat, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. 3500 Shamrock Dr.

RIVERDANCE 25TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW

BLUE MAN GROUP

For more than 25 years, this Celtic-flavored dance show

The bald and blue percussionists are back. This per-

Built alongside a 100-year-old forest between Dilworth

has toured the globe. Now, the show has been rein-

formance art group has been at it for more than 30

and Myers Park, Discovery Place Nature combines

vented by producer Moya Doherty and director John

years and continues to reinvent and expand the show.

learning and fun through indoor and outdoor activities.

McColgan. $25-$85, Tue-Thu, 7:30 p.m.; Fri, 8 p.m.; Sat, 2

$29.50-$104.50, Fri, 8 p.m.; Sat, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sun,

The Fort Wild outdoor exhibit includes activities that

p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sun, 1:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Belk Theater,

1:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Ovens Auditorium, 2700 E. Inde-

allow kids to get their hands dirty, and the Butterfly Pa-

130 N. Tryon St. 704-372-1000, carolinatix.org.

pendence Blvd. 704-372-1000, carolinatix.org.

vilion gives visitors a chance to walk among free-flying

BRYAN CALLEN

ANASTASIA

Callen, co-host of the popular podcast The Fighter and

Based on the animated retelling of the Anastasia leg-

each month, the museum offers a guided nature walk

the Kid, broke through as a cast member on MADtv. The

end, the show premiered on Broadway three years ago.

along the Paw Paw Nature Trail. Free for members, $8

stand-up has recently appeared in big films like Joker.

$25-$124.50, Tue-Fri, 8 p.m.; Sat, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sun,

for nonmembers, $6 for military, and free for kids under

CAMERON McCOOL

APRIL 7-12

APRIL 23-25

APRIL 24-26

APRIL 28-MAY 3

704-568-1774, charlottemuseum.org.

DISCOVERY PLACE NATURE

butterflies. Explore the moon and stars in the digital planetarium, which offers a mix of multimedia shows and seasonal star shows. On the fourth Saturday of

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

85

THE GUIDE 2. Tue, 9 a.m.-7 p.m.; Wed-Fri, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sat, 9 a.m.-5

representation and creativity. Free for members, $9 for

dents. Brooklyn: Once a City within a City explores the

p.m.; Sun, noon-5 p.m. 1658 Sterling Rd. 704-372-6261,

adults, $7 for kids 6-17, seniors, military, and college stu-

rise and demise of the Brooklyn neighborhood, once

nature.discoveryplace.org.

dents, and free for kids under 6. Tue, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Wed,

a thriving African-American community in Charlotte.

10 a.m.-8 p.m. (museum entry is free Wed, 5 p.m.-8 p.m.);

An Evening with Danny Glover (APRIL 16, $150-$250,

Thu-Sat, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. 551 S. Tryon

7:30 p.m.-11 p.m., McGlohon Theater) launches the

St. 704-547-3700, ganttcenter.org.

museum’s fundraising campaign (CataLysT 2020), with

DISCOVERY PLACE SCIENCE

This uptown landmark educates and entertains visitors of all ages in the STEM areas (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The museum has

HODGES TAYLOR ART CONSULTANCY

acclaimed actor and activist Danny Glover as the guest speaker. Regular admission: Free for members, $10 for

experiments, interactive exhibits, an aquarium, and

After opening as an uptown gallery in 1980, Hodges

adults, $8 for seniors, military, and college students, $6

even an on-site rainforest. KidScience, the center’s early

Taylor became a consulting firm in 2011 and moved

for children 6-18, and free for kids under 6. Admission

education exhibition for children up to 7, offers kids

to South End. Hodges Taylor hosts exhibitions in its

is half price on Sundays. Mon-Fri, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat, 10

the chance to build and race cars, explore colors and

office and gallery. Free admission. Wed-Fri, 11 a.m.-

a.m.-4 p.m.; Sun, noon-5 p.m. 200 E. 7th St. 704-333-

light at the Light Table, and experience a gust of wind

4 p.m., 118 E. Kingston Ave., Ste. 16. 704-608-2016,

1887, museumofthenewsouth.org.

at the Wind Wall. The Being Me exhibit explores the

hodgestaylor.com.

human body and celebrates the unique characteris-

LIBERTY WALK

With this free self-guided walking tour, you can learn

MAY 25, explores four new dinosaur species that were

JERALD MELBERG GALLERY

Founded in 1983, Melberg’s gallery carries works from a

about the development of Charlotte and how its citizens

discovered in Antarctic ice over the past 30 years (exhibi-

wide range of acclaimed artists such as Romare Bearden

were involved in the American Revolution. To get infor-

tion admission: $3, plus regular admission fee). On the

and Wolf Kahn. Over the years, the gallery has worked

mation about the 19 markers along the walk, down-

third Friday of every month, the museum hosts themed

with prestigious institutions like New York’s Museum

load a brochure at charlottelibertywalk.com or pick up

events that invite adults to get in on the fun without the

of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Wash-

a brochure at the Levine Museum of the New South or

little ones (Science on the Rocks, $12-$14, 5 p.m.-9 p.m.).

ington. Kim Keever, THROUGH APRIL 25, features new

the Visitor Info Center at 501 S. College St. (in the Char-

Regular admission: Free for members, $19 for adults,

abstract photographs by the New York-based artist, who

lotte Convention Center, 800-231-4636). A “Charlotte

$17 for seniors and military, $15 for kids 2-13, and free

creates his works by pouring pigments into a 200-gallon

Liberty Walk” app is available at handheldhistory.com

for kids under 2. Mon-Fri, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sat, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.;

tank of water. Free admission. Mon-Fri, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.;

to help you along. Guided tours can be arranged by

Sun, noon-5 p.m. 301 N. Tryon St. 704-372-6261, science.

Sat, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. 625 S. Sharon Amity Rd. 704-365-

contacting the Mecklenburg Historical Association at

discoveryplace.org.

3000, jeraldmelberg.com.

contact@meckdec.org.

tics of human beings. Antarctic Dinosaurs, THROUGH

ELDER GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ART

LACA PROJECTS

THE LIGHT FACTORY

This South End gallery changed ownership in 2017, with

LaCa opened in 2013 as the first arts venue in the South-

A creative home for photographers and filmmakers, The

attorney and former journalist Sonya Pfeiffer taking over

east dedicated entirely to Latin American contemporary

Light Factory has workshops, classes, school programs,

as owner and creative director. Pfeiffer’s experience as a

art. The gallery works to connect Latin American artists

and exhibits. Classes include DSLR use, black-and-white

civil rights lawyer translates to socially conscious pro-

with the city’s art scene while promoting Latin American

film photography, and portrait photography. A Shared

gramming. In (or for) perpetuity, THROUGH MAY 9, dis-

art in Charlotte and the Southeast region. Intimismos,

Elegy, THROUGH APRIL 10, displays the works of

plays mixed-media paintings, drawings, and sculptural

THROUGH APRIL 25, features paintings and collages

two pairs of photographers with family ties. Osamu

works by Carmen Neely and a video art installation by

by Barcelona-based artist Franco Fasoli and Berlin-based

James Nakagawa and his uncle, Takayuki Ogawa, and

Paul Travis Phillips. Jeong and Choon Yun, THROUGH

artist Octavio Garabello. Free admission. Tue-Fri, 11 a.m.-

Elijah Gowin and his father, Emmet Gowin, present

MAY 9, presents works by by this husband and wife

6 p.m., Sat, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. 1429 Bryant St. 704-837-1688,

“unique but overlapping visions” in recording family

from South Korea, who use ancient Asian papermaking

lacaprojects.com.

histories. The 12th Annuale: A Juried Portfolio Showcase,

LARK & KEY

tory’s annual photography competition. This year’s juror

Artists and married couple Sandy Snead and Duy Huynh,

is Julie Grahame, a photography consultant and curator

who opened their gallery in 2008, offer artwork, ceram-

who edits, writes, and publishes aCurator magazine. Free

ics, jewelry, and paper goods from local, regional, and

admission. Wed-Sat, noon-6 p.m. 1817 Central Ave. 704-

Owned by Katharine Hidell Thomas and Rebecca

national artists. Whether you’re searching for functional

333-9755, lightfactory.org.

Brooks, the South End gallery has highlighted local and

art or browsing for a painting, this Dilworth gallery is

regional artists for more than 20 years. Exhibits here

an ideal spot for the art lover. Joyful Being, APRIL 1–

rotate every six to eight weeks. The gallery represents

MAY 1, is Vicki Sawyer’s solo exhibition with featured

The biggest difference between the McColl Center and

notable names like Sarah Helser, Sally King Benedict,

ceramic artist Cathy Kiffney. Free admission. Wed-Fri,

other arts institutions is that it offers visitors the chance

Jacob Cooley, David Kroll, and more. Free admission.

10 a.m.-3 p.m. 700 East Blvd., Ste. 1. 704-334-4616,

to observe the artistic process. In the center’s nine stu-

Tue-Fri, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. 1910 South

larkandkey.com.

dios, visitors can watch artists develop and execute new

techniques to create contemporary pieces. Free admission. Tue-Fri, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sat, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. 1520 S. Tryon St. 704-370-6337, eldergalleryclt.com.

HIDELL BROOKS GALLERY

Blvd., Ste. 130. 704-334-7302, hidellbrooks.com.

HARVEY B. GANTT CENTER FOR AFRICANAMERICAN ARTS + CULTURE

LEVINE MUSEUM OF THE NEW SOUTH

APRIL 23–JULY 31, displays works from The Light Fac-

MCCOLL CENTER FOR ART + INNOVATION

ideas. Adorned, THROUGH MAY 2, shows the works of McColl alumnus Sharif Bey and Shanequa Gay. The exhi-

For more than two decades, the museum has hosted

bition, curated by visiting curator Jonell Logan, includes

groundbreaking exhibits and provided context for some

African-inspired masks, large-scale clay and glass neck-

Part of uptown’s Levine Center for the Arts campus, the

of the South’s most significant events. The museum’s

laces, and a site-specific installation. Free admission.

Gantt Center focuses on works by Africans and African-

guiding principle is “using history to build community.”

Thu, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri-Sat, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. 721 N. Tryon St.

Americans. The museum’s permanent exhibition, the

Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers, an award-winning exhibit

704-332-5535, mccollcenter.org.

John and Vivian Hewitt Collection of African-American

that spans 8,000 square feet, uses Charlotte and its 13

Art, showcases 58 works from 20 artists, including Ro-

surrounding counties as a case study to explore the

mare Bearden. Painting Is Its Own Country, THROUGH

“profound changes in the South since the Civil War.”

As the state’s first art museum, Mint Museum Randolph

APRIL 12, highlights the works of more than two dozen

#HomeCLT: People. Places. Promises. tells the stories of

opened in an original branch of the U.S. Mint in 1936.

artists who challenge traditional concepts of cultural

Charlotte’s neighborhoods through the words of its resi-

Galleries continue to engage visitors with the art of the

86

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

MINT MUSEUM RANDOLPH

THE GUIDE signature exhibit Glory Road receives a makeover with a new theme and 18 new cars. In January, the Hall unveiled the new version of the exhibit Dale Jr.: Glory Road Champions, with 18 championship cars selected

by Dale Earnhardt Jr. Haulin’: 25 Years of NASCAR Trucks, THROUGH JULY 13, looks at the “rich and rowdy history, heritage and heroes” of the NASCAR Truck Series, which began in 1994, and displays eight of the Series’ most iconic trucks. The 2nd Saturday program explores elements of racing with a new topic and interactive activity each month. This month, Experience Science Hands On (APRIL 11, free with regular admission, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) celebrates Science Month in North Carolina with a series of micro-science experiments that examine gravity and laws of motion. Free for members, $25 for adults, $22 for seniors, $18 for military and children 4-12, and free for kids 3 and under. Mon, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Wed-Sun, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays are open for group reservations only. 400 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. 704654-4400, nascarhall.com.

REED GOLD MINE

In 1799, the nation’s first documented gold find occurred at the site that became Reed Gold Mine. After the discovery in Cabarrus County, gold mining spread to nearby counties and eventually to other Southern states. Now, more than 220 years later, visitors can tour the mine and find a treasure themselves. Admission and tours of the mine are free. Gold panning is available

(Above) Kim Keever’s abstract photographs are on display at Jerald Melberg Gallery. (Left) Haitian-born artist Didier William’s work is part of the Painting Is Its Own Country exhibition at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture.

for $3 between April and October. Tue-Sat, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

9621 Reed Mine Rd., Midland, 704-721-4653, historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/reed-gold-mine.

SOCO GALLERY

Chandra Johnson, named one of the 2017 Charlotteans of the Year by Charlotte magazine for her work in the cultural sector, opened this gallery in a Myers Park

p.m.; Sun, 1 p.m.-5 p.m. 2730 Randolph Rd., 704-337-

bungalow in 2015. Liz Nielsen, Lyle Owerko, and Ken

2000, mintmuseum.org.

Van Sickle are a few of the accomplished artists whose

MINT MUSEUM UPTOWN

APRIL 24, displays paintings by New York artist Doug-

The Mint Uptown has a renowned craft and design

las Melini. Free admission. Mon-Sat, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. 421

exhibit that showcases works in a variety of materi-

Providence Rd. 980-498-2881, soco-gallery.com.

als, as well as collections of American, contemporary, and European art. Immersed in Light: Studio Drift at

KIM KEEVER; DIDIER WILLIAM

works appear at the gallery. Into the Woods, THROUGH

SOZO GALLERY

the Mint, THROUGH APRIL 26, displays five works

Located in the Hearst Tower uptown, Sozo is a con-

by Studio Drift, an artist collective founded by Dutch

temporary gallery that presents original artwork from

artists Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn. The exhibi-

local, national, and international artists. On its website,

tion includes glass and light installations and films

the gallery references multiple meanings of “sozo.”

created over the last 11 years. Free for members, $15

In Greek, the word means to “be healed by God,” and

ancient Americas, decorative arts, and European and

for adults, $10 for seniors and college students, $6

in Japanese, it means “to create, to imagine.” Wed, 10

African art. Resources include a reference library with

for children 5-17, and free for kids under 5. Tue, 11

a.m.-4 p.m.; Tue, Thu, Fri, Sat: by appointment only. 214

more than 18,000 volumes. Classic Black: The Basalt

a.m.-6 p.m.; Wed, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. (museum entry is

N. Tryon St. 704-575-6777, sozogallery.net.

Sculpture of Wedgwood and His Contemporaries,

free Wed, 5 p.m.-9 p.m.); Thu, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fri, 11

THROUGH AUG. 30, features black basalt sculp-

a.m.-9 p.m.; Sat, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sun, 1 p.m.-5 p.m. 500

tures, including life-size portrait busts, statues, and

S. Tryon St. 704-337-2000, mintmuseum.org.

vases, by Josiah Wedgwood and other Staffordshire potters in late 18th-century England. Free for mem-

NASCAR HALL OF FAME

bers, $15 for adults, $10 for seniors and college stu-

This uptown complex provides a variety of attractions

dents, $6 for children 5-17, and free for kids under

for racing fans, including hands-on exhibits, a state-

5. Tue, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Wed, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. (museum

of-the-art theater, and the Hall of Honor, where rac-

entry is free Wed, 5 p.m.-9 p.m.); Thu-Sat, 11 a.m.-6

ing greats are enshrined. Every three years, the Hall’s

Compiled by Charlotte magazine staff. These listings are a reader service and are not connected to advertising in any way. Events, dates, and times are subject to change. Please call ahead. To have your event considered, email us at agenda@ charlottemagazine.com.

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

87

THE GUIDE

Restaurants YOUR GUIDE TO CHARLOTTE’S DINING SCENE KID CASHEW

Dilworth ❤ 300 EAST

$-$$

NEW AMERICAN The interior of this old house-turnedrestaurant is welcoming, as is the menu of familiar and surprising sandwiches, salads, and entrées. Save room for dessert by pastry chef Laney Jahkel-Parrish. 300 East Blvd. (704-332-6507) BR (Sun), L, D, BAR ✸☎

❤ BONTERRA

$$$$

NEW SOUTHERN Its setting may be a historic Southern church, but Bonterra serves up modern Southern flavors with top-notch service. Wine lovers will be impressed by the more than 200 wines by the glass. 1829 Cleveland Ave. (704-333-9463) D, BAR ✸☎

CAPISHE

$-$$

ITALIAN The pasta dishes and pizza prepared by Chef David Cavalier, previously of Kindred, are impressive for a fast-casual restaurant. Arrive early for lunch to beat the long lines. 500 E. Morehead St., Ste. 100. (980-8199494) L, D, BAR

❤ COPPER

$$$

INDIAN Ease into Indian cuisine with standard dishes like chicken tikka masala, or be more adventurous with the spicy seafood medley "anjeeri." 311 East Blvd. (704333-0063) L, D, V, BAR ✸☎

DOLCE OSTERIA

$$

ITALIAN This classic, cozy, family-run neighborhood trattoria serves a mix of fresh, regional Italian cuisine and a tidy, all-Italian wine list. 1710 Kenilworth Ave. (704-332-7525) L (weekdays), D, B/W ✸☎

FERN, FLAVORS FROM THE GARDEN

$$

VEGETARIAN Fern moved from Plaza Midwood to Dilworth in mid-2016. It still has ferns on the wall, and the menu is still full of flavorful vegetarian cuisine. 1419 East Blvd., Ste. A. (704-377-1825) L, BR, D, V, BAR ✸

FIAMMA RESTAURANT

$$-$$$

ITALIAN The open layout lends an air of conviviality to this slick eatery, which has house-made pastas, thincrust pizzas, note-perfect risotto, and daring meat entrées. 2418 Park Rd. (704-333-3062) L, D, BAR ✸☎

FRAN’S FILLING STATION

$$-$$$

PIZZA Two words: pistachio pizza. Seriously, try it. Then grab a spot on the patio beneath the bistro lights and enjoy a bottle of wine with friends. There's a second location in Providence Commons, too. 2230 Park Rd., (704-900-0929) L, D, BAR ✸

88

LEBOWSKI’S NEIGHBORHOOD GRILL

$$

AMERICAN Dishes at this neighborhood favorite include burgers, brats, and the popular “Beef on Weck.”

1524 East Blvd. (704-370-1177) L, D, BAR ✸

THE MAYOBIRD

$$

$$$

CAJUN Nightly live jazz complements New Orleans creole favorites like shrimp étouffée and crawfish Diane in this century-old house. 1800 E. 7th St. (704-377-9017) BR, D, BAR ✸☎

$$$-$$$$

NEW AMERICAN A beautiful interior and a no-fuss vibe create a stress-free fine dining experience, with dishes ranging from buttermilk-fried chicken over spinach with black pepper shallot gravy to local seafood specials.

1535 Elizabeth Ave. (704-377-7976) D, BAR ☎

❤ CUSTOMSHOP

$$$$

PIZZA Among a sea of by-the-slice joints, owner Daniel Siragusa sticks by his Italian roots with personal pizzas.

Some think they can’t possibly eat the whole pie, but they do. And then they order dessert. 1055 Metropolitan Ave., Ste. 130. (704-370-0777) L, D, BAR ✸☎

Elizabeth/Cherry

❤ CARPE DIEM

❤ THE FIG TREE RESTAURANT

$$-$$$

FUSION Here, fusion means a sampling of dishes from the Far East and Spain. 1716 Kenilworth Ave. (704-3589688) L (weekdays), D, BAR ✸☎

CAJUN QUEEN

$

NEW AMERICAN The No. 2 restaurant on our 2018 Best Restaurants list, the Fig Tree specializes in fresh and flavorful cuisine with an emphasis on wine pairing in a 1913 bungalow. 1601 E. 7th St. (704-332-3322) D, BAR ✸☎

NEW SOUTHERN Southern classics take on a new form—and global influence—at this easygoing spot.

1531 East Blvd. (980-237-2227) D, BAR ✸☎

ZEN FUSION

EARL’S GROCERY

AMERICAN This upscale marketplace, with sandwiches, salads, and daily specials from chef Obie Chisolm, is a welcome afternoon spot for a grab-and-go meal or a bite and people-watching. 1609 Elizabeth Ave. (704333-2757) B, BR, L, D, V ✸

$

AMERICAN The daytime partner to The Summit Room focuses on specialty coffees, quiches, and pastries, and, of course, chicken salad sandwiches. 1531 East Blvd.

(980-237-2543) B, L, B/W ✸

THE SUMMIT ROOM

takes on American cuisine in a hip, rustic atmosphere.

1601 Elizabeth Ave. (704-333-3396) D, BAR ✸☎

$$-$$$

NEW AMERICAN Owner and executive chef Trey Wilson uses top-notch, seasonal ingredients to create fresh

❤ PIZZERIA OMAGGIO

$$

❤ THE STANLEY

$$$

SUNFLOUR BAKING CO.

$-$$

NEW SOUTHERN Chef Paul Verica's menu reflects a respect of seasonal produce, with playful dishes such as "Asparagus—as many ways as we could think of," and a more robust cocktail program. 1961 E. 7th St. (980-2992741) D, BR (Sun), BAR ✸☎

BAKERY With locations in Dilworth, Harrisburg, and Ballantyne, Sunflour serves croissants, cinnamon buns, sandwiches, and soups. Regulars spend mornings here with a cup of coffee, letting them fade into afternoons.

2001 E. 7th St. (704-900-5268) B, L, D, V ✸

Huntersville/Lake Norman ALIÑO PIZZERIA

$$

PIZZA Enjoy your Neapolitan-style, wood-fired pizza at a community table with paper towels on hand to catch the drips from crust dipped in herbs and olive oil. A second location is at Concord Mills. 500 S. Main St., Ste. 401, Mooresville. (704-663-0010) L, D, B/W ✸

$$-$$$

AMERICAN This small Dilworth restaurant has soups, salads, and delicious, oversized sandwiches made with fresh, thick bread filled with innovative combinations.

2410 Park Rd. (704-372-2009) L, D, BAR ✸

INIZIO PIZZA NAPOLETANA

$$

MEDITERRANEAN This bright and rustic restaurant from the owner of Georges Brasserie serves meat family-style from a wood-fired grill and a selection of small plates. 1608 East Blvd. (704-208-4148) L, D, BAR ✸

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

$ $$ $$$ $$$$

❤

Most entrées under $10 Most entrées $10-$17 Most entrées $18-$25 Most entrées $26 & up Best Restaurants

B BR L D V

Breakfast Weekend brunch Lunch Dinner Vegetarian friendly

B/W Beer and wine only BAR Full-service bar ✸ Patio seating available Reservations suggested

☎

REVIEW POLICIES—The restaurants on these pages are recommendations of the editors of Charlotte magazine.

They are not related to advertising in any way. Restaurant visits are anonymous, and all expenses are paid by the magazine. Reviews are written by members of the editorial staff. We regularly update these listings. New additions are denoted by “new listing” and revised reviews are indicated by “update.”

❤ DRESSLER’S

$$$

NEW AMERICAN Part steak house, part upscale American cuisine, dishes are delivered with consistency and a smile, both here and at the Metropolitan Avenue location. 8630-1A Lindholm Dr. (704-987-1779) D, BAR

✸☎

FLATIRON KITCHEN + TAPHOUSE

$$$

STEAK HOUSE High-quality steaks are a given here, but the seafood and vegetables are treated with the same respect. 215 S. Main St., Davidson. (704-237-3246) BR, L, D, BAR ✸☎

❤ HELLO, SAILOR

$$-$$$

NEW SOUTHERN Davidson's sweethearts, Joe and Katy Kindred, opened this lakefront spot. Expect Carolina classics like fried catfish and seafood platters, as well as tiki drinks. 20210 Henderson Rd., Cornelius. (704997-5365) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

❤ KINDRED

$$-$$$

NEW AMERICAN Chef Joe Kindred, a James Beard Award semifinalist, serves homemade pasta dishes and creative small plates in historic downtown Davidson. 131 N. Main St., Davidson. (980-231-5000) BR, L, D, BAR ✸☎

SABI ASIAN BISTRO

$$

ASIAN Find Asian-inspired dishes, from sushi to stir fry to sweet-and-sour chicken, in a sleek interior. 130 Harbor Place Dr., Davidson. (704-895-5707) L, D, BAR ✸

Matthews/Mint Hill KABAB-JE ROTISSERIE & GRILLE

$$

MIDDLE EASTERN With a second location in Stonecrest, this Mediterranean and Lebanese spot serves dishes like hummus shawarma and lamb kabobs.

2233 Matthews Township Pkwy., Ste. E. (704-8450707) L, D ✸

LOYALIST MARKET

$-$$

AMERICAN This charming eatery is a sandwich shop by day and a cheese shop by night. Choose from over 60 artisan cheeses and cured meats from the U.S. and

abroad, along with gourmet food products, wine, and local beer. 435 N. Trade St., Ste. 102. (704-814-9866) L, D, BAR ✸

NEW ZEALAND CAFÉ

$-$$

with stylish twists in a spot fit for couples, families, and everyone else. 601 S. Kings Dr. (704-343-0148) L, D, BAR ✸☎

PROVIDENCE ROAD SUNDRIES

$-$$

❤ STAGIONI

$$$

VOLO RISTORANTE

$$$

FUSION A wooden latticework ceiling and indoor trellis add charm to this neighborhood favorite, where sushi is fresh and affordable. 1717 Sardis Rd. N., Ste. 6A. (704708-9888) L, D, B/W ✸

AMERICAN Classic bar food and friendly service have made this a neighborhood hangout for generations.

1522 Providence Rd. (704-366-4467) L, D, BAR

SANTÉ

ITALIAN Meaning “seasons,” this concept from Bruce Moffett serves Italian standards. A must-visit for Chef Eric Ferguson's delicious, handmade pastas, wood-fired pizzas, and slow-roasted meats. 715 Providence Rd. (704-372-8110) D, BAR ☎

$$$ - $$$$

FRENCH The food is far from colloquial here, and the exposed brickwork and antiqued tin roof lend credence to the French name. 165 N. Trade St., Matthews. (704845-1899) D, BAR

❤ YUME BISTRO

$$

JAPANESE The flavorful ramen and other Japanese classics here defy the restaurant’s plain interior. They also opened a new location in Wilmore last year. 1369 Chestnut Ln., Matthews. (704-821-0676) L, D

Myers Park/Cotswold DEEJAI THAI

$$

THAI This family-owned eatery offers takeout, but with its modern dining room and bright patio, you’ll want to settle into a table. 613 Providence Rd. (704-333-7884) L, (weekdays), D, BAR ✸

FENWICK’S

$$

AMERICAN A Myers Park mainstay since the 1980s, Fenwick’s is a go-to for a comforting meal made with fresh ingredients, delivered with warm service. 511 Providence Rd. (704-333-2750) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

LEROY FOX

$$

SOUTHERN A casual eatery known for its fried chicken, Leroy Fox serves Southern classics and upscale pub grub, with an additional location in South End. 705 S. Sharon Amity Rd. (704-366-3232) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

MAMA RICOTTA’S

$$

ITALIAN Frank Scibelli’s (Midwood Smokehouse, Yafo, Paco’s) first restaurant does simple Italian dishes

ITALIAN Volo translates to "flight," which is the Italian answer to a tasting menu. Let the chef choose a meat, vegetable, or seafood flight for you, or order off the dinner menu and enjoy a plate of gnocchi, risotto, or tortellini paired with a glass of chianti. 1039 Providence Rd. (704-919-1020) D, BAR ☎

NoDa/North Charlotte AMÉLIE’S FRENCH BAKERY

$

FRENCH Enjoy a flaky croissant on the outdoor patio or order from the café menu of soups and sandwiches any time of day—or night. Amélie's now has two additional locations in uptown and Park Road Shopping Center.

2424 N. Davidson St. (704-376-1781) B, L, D

BAO + BROTH

$-$$

ASIAN Follow the smell of ramen and steamed pork belly buns to this food stall, the fifth restaurant from chef Bruce Moffett, and have a seat among the other diners in Optimist Hall. 1115 N. Brevard St. (704-6252269) L, D

BENNY PENNELLO’S

$

PIZZA A full Benny P’s pie is 28 inches, almost double the standard—but if you divide it into eight slices, one is the ideal-sized meal for one person. 2909 N. Davidson St., Ste. 100. (980-949-8398) L, D, B/W

Best Bites Our favorite dish this month, chosen by Charlotte magazine staff

ALYSSA RUANE

BOOM BOOM CHICK’N, $10.49 CRAFTY BURG’R N’ TAP BECAUSE OF ITS BEEFY MONIKER, Crafty Burg’r surprises diners with its flaky and tender fried chicken. A classic, creative neighborhood joint—all three locations are in or near Lake Norman communities—Crafty’s Huntersville and Cornelius spots have seen my face no fewer than 40 times over the past three years.

Next to my petite stature, proportionally, this sandwich is an Everest.

With the help of a skewer, housemade buns hug two (two!) freshly fried chicken breasts, skinny onion rings, tomato, onion, and, of course, bacon. This beast of a sandwich is worth every bit of mess when the signature Boom Boom sauce hits your lips. The added bonus? You get two sides with your sandwich—a refreshingly rebellious detail in a city that’s having its tapas moment. Get the (spiral!) mac ’n’ cheese and the bread pudding—because when else can you order dessert as a side dish? —Alyssa Ruane

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

89

THE GUIDE CABO FISH TACO

$-$$

CRÊPE CELLAR KITCHEN & PUB

$-$$

SEAFOOD This NoDa “Baja seagrill” serves up the title dish as well as quesadillas, burritos, and salads in a fun, surf-themed atmosphere. 3201 N. Davidson St. (704332-8868) L, D, BAR ✸

FRENCH The crêpes—both sweet and savory—are delicious, but the restaurant’s fare goes beyond its French roots with flavorful salads, entrées, and craft cocktails.

3116 N. Davidson St. (704-910-6543) BR, L, D, BAR

THE DUMPLING LADY

$-$$

ASIAN One of Charlotte’s most popular food trucks has a brick-and-mortar space in Optimist Hall. Order Zhang Qian’s authentic Sichuan dumplings, noodles, and dim sum, and brace for spice. 1115 N. Brevard St. (980-5956174) L, D, V

EL THRIFTY

$-$$

MEXICAN The Mexican cantina and gaming venue in Optimist Hall serves creative tacos and cocktails with a side of duckpin bowling. 1115 N. Brevard St. (980-9497837) L, D, BAR ✸ NEW LISTING

THE GOODYEAR HOUSE

$$-$$$

NEW AMERICAN Grab a table in the botanist room or the open patio on a warm night, and enjoy elevated comfort food like smoked cashew mac and cheese and guinea hen stew. 3032 N. Davidson St. (704-910-0132) L, D, BAR ✸

❤ HABERDISH

$$-$$$

AMERICAN Southern appetizers, fried chicken, and apothecary cocktails from Colleen Hughes draw a hip crowd to this mill town southern kitchen. 3106 N. Davidson St. (704-817-1084) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

HEIST BREWERY

$-$$

AMERICAN This is bar food to the extreme. Beer is incorporated into several dishes at this brewpub. The beer cheese is made with Heist’s own beer and served alongside pretzels made with leftover mash. 2909 N. Davidson St., Ste. 200. (704-375-8260) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

JACKBEAGLE’S

$

AMERICAN A mainstay for the locals, this place serves unconventional bar bites like mac-and-blue-cheese with bacon. 3213 N. Davidson St. (704-334-5140) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

$ Most entrées under $10 $$ Most entrées $10-$17 $$$ Most entrées $18-$25 $$$$ Most entrées $26 & up

❤ B BR L D V

90

Best Restaurants Breakfast Weekend brunch Lunch Dinner Vegetarian friendly

B/W Beer and wine only BAR Full-service bar ✸ Patio seating available Reservations suggested

☎

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

PAPI QUESO

$-$$

ROOM AND BOARD

$-$$

AMERICAN Expect all the staples from the popular food truck, along with new grilled cheeses, mac and cheese, and melts from the brick-and-mortar location in Optimist Hall. 1115 N. Brevard St. (704-579-1779) L, D, V

AMERICAN Inside a two-story Victorian home and former boarding house, have your choice of sandwiches, burgers, and wings, or come for Sunday brunch and get a "hangover pizza." 3228 N. Davidson St. (980-4303136) BR (Sun) L, D, BAR

Plaza Midwood/East Charlotte ACE NO. 3

$$

MOO & BREW

$$

❤ NC RED

$$

SAL'S PIZZA FACTORY

$$

❤ SOUL GASTROLOUNGE

$$

SNOOZE: AN A.M. EATERY

$$

THREE AMIGOS

$$

$-$$

SEAFOOD/SOUTHERN The fourth restaurant from Bruce Moffett serves a mix of Rhode Island shore food, like oysters and stuffed clams, and southern comforts, like fried chicken and mac and cheese. 1205 Thomas Ave. (704-321-4716) D, BAR ✸

$-$$

AMERICAN Rotisserie chicken with South Americaninspired sides makes for a healthy and fast lunch or dinner. 1518 Central Ave. (980-265-1290) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

COMMON MARKET

❤ MIDWOOD SMOKEHOUSE

BARBECUE With North Carolina pulled pork, beef brisket, smoked chicken, and dry or sauced ribs, there’s a ’cue for everyone—and traditional sides to pair. The restaurant has a number of Charlotte locations including Ballantyne and Park Road Shopping Center, but the Plaza Midwood spot is its flagship post. 1401 Central Ave. (704-295-4227) L, D, BAR ✸

AMERICAN A playful list of burgers, craft beers, and friendly servers make this spot an easy choice for a casual dinner out. The patio is packed on nice nights. 1300 Central Ave. (980-585-4148) L, D, BAR ✸

VIETNAMESE Even if you think cilantro tastes like soap, don't let the name of this fast casual restaurant fool you—the herb add-on is optional. Structured like Chipotle, build-your-own meals include a base starch (banh mi, vermicelli noodles, white rice, fried rice), one protein, and five toppings. 2001 Commonwealth Ave. (704-345-9490) L, D, V, B/W ✸

COALTRANE’S

$

$

AMERICAN The new counter-service burger joint from the team behind Sea Level and the Waterman offers a straightforward menu of burgers, fries, and shakes.

1001 Belmont Ave. (704-910-2200) L, D, ✸

CILANTRO NOODLE

LUPIE'S CAFE

AMERICAN The building, interior, and menu have barely changed since owner Lupie Duran opened in 1987.

It’s an ideal spot for cold days, specializing in handmade burgers, four kinds of chili, meatloaf, and "chicken n dumplins." 2718 Monroe Rd., (704-374-1232) L, D, B/W

PIZZA The New York slices at this east Charlotte joint have thick cheese and generous toppings—the classic style of pizza that fuels nostalgia and harkens back to a time when you didn’t know what calories or gluten were. 3723 Monroe Rd. (980-219-7108) L, D, BAR

$

NEW AMERICAN Expect to wait a while at this no-reservations spot, known for small plates like pork belly tacos with compressed watermelon, and a rotating list of craft cocktails. 1500-B Central Ave. (704-348-1848) D, BAR ✸

DIAMOND RESTAURANT

$-$$

DISH

$-$$

AMERICAN The Denver-based breakfast spot has a huge menu, but you're free to mix and match. Choose any two benedicts with the Benny Duo, or get the Pancake Flight with three different flavors. There's also a morning cocktail menu with mimosas, mojitos, and a dirty drunken chai. 1331-A Central Ave. (704-243-5070) B, BR, L, BAR ✸

DELI A neighborhood hangout with additional locations in South End and Oakwold, this market and deli serves quick and delicious sandwiches, local craft beers, snacks, sweets, and more. 2007 Commonwealth Ave. (704-334-6209) B, L, D, B/W ✸

AMERICAN This 1950s-style diner features retro teal booths, a jukebox, and classic dishes like burgers, fried pork chops, and fried chicken. 1901 Commonwealth Ave. (704-375-8959) L, D, BAR ✸

SOUTHERN A neighborhood joint with an eclectic clientele, good, down-home Southern food, and a funky wait staff. 1220 Thomas Ave. (704-344-0343) B, L, D, BAR ✸

❤ INTERMEZZO PIZZERIA & CAFÉ

$-$$

FUSION Even the pickiest eater can find something to order here, with menu options ranging from burgers and pizzas to cabbage rolls and stuffed peppers. 1427 E. 10th St. (704-347-2626) L, D, V, BAR ✸

LANG VAN

$

VIETNAMESE Regulars love this no-fuss spot for its authentic cuisine, with loads of flavor and fresh ingredients. 3019 Shamrock Dr. (704-531-9525) BR, L, D, V, B/W

MEXICAN Three Amigos remains a constant on Central Avenue, specializing in enchiladas and other Mexican staples like tinga de pollo and carne asada tacos. It's always fresh, too—they'll never save rice, beans, or meat for use the next day. 2917A Central Ave., 704-536-1851.

L, D, BAR ✸

THE WORKMAN’S FRIEND

$$-$$$

IRISH Enjoy Irish classics like fish and chips and shepherd’s pie in this rustic dining room, or grab a pint at the custom-built walnut bar. 1531 Central Ave. (980-2248234) BR, L (Fri-Sun), D, BAR ✸

YAMA IZAKAYA

$$

JAPANESE Enjoy true, labor-intensive ramen, complete with add-ons like corn and pork belly, as well as tradi-

tional Japanese small plates and a sushi menu. 1324 Central Ave. (704-910-6387) D, V, BAR ✸

ZADA JANE’S CORNER CAFE

The Queen and Glass was included in our Best New Restaurants in 2019.

$-$$

SOUTHERN This funky neighborhood restaurant with shuffleboard courts, a large patio, and colorful walls serves breakfast and brunch all day. 1601 Central Ave. (704-332-3663) B, BR, L, BAR ✸

South End BARCELONA WINE BAR

$$$

NEW AMERICAN Nosh on Spanish and Mediterraneaninspired tapas or customize a charcuterie board with meats from different regions in Europe. Choose from more than 400 wines, and don't miss the olive oil cake.

101 W. Worthington Ave., Ste. 110. (704-741-0300) D, BAR ✸☎

❤ BARDO

$$$

NEW AMERICAN This foodie destination serves seasonal small plates and creative cocktails. The dining room looks into a big, open kitchen where diners can watch the chefs at work. 1508 S. Mint St., Ste. B. (980585-2433) D, BAR ☎

❤ BEEF ’N BOTTLE

$$$

STEAK HOUSE An old favorite, this steak house is just what you’d expect, serving up thick and juicy cuts in a dark interior. 4538 South Blvd. (704-523-9977) D, BAR

BILL SPOON’S BARBECUE

$

BARBECUE Stop by for true eastern-style barbecue, mustard-based slaw, homemade banana pudding, and Mr. Spoon’s special sauce. 5524 South Blvd. (704-5258865) L (Mon-Sat)

BREWERS AT 4001 YANCEY

$$

AMERICAN In addition to craft beers, this LoSo brewery has Southern-inspired bar food like fries topped with jalapeño gravy and bacon crumbles. 4001-A Yancey Rd. (704-452-4001) BR (Sun), L, D, BAR ✸☎

THE DUNAVANT

$$$

STEAK HOUSE The signature steak and bottomless fries dinner, which includes bread, a choice of soup or salad, and the option of three sauces, tastes more expensive than its $25 fixed price. 2322 Dunavant St., Ste. 200. (980-335-0125) BR, D, BAR ✸

EIGHT + SAND KITCHEN

$

AMERICAN Come here for breakfast, brunch, lunch, an afternoon snack, or an evening out. The made-fromscratch bakery has sandwiches, salads, and artisan breads, and the café serves drinks all day. 135 New Bern St. B, BR, L, B/W

❤ FUTO BUTA

$$

JAPANESE This ramen house promises authenticity, irreverence, and delightful, salty bowls of the hot noodle soup. 222 E. Bland St. (704-376-8400) L, D, B/W ✸

PETER TAYLOR

INDACO

$$-$$$

ITALIAN Atherton Mill's rustic Italian restaurant serves wood-fired pizzas and hand-crafted pastas, proving certain dishes are classics for a reason. 2046 South Blvd.

(704-741-9004) L, D, BAR

Night Life Our city, which once banned cocktail sales, offers plenty of opportunities to imbibe. Try one of these after-dark spots THE QUEEN & GLASS

$$-$$$

COCKTAIL BAR / LOUNGE This intimate Dilworth lounge has creative cocktails and a small plates menu of shareable spreads, salads, and flatbreads.

1315 East Blvd., Ste. 115 (980-299-0816)

THE CRUNKLETON

$-$$

$$

$$-$$$

WINE BAR On a warm summer night, there’s no better place to savor a glass of chardonnay. Grab a table on the patio under the trees and relish the little white lights when the sun goes down. 300 E. Tremont Ave. (704-595-3337)

WINE BAR / RETAIL At this wine bar, restaurant, and retail shop, it’s drinks first, food second. Shop the shelves for a bottle of wine, and savor it over a small plate of meatballs or bruschetta. 100 N. Tryon St. (980-299-0039)

SOPHIA'S LOUNGE

FOXCROFT WINE CO.

WINE BAR The wine bar, restaurant, and retail hybrid has a relaxed atmosphere, wines from every region of the world, and deliciously simple food.

Dilworth is Foxcroft's flagship post, with additional locations in SouthPark and Waverly. 1235 East Blvd., Ste. 1. (704-602-2133)

COCKTAIL BAR You can't go wrong with a classic Manhattan, but if you’re feeling adventurous, Idlewild's bartenders will create a cocktail based on your drink preferences. 424 E. 36th St., Ste. 2. (704572-8678)

CICCHETTI

$$

$$$

COCKTAIL BAR The region's best bartenders applied to work at Gary Crunkleton's Elizabeth bar and restaurant. Known for his impeccable classic cocktails, the mixologist and restaurateur opened the first Crunkleton in Chapel Hill. 1957 E. 7th St. (704919-0104)

IDLEWILD

MERCHANT + TRADE

BAR / LOUNGE This 19th floor rooftop lounge overlooking Romare Bearden Park is a great place to visit before dinner, or to cap off the night. Just remember to dress to impress, because access to sweeping views of the city requires some style. 303 S. Church St. (704-445-2550)

$$$

COCKTAIL BAR If the ornate armchairs or the velvet sofas on which you could pose like a French girl don’t make you feel like royalty, the customdesigned chandeliers and regal artwork should do it. The cocktails here, rightfully, are fit for a queen.

127 N. Tryon St., Ste. D. (704) 503-9322)

NUVOLE ROOFTOP TWENTY-TWO $$-$$$

BAR / LOUNGE Sip a cocktail and take in sweeping views of uptown from this sleek rooftop lounge on the 22nd floor of the AC Hotel & Residence Inn. Bring a few friends and order shareable plates like lobster club sliders and the bison tartare. 220 E. Trade St., Ste. 2200. (980-960-9800)

DILWORTH TASTING ROOM

PETITE PHILIPPE

$$

$-$$

WINE BAR / RETAIL Wine bottles are on display in cabinets resembling bookcases, and chocolates are clustered under glass on a marble slab at this Myers Park tasting room. Milling around, asking questions, and sampling are encouraged. 2820 Selwyn Ave., Ste. 160. (704-332-9910)

LINCOLN STREET KITCHEN & COCKTAILS

$$

COCKTAIL BAR Grab a spot in the main dining room, step outside to the ground floor patio, or head upstairs to the rooftop patio and take in views of uptown as you sip on a signature cocktail—they're all $13 here. 1320 S. Church St., Ste. 400. (704-595-3337)

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

91

THE GUIDE LET'S MEAT KBBQ

$$$$

KOREAN BBQ Marinated meats at this all-you-caneat hangout come with Korean sides like steamed egg soufflé. 1400 S. Church St., Ste. B. (980-299-4389) L, D, (Mon-Fri) BAR

LUNA’S LIVING KITCHEN

$$

PRICE’S CHICKEN COOP

$

SOUTHERN Expect to eat your meal standing up—or sitting in your car—but rest assured it's the best damn fried chicken in the country. 1614 Camden Rd. (704333-9866) L, D (until 6 p.m.), Cash only. No seating.

RAI LAY THAI CUISINE

$$

VEGETARIAN This vegan gem is known for its raw version of lasagna, made with zucchini noodles, sundried tomato sauce, mushrooms, and a cashew-basil cheese.

Its juice bar is also a popular draw. 2000 South Blvd., Ste. 300. (704-333-0008) B, L, D, B/W, V ✸

THAI Upscale Thai food in a sleek interior with attentive service makes this a fitting spot for South End. 1520 South Blvd., Ste. 130. (980-207-0991) L (Mon-Sat), D, BAR ☎

MAC’S SPEED SHOP

FUSION This hip spot fuses traditional American barbecue with Korean flavors all the way to the sides, which include ramen mac-and-cheese. 1400 S. Church St., Ste. A. (980-299-5143) L (weekends), D, BAR ✸

$ -$$

BARBECUE Solid barbecue and cold beer (150 choices) in a bike-themed space draw fun-loving crowds, with additional locations in Matthews and Lake Norman.

2511 South Blvd. (704-522-6227) L, D, BAR ✸

MIDNIGHT DINER

$

AMERICAN This 24-hour classic diner has everything you’d expect, including an all-day breakfast, onion rings, milkshakes, burgers, and hand-cut fries, along with Southern fare. 115 E. Carson Blvd. (980-207-3641) B, L, D, B/W ✸

MOCCO BISTRO

$

GREEK Despite the sounds of South Boulevard, the Greek pastries and coffees here can transport you to the Aegean Sea in just one taste. 4004 South Blvd., Ste. E. (980-207-0508) B, L, D, B/W ✸

NIKKO

SUPERICA

$$-$$$

THE WATERMAN FISH BAR

$$-$$$

❤ ZEPPELIN

$$-$$$

TEX-MEX Atlanta chef Ford Fry brings the newest location of his Tex-Mex concept, with tacos, fajitas, and enchiladas, to the Design Center. 101 W. Worthington Ave., Ste. 100 (980-321-9914) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

$$-$$$

NEW SOUTHERN A seasonal menu includes small plates like Korean-inspired calamari and barbecueroasted octopus. The cocktail program focuses on innovative interpretations of classic drinks. 235 W. Tremont Ave. (980-209-0008) BR (Sun), D (Tues-Sat), BAR ✸

$$-$$$

SUSHI This second location of the Charleston-based Indigo Road restaurant group’s Japanese spot has great service, a beautiful interior, and dishes full of flavor.

2000 South Blvd., Ste. 510. (704-594-1922) D, BAR ☎

South Charlotte BIG VIEW DINER

$ Most entrées under $10 $$ Most entrées $10-$17 $$$ Most entrées $18-$25 $$$$ Most entrées $26 & up

❤

L D V

92

Best Restaurants Breakfast Weekend brunch Lunch Dinner Vegetarian friendly

B/W Beer and wine only BAR Full-service bar ✸ Patio seating available Reservations suggested

☎

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

GALLERY RESTAURANT

$$$-$$$$

THE PORTER’S HOUSE

$$$-$$$$

NEW AMERICAN Inside the Ballantyne hotel, you’ll find Southern-inspired, white-tablecloth dining with dishes sourced from local farmers. 10000 Ballantyne Commons Pkwy. (704-248-4100) B, BR, L, D, BAR

STEAK HOUSE The newest member of the Rare Roots Hospitality Group (Dressler’s, Dogwood) is known for thick-cut steaks, modern sides, and craft cocktails. 7417 Waverly Walk Ave. (704-930-7878) D, BAR ✸☎

RED ROCKS CAFÉ

$$-$$$

SPICE ASIAN KITCHEN

$$-$$$

AMERICAN Consistently good pasta, seafood, and steak make this restaurant a mainstay in the Strawberry Hill shopping center. Additional locations are in Indian Land and Birkdale Village. 4223 Providence Rd., Ste. 8 (704-364-0402) BR (Sun), L, D, V, BAR ✸

ASIAN The dumplings and Pad Thai are consistently good, but the bibimap, bossam, and curry dishes are great for adventurous palates. During patio season, enjoy a cocktail or dessert at the rooftop terrace bar. 251 Textile Way, Fort Mill. (803-548-6868) L, D, V, BAR ✸

WALDHORN

$$

GERMAN Family-friendly Waldhorn offers authentic German dishes in a Bavarian setting. 12101 Lancaster Hwy., Pineville. (704-540-7047) BR (Sun), L, D, BAR ✸

SouthPark/Park Road ❤ BAR MARCEL

$$-$$$

BAKU

$$-$$$

$$-$$$

JAPANESE Black and red decor, delicious sushi, techno beats, and a large pair of geisha eyes staring out at the crowd make for a dramatic setting in this shared plates restaurant. 4515 Sharon Rd. (704-817-7173) D, BAR ☎

ITALIAN This eatery in StoneCrest at Piper Glen has Italian-American dishes like snapper picatta, penne alla Civetta, and scallops risotto. Save room for a lasagnasized slice of tiramisu for dessert. 7828-E Rea Rd. (980335-2758) BR (Sun), L, D, V, BAR ✸

$$-$$$

INDIAN The sister restaurant of Copper has contemporary decor and a sharply dressed wait staff delivering Indian dishes to each table. 14815 Ballantyne Village Way., Ste. 170. (704-369-5777) L, D, V, BAR ✸

THE FLIPSIDE CAFÉ

$$-$$$

$$

AMERICAN This spot serves up hearty portions of diner staples, such as meatloaf and fresh-roasted turkey clubs, all made in-house. 16637 Lancaster Hwy. (704544-0313) B, L, D, BAR ✸

THE BLUE TAJ

FLIPSIDE RESTAURANT

NEW SOUTHERN This sister restaurant of Flipside Café has a more formal and spacious dining room, which fits with its elevated menu. 129 Caldwell St., Rock Hill. (803324-3547) BR, L, D, V, BAR ☎

FUSION The menu features shareable plates of beef carpaccio or truffle and herb frittes—but order a flatbread pizza for yourself. 3920 Sharon Road, Ste. 160.

(980-237-1919) L, D, BAR ✸☎

(Arboretum, Ballantyne, Pineville, Fort Mill)

CIVETTA ITALIAN KITCHEN + BAR

B BR

$-$$

BAJA The breezy vibes and bright flavors at this taco joint call for a Pacifico or a margarita. 2433 South Blvd.

(704-912-1889) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

$$-$$$

ITALIAN Head to the ground floor of the RailYard for a dressed-up entree like squid ink mafaldine, or get the basic spaghetti and meatballs, which is good every time. 1414 S Tryon St., Ste. 140 (980-279-8900) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

O-KU

SOUTHBOUND

$$

SEAFOOD This oyster bar has all the staples: lobster rolls, clam chowder, and oysters four ways. At sunset, head to the rooftop terrace for a cocktail and views of uptown. 2729 South Blvd., Ste. D. (704-275-5558) L, D, BAR ✸

JAPANESE Artistic sushi, a moody interior, and thumping sound system bring in dinner and late-night crowds, but quick service makes it a great lunch spot. 325 Arlington Ave., Ste. 108. (704-370-0100) L (weekdays), D, BAR ✸☎

NORTH ITALIA

SEOUL FOOD MEAT CO.

taurant makes you feel right at home, but the food lets you know it ain’t your mama in the kitchen. 3150 Hwy. 21 N., Fort Mill. (803-802-1711) B, BR, L, D, B/W, ☎

$$-$$

NEW SOUTHERN Chefs Jon and Amy Fortes’ first res-

❤ BARRINGTON’S

$$$-$$$$

NEW AMERICAN Bruce Moffett’s first restaurant is one of the best in town, with a classic menu and stellar service. 7822 Fairview Rd. (704-364-5755) D (MonSat), BAR ☎

CAFÉ MONTE

$$-$$$

FRENCH Monte Smith has done a bang-up job re-creating a classic French restaurant, and diners react enthusiastically at brunch, lunch, and dinner. 6700 Fairview Rd. (704-552-1116) B, L, D, BAR ✸☎

CANTINA 1511

$$

❤ CORKBUZZ

$$-$$$

MEXICAN This easy, casual spot draws crowds for its fresh takes on Mexican cuisine and fine margarita list.

4271 Park Rd. (704-331-9222) L, D, V, BAR ✸☎

NEW AMERICAN This place focuses on food that pairs well with wine—all 200-plus by the bottle and nearly 40 by the glass. 4905 Ashley Park Ln., Ste. J. (704-6251328) BR, L (weekdays), D, BAR ✸☎

❤ DOGWOOD SOUTHERN TABLE + BAR

$$$

NEW SOUTHERN Ingredients are fresh and cocktails are innovative at this spot, a sister to Dressler’s. 4905 Ashley Park Ln., Ste. D. (704-910-4919) BR (Sun), L, D, BAR ☎

❤ DOT DOT DOT

$$$

NEW AMERICAN Stefan Huebner's creative cocktails may be the main attraction at this members-only speakeasy, but chef Daniel Wheeler's sweet potato gnocchi with bourbon glaze will convince you to stay for dinner. 4237 Park Rd., Ste. B. (704-817-3710) D, BAR

❤ FLOUR SHOP

$$$

ITALIAN Watch your pasta get prepared in the open kitchen. Chef Trey Wilson's shared plates are great for larger groups, but if you don't want to share, get the lamb Bolognese. 530 Brandywine Rd. (980-299-3754) D, BAR ☎

❤ GOOD FOOD ON MONTFORD

$-$$

$$-$$$

$$$$

STEAK HOUSE Chef Tyler Honeycutt aces steakhouse classics like ribeye or filet, and be sure to save room for some lemon olive oil cake for dessert. 4477 Sharon Rd., Ste 125. (704-954-8900) D, BAR ☎

PETER TAYLOR

PACO’S TACOS & TEQUILA

ROASTING COMPANY

$

AMERICAN Since adding a full bar, Roasting Company fits in more comfortably with the Montford Drive scene, but still sets the standard for rotisserie chicken. 1521 Montford Dr. (704-521-8188) L, D, BAR ✸

ROCKSALT

$$$-$$$$

SEAFOOD Head to RockSalt for the spacious patio and fresh seafood—from the raw bar, with several varieties of oysters on the half shell, or the daily catch. 512 Brandywine Rd. (704-503-9945) BR, L (weekends), D, BAR ✸☎

❤ ROOSTER’S WOOD-FIRED

KITCHEN

$$-$$$

$$

AMERICAN Unlike its flagship location in Plaza Midwood, the SouthPark brewery serves more than typical bar snacks. Chef Gene Briggs cooks pork belly gyros, duck fat chicken wings, and a full Sunday brunch. 5610 Carnegie Blvd. (980-256-4167) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

OAK STEAKHOUSE

$$-$$$

AMERICAN This pub, named for the astronomer and mathematician, serves its entire menu until closing at 2 a.m. 4151 Park Rd., Ste. A. (704-525-7775) L (weekdays), D, BAR ✸

ASIAN Roger and Robert Kongham, the sons of Thai Taste’s owners, serve creamy curries, Thai classics, and sushi in a more formal dining room. 1600 E. Woodlawn Rd., Ste. 150. (980-256-4380) L, D, BAR

LEGION BREWING

REID’S FINE FOODS

NEW AMERICAN Stellar service and a reliable menu have earned this market and restaurant a loyal following. 4331 Barclay Downs Dr. (704-377-7686) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

$$-$$$

AMERICAN Jazzed-up American cuisine makes Harper’s a place to take out-of-town guests with varying palates. 6518 Fairview Rd. (704-366-6688) BR (Sun), L, D, BAR ✸

HIBISCUS

$$$$

NEW SOUTHERN Chef Jim Noble’s menu features gussied-up, Southern-tinged American and European peasant fare, like hand-tossed pizzas and roasted chicken. A second location is in uptown. 6601 Morrison Blvd.

(704-366-8688) L, D, V, BAR ☎

NEW AMERICAN Bruce Moffett’s small-plates bistro unites a variety of influences and flavors onto one menu, and each dish is worth ordering. 1701 Montford Dr. (704-525-0881) D, BAR ☎

HARPER’S RESTAURANT

❤ PEPPERVINE

FUSION Chef Bill Greene serves a rotation of artistic small plates with unexpected pairings like lamb belly with kimchi porridge, or smoked butternut squash with miso. 4620 Piedmont Row Dr., Ste. 170B. (980-2832333) D, V, BAR ✸☎

$$

MEXICAN Although you’ll find plenty of options on the menu, there are 10 varieties of tacos and more than 60 kinds of tequila. 6401 Morrison Blvd., Ste. 8A. (704-7168226) L, D, V, BAR ✸

SIR EDMOND HALLEY’S

TOSCANA

$$

$$$

ITALIAN An authentic northern Italian menu is paired with an extensive wine list, while courtyard dining adds to the experience on a nice night. 6401 Morrison Blvd., Ste. 6B. (704-367-1808) L (weekdays), D, BAR ✸☎

❤ UPSTREAM

$$$-$$$$

SEAFOOD The 20-year-old SouthPark mainstay is known for upscale seafood, but executive chef Sam Diminich's sushi menu adds Pacific Rim flavors to the mix. 6902 Phillips Place Ct. (704-556-7730) BR (Sun), L, D, BAR ✸☎

YAFO KITCHEN

$$

MEDITERRANEAN With additional locations in Dilworth and Plaza Midwood, this fast-casual concept serves Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean-inspired fare in a wrap, salad, or grain bowl. 720 Governor Morrison St., Ste. 120. (704-365-7130) L, D, B/W ✸

YAMA ASIAN FUSION

$$

FUSION This upscale Japanese restaurant has sushi, hibachi, and Asian-inspired entrées. A second location opened in Waverly last year. 720 Governor Morrison St., Ste. 130. (70s4-295-0905) L (Mon-Sat), D,BAR ✸☎

Along the Rail These sips and bites are worth a stop on light rail Scaleybark Station

ZACK'S HAMBURGERS

$

BURGERS As you wait in line here, you’ll debate: fries or onion rings? Blurt out your decision, then wait for your number to be called from the microphone, ready for pickup. 4009 South Blvd. (704-525-1720) East-West Blvd. Station

PEPPERBOX DOUGHNUTS

$

BAKERY The yeast-based doughnut flavors rotate regularly, but recent iterations have included ricotta rhubarb, toasted miso caramel, and pineapple black pepper bacon bar. 101 W. Worthington Ave., Ste. 150 (980-294-0150) Carson Station

LINCOLN'S HABERDASHERY

$$

MARKET This artisanal market and wine shop serves sandwiches and coffee in a chill setting, and the shopping area has rare knickknacks.

1300 South Blvd., Ste. S (704-910-4660) Stonewall Station

RHINO MARKET & DELI

$

DELI Stop by this popular deli for a breakfast burrito, soup, or sandwich, or grab a snack like the Queen Charlotte’s Pimento Cheese. 1500 W. Morehead St., Ste. E. (704-375-2036) Parkwood Station

STRUDEL SHOP

$

TAKEOUT Owners Kevin Kelly and Dee Hang grew up in the Optimist Park neighborhood, so you won't find German accents here. "This is redneck strudel," Kelly jokes. 510 E. 15th St., Ste. A (980-237-8077) 36th St. Station

THE CHAMBER BY WOODEN ROBOT $

BREWERY Wooden Robot's second location in NoDa has the same beloved beers and then some in this giant two-story space just steps from the light rail stop. 416 E. 36th St., Ste. 100 (980-938-6200) Tom Hunter Station

SOUTH 21 JR.

$

SOUTHERN Known for great burgers and fried chicken, its well-decorated chicken dinner comes with Charlotte's standard: fries, coleslaw, and a roll. 6920 N. Tryon St. (704-598-7407) JW Clay Station

NINETIES ICE CREAM

$

ICE CREAM This family-owned dessert shop serves ice cream sandwiches and cereal milkshakes with childhood favorites like Fruity Pebbles and Lucky Charms. 9009 J M Keynes Dr., Ste. 4 (704-547-1856)

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

93

❤ THE ASBURY

University Area AMALFI PASTA ’N PIZZA

$$

ITALIAN The only other places where Italian food is this real, this good, and this cheap are called trattorias, and you have to take a plane to get to them. 8542 University City Blvd. (704-547-8651) L, D, B/W ✸

FIREWATER

$$-$$$

AMERICAN The food here is primarily American bistrostyle, but the owner’s family tuna business makes apps like the tuna tartare standouts. 8708 J. W. Clay Blvd.

(704-549-0050) L (weekends), D, BAR ✸

ZAPATA’S CANTINA

$$

MEXICAN Expect typical Mexican fare in a high-energy dining room, with an additional location in Ballantyne.

8927 J.M. Keynes Dr., in University Place shopping center. (704-503-1979) L, D, BAR

$$$

$$$

$ Most entrées under $10 $$ Most entrées $10-$17 $$$ Most entrées $18-$25 $$$$ Most entrées $26 & up

❤

L D V

94

Best Restaurants Breakfast Weekend brunch Lunch Dinner Vegetarian friendly

$$-$$$

$$ -$$$

ITALIAN This restaurant serves up an extensive Italian menu in an elegant, modern space. 100 N. Tryon St. (704-376-8880) L (weekdays), D, BAR ☎

B BR

THE CELLAR AT DUCKWORTH’S

AMERICAN This sister restaurant to Leroy Fox has a trendy, pop-culture vibe—and a roster of fancy burgers (including a foie gras-topped offering for $20). 201 N. Tryon St., Ste. 1010. (980-224-8674) L, D, BAR

ITALIAN The Italian-inspired entreés at this uptown spot are all excellent, and the whipped ricotta with sourdough, lavender honey, and pistachio is the most imaginative appetizer on the menu. 303 S. Church St. (704-445-2540) B, BR, L, D, V, BAR ✸☎

❤ ARIA TUSCAN GRILL

$$$$

$-$$$

AMERICAN The blackened catfish is cooked just right, the Cajun pasta is piping hot, and chatter fills the no-reservations dining room. 401 W. 9th St. (704-332-6789) L, D, BAR

❤ ANGELINE'S

CAPITAL GRILLE

STEAK HOUSE A classic steak house, complete with a large bar for sipping martinis and a dining room that exudes power. 201 N. Tryon St. (704-348-1400) L (weekdays), D, BAR ☎

AMERICAN Marriott introduced this coffee and sandwich shop for locals and hotel guests alike to have a comfortable, casual dining option. 100 W. Trade St. (704353-6003) B, L, D, B/W

NEW AMERICAN Executive chef Whitney Thomas's innovative, seasonal menu includes yellowfin tuna sushi tots and mint crusted lamb loin. 127 N. Tryon St., Ste. 8.

(704-919-1322) BR, L, D, BAR ☎

❤ ALEXANDER MICHAEL’S

$$-$$$

$$$

NEW SOUTHERN This uptown spot with modern Southern food is best for cocktails and conversation at the bar. 204 N. Tryon St. (704-333-3747) BR, L, D, BAR ☎

❤ 5CHURCH

BASIL THAI

THAI Thai lovers can sate their cravings with tasty pad Thai, while the more daring can try dishes like crispy red curry duck, a rich, deep-fried half duck in a spicy red curry sauce. 210 N. Church St. (704-332-7212) L (weekdays), D, V, BAR ☎

NEW AMERICAN The focus is on small plates, craft beer served in its proper glassware at proper temperature, and craft cocktails. 330 N. Tryon St. (980-349-4078) D, BAR ☎

Uptown 204 NORTH

$$$

NEW SOUTHERN Chef Mike Long's inventive menu mixes countryside favorites like biscuits and deviled eggs with bold flavors and contemporary techniques.

235 N. Tryon St. (704-342-1193) B, BR, L, D, BAR ☎

B/W Beer and wine only BAR Full-service bar ✸ Patio seating available Reservations suggested

☎

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

COCO + THE DIRECTOR

COWBELL BURGER & BAR

DANDELION MARKET

$

$$

$$-$$$

NEW AMERICAN On weekends, this Irish pub turns into one of uptown’s hottest nightlife spots. But during the day, come for a cozy meal with flickering candles and shared plates. 118 W. 5th St. (704-333-7989) BR, L, D, BAR

ESSEX BAR & BISTRO

$$-$$$

GLOBAL Middle Eastern and Mediterranean influences run through this menu. Order a few tapas and a bottle of wine, head out to the patio, and watch the activity at Trade and Tryon. 101 S. Tryon St., Ste. 14. (980-406-3857) L, D, BAR ✸☎

EVOKE

$$$-$$$$

FAHRENHEIT

$$$-$$$$

STEAK HOUSE In this modern space off the lobby of Le Méridien, the beautifully seared steaks and seafood crudos are among the must-try menu items. 555 S. McDowell St. (980-237-5354) B, L, D, BAR ☎

NEW AMERICAN Located on the 21st floor of Skye Condos, chef Rocco Whalen’s restaurant is the place in Charlotte to eat a meal and see the city twinkle. 222 S. Caldwell St. (980-237-6718) BR, D, BAR ✸☎

❤ FORCHETTA

$$-$$$

ITALIAN Chef Luca Annunziata serves lasagna just like his mom made it and carbonara as it's served in Rome.

230 North College St. (704-602-2750) B, L, D, BAR ☎

❤ FIN & FINO

$$$

SEAFOOD Come for the raw bar, but stay for bartender Brittany Kellum's drinks. Then splurge on a slice of cheesecake. 135 Levine Avenue of the Arts, Ste. 100. (704-800-5680) L, D, BAR ✸☎

❤ HALCYON, FLAVORS FROM THE EARTH $$$-$$$$

NEW SOUTHERN With views from the Mint Museum Uptown, this restaurant's local menu is popular for lunch and pre-theater dinners. 500 S. Tryon St. (704-910-0865) BR, L, D, V, BAR ✸☎

❤ HAYMAKER

$$$ - $$$$

NEW SOUTHERN Enjoy locally and seasonally inspired dishes from North Carolina chef William Dissen in this bright, stylish space next to Romare Bearden Park. 225 S. Poplar St. (704-626-6116) BR,D,BAR ✸☎

THE KING’S KITCHEN

$$-$$$

❤ LA BELLE HELENE

$$$ - $$$$

SOUTHERN Chef Jim Noble's restaurant, which serves traditional Southern fare, donates profits to faith-based feeding centers and employs troubled youth and people who have just come out of rehab or prison.

129 W. Trade St. (704-375-1990) L (weekdays) D, B/W, ✸☎

FRENCH The Parisian menu offers rotisserie chicken and a mix of pour commencer and plats, plus decadent desserts and specialty cocktails. 300 S. Tryon St., Ste. 100. (704-9692550) BR (Sun), L, D, BAR ☎

LUCE

$$$

ITALIAN Luce is a beautiful, intimate, luxurious restaurant with simple but innovative northern Italian cuisine. 214 N. Tryon St., Ste. J, in Hearst Plaza. (704-344-9222) L (weekdays), D, BAR ✸☎

MALABAR SPANISH CUISINE

$$

SPANISH This sister restaurant to Luce serves authentic regional cuisine from Spain for lunch and dinner. 214 N. Tryon St. (704344-8878) L (weekdays), D, BAR ✸☎

❤ McNINCH HOUSE

$$$$

NEW SOUTHERN Guests order from a daily prix fixe menu (ranging from five courses to nine courses), choose their wine and entrées, and the staff takes care of the rest. 511 N. Church St. (704-332-6159) D, BAR ☎

MERT’S HEART AND SOUL

$-$$

MIMOSA GRILL

$$$

SOUTHERN James Bazzelle’s pride and joy serves down-home Southern cooking, with a dash of Lowcountry, in a downtown-feeling place. 214 N. College St. (704-342-4222) BR, L, D,B/W ✸

NEW SOUTHERN This popular after-work spot has a menu that changes seasonally, but always has friendly service, tasty seafood

Charlotte magazine (ISSN 1083-1444) is published monthly by Morris Communications at 214 W. Tremont Ave., Suite 302, Charlotte NC 28203-5161. Entire contents Copyright © 2020 by Morris Communications. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or otherwise reproduced without written permission from the publisher. Periodicals postage paid in Charlotte, NC and additional offices. To subscribe, renew, or change address, go to www.charlottemagazine.com or write to: Charlotte magazine, 214 W. Tremont Ave., Suite 302, Charlotte NC 28203-5161. Subscription rate $19.95 for one year (twelve issues). For renewal or change of address, include the address label from your most recent issue. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Charlotte, P.O. Box 433237, Palm Coast, FL 32143-9616. Unsolicited photographs, illustrations, or articles are submitted at the risk of the photographer/artist/author. Charlotte magazine assumes no liability for the return of unsolicited materials and may use them at its discretion.

THE GUIDE

dishes, and interesting grits. 327 S. Tryon St. (704-3430700) BR, L (weekdays), D, BAR ✸☎

MURPHY’S KITCHEN & TAP

$$

IRISH Pies, tarts, meats, potatoes—everything you’d expect, you’ll find at this Irish pub with a large range of alcoholic beverage options. 445 W. Trade St. (704-3320557) BR, L, D, BAR ✸

QUEEN CITY Q

$

BARBECUE Here, the barbecue slow-cooks every day in wood-fired smokers and comes served with classic sides like peppery green bean casserole and slaw. 225 E. 6th St., Ste. A. (980-272-6341) L, D, BAR

❤ SEA LEVEL NC

$$-$$$

SEAFOOD Concrete beams and rustic brick give an industrial feel to this seafood restaurant, which serves up dishes that are accessible, inventive, and sustainably sourced. 129 E. 5th St. (704-412-2616) L, D, BAR ✸☎

SOHO BISTRO

❤ NOBLE SMOKE

$-$$

BARBECUE Feast on Carolina-style pork and Texas-style brisket, and grab a drink at the “Legends Counter” with custom plaques for Southern barbecue icons. 2216 Freedom Dr. (704-703-5252) L, D, BAR ✸☎

BOSSY BEULAH'S

$

AMERICAN Think of Bossy Beulah’s as the kid sister— or sidekick—to Noble Smoke. Order your fried chicken sammie bunless or add American cheese, and pair it with a sweet tea or Cheerwine. 2200 Freedom Dr. (980737-1400) L, D, ✸

PINKY’S WESTSIDE GRILL

$

TOUCAN LOUIE'S

$

AMERICAN Housed in an old auto shop, this funky spot serves great burgers, hot dogs, sandwiches, and salads, as well as tasty sides like waffle fries. 1600 W. Morehead St. (704-332-0402) L, D, BAR ✸

CARIBBEAN With state-sourced meats smoked inhouse and strictly N.C. cheese, this new cafe's commitment to local ingredients is notable, but it's their food's Caribbean flair that elevates their grab-and-go sandwiches. 2753 Rozzelles Ferry Rd. (980-209-9791) B, L, D, B/W ✸

CROSSWORD OF THE MONTH

By Andy Smith

ANSWERS can be found online at charlottemagazine. com/crossword.

$$

ASIAN Lightning-fast, friendly service complements hot, savory Chinese favorites such as Sha Cha Shrimp and Mongolian Chicken. 214 N. Tryon St., Ste. 110. (704333-5189) L, D, B/W

❤ STOKE

$$$

NEW AMERICAN Hotel dining gets an upgrade with this wood-fired grill, family-style concept in Marriott City Center. 100 W. Trade St. (704-353-6005) B, BR, L, D, BAR

SUKOSHI

$$

SUSHI Think high-quality sushi in a fast-casual setting.

Chef Michael Chanthavong brings favorites from his menu at O-Ku, like tuna wrap-it-up and salmon citrus rolls. 101 S. Tryon St., Ste. 120. (980-495-3800) L, D, V

THE YOLK

$-$$

AMERICAN Greg and Subrina Collier's breakfast-focused concept in 7th Street Public Market is open for breakfast and lunch, but shrimp and grits topped with Gouda cheese, jerk seasoning, and scallion pesto is delicious any time of day. 224 E. 7th St. (704-230-4346) B, L

West/Northwest Charlotte COMMUNITY TABLE BISTRO

$

SOUTHERN At the Goodwill Opportunity Campus, a small, cafeteria-style restaurant sears, bakes, and fries comfort food on a daily rotation for an affordable price. 5301 Wilkinson Blvd. (980-636-1000) B, L (weekdays), V ✸

ESTIA'S KOUZINA

$$-$$$

❤ HEIRLOOM RESTAURANT

$$-$$$

GREEK This upscale Mediterranean restaurant offers healthy and delicious dishes like gyro pitas, lamb burgers, and hearty salads. 609 N. Main St., Belmont. (704825-7005) BR, L, D, V, BAR ✸☎

NEW AMERICAN Ingredients are sourced almost exclusively from North Carolina, and the tasting menu includes options like fried chicken and pork and beans.

8470 Bellhaven Rd. (704-595-7710) D, V, BAR ☎

APRIL 2020 // CHARLOTTE

95

YOU ARE HERE Each month, we’ll throw a dart at a map and write about where it lands.

LOCATION: Bridgehampton neighborhood

n

hampto

bridge

Straddle Up BRYAN AND SARAH HARTLEY knew the North Carolina-South Carolina state line ran through their neighborhood and near their property when they bought their home five years ago.

They were amused that when they stepped out their back doors and looked left, to just beyond the creek that bordered their backyard, they could see South Carolina.

Two years ago, they refinanced their mortgage, and the new property survey showed that a slice of their yard, on the other side of their fence but before the creek, is actually across the state line.

“That was kind of a surprise,” Bryan Hartley laughs. “We said, ‘Really?’”

The oddity of a 544-home neighborhood in two states is great conversation fodder at cocktail parties, although Bridgehampton residents don’t discuss it much except during introductions,

96

CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020

when they ask each other, “What side are you on?” Pull into the entrance at Johnston and Ardrey Kell roads, and you’re in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jump in the neighborhood pool, and you’re in Indian Land, South Carolina. School buses from both states pick up and drop off in Bridgehampton. Property values for the stately 4,000- to 5,000-square-foot homes vary widely; houses of identical size sell for $60,000 or $70,000 less on the South Carolina side.

The Hartleys say they love raising their two daughters in Bridgehampton. Nine kids ages 9 and under live on their culde-sac. A few months ago, a neighbor sent them photos of a wild boar traipsing through the Hartleys’ property, just outside their fence.

“Of course,” Bryan Hartley says with a chuckle, “he was on the South Carolina side.” —Cristina Bolling

SHAW NIELSON; CRISTINA BOLLING

Bryan and Sarah Hartley roll with life on the border

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