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Comeback of a Fish Camp Legend In the hands of Gus Oliver’s daughter Tina, once beloved Bonnie Kay Seafood is yet again packing in the customers
DeAna Voss, Tina Oliver, and Bonnie Oliver By David Claude Bailey
Photograph by Hannah Sharpe
“The summer before he died at age
95 1/2½, he was out there on his backhoe, shoring up the dam,” a longtime customer of Bonnie Kay Seafood says, pushing himself away from a table littered with the deep-fried remains of Gus’ Platter, a golden mountain of shrimp, oysters, crab, scallops and flounder. Gus was the man who, in 1957, built Bonnie Kay in the evenings, brick by brick, after drilling wells all day. It was Gus Oliver who, on his father’s farm near Pleasant Garden, dug the lake without which Bonnie Kay wouldn’t have been a bona fide fish camp. And it was Gus who built his own airplane. And motorcycle. And automated oyster scrubber. “If Dad didn’t have something and wanted it, he’d just build it,” says Bonnie Oliver, co-owner of the Greensboro icon that nearly shut down a couple of years ago. Her kid sister, Tina The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Oliver, put Bonnie Kay back in the swim, Bonnie says.
Way back when, Gus Oliver hand-breaded every Virginia oyster that came out of the kitchen and built the eatery’s reputation on thick, golden filets of flounder — served on paper plates. Heaping helpings of hush puppies, french fries and creamy slaw came family-style — without a salad in sight. And, oh yes, if you wanted a frosty beer to chase down a half-dozen oysters on the half shell, Gus and his wife, Ann, would gladly oblige, unlike the owners of so many other fish camps and other restaurants that refused to mix alcohol with family fare. Admittedly, Bonnie Kay got off to a slow start, with its unpaved parking lot, Spartan dining room, concrete floors, beaded knotty-pine paneling and homemade wooden booths. But that was all in keeping with the North Carolina tradition that fish camps be rustic. In fact, the Tar Heel State can lay claim to the first use of fish camp “to designate a restaurant specializing in fish dishes,” according to the Dictionary of American Regional English. “Often the lake on which the camp was situated provided the fish for a nearby restaurant,” the book says. The state’s first seafood eateries were in Calabash, where the Becks and the Colemans held outdoor oyster roasts beneath a canopy of shady oaks in the 1930s. Luther Lineberger brought fish camps to the Piedmont when he set up a hut on New Hope Road near Gastonia, serving customers under a tin roof. Bob Shaw’s Friendly Road Inn was the grandaddy of Greensboro post-war fish camps, started in 1951, with Luke Conrad and his wife opening Libby Hill in 1953. Tina Oliver says her father was friends with Conrad, serving with him in World War June 2014
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