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CAROLINA TROPHIES 12/31/26
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Our 43RD Year • Issue No. 30 • July 30, 2026
The Snack Shop in Boiling Springs carrying on fine food tradition By Alan Hodge Food service businesses are often like vegetables planted in rich but thin soil, they spring up quickly but wither just as fast. That’s not the case with the Snack Shop Family Restaurant and its predecessor Cleveland Sandwich Co., both of which have called Boiling Springs home for 100 years. This epicurean epic got started way back in 1926 when Belton Beason started the sandwich manufacturing business at 103 S. Main St. in Boiling Springs. His employees put together sandwiches on an industrial scale. A period photo shows smartly dressed employees in skirts and slacks standing in front of the little brick structure in the heart of downtown. The tasty sandwich varieties they turned out included chicken salad, pimento cheese, beef and egg, Dutch lunch, ham, hamburger, and many more. Prices were around fifteen cents each. The sandwiches were wrapped and loaded into trucks that fanned out across the landscape to offices, textile mills, factories, and other spots where folks needed a delicious, fresh, and economical meal. Belton’s grandson Terry Beason recalled the operation. “We had a huge business,” he said. “We delivered twenty routes as far away as Asheville and into South Carolina.” Not long after starting the sandwich firm, Beason moved the sand-
These folks were on lunch duty at the Snack Shop last week. From left, Kim Francis, Julia Lyles, owner Ilias Tsambounieris aka “Louie”, Janet Edwards, Tesla McNabb and Hilda Holt. Employees not pictured include Joby Hamrick, Cieren Humphries, Ashlee Humphries, Mitzie Thacker and Meddie Lawrence. (Photos by Alan Hodge)
Louie, Tesla McNabb, and Julia Lyles at the grill.
wich making operation into what is now the Turner Trucking office building on College St. The Main St. location became the Snack Shop. Over the years, the Sandwich Co. and the Snack Shop remained in the Five-year-old Serenity Litton at the Snack Shop The Snack Shop is at 103 S. Main St. in Boiling Springs. Beason famcounter. ily. After Belton passed away in Snack Shop soldiered 1952, it went to his son James who on for a spell, but evenran it until he died in 1981. After that, tually faded into the the sandwich operation as well as the Boiling Springs mist. However, in 1997, the beloved Snack Shop experienced a renaissance. That’s when Ilias Tsambounieris (known to friends and customers as “Louie”) bought the Gardner-Webb students Reed Walker and Eli Snack Shop and set it Bowman eat at the Snack Shop all the time. on a course for revival. George Diakolios. They have two Louie, 68, a native Meddie Lawrence keeps the pans of Karpathos, Greece, came to daughters, Anna and Sofia Tsamshiny clean at the Snack Shop. America when he was nine years bounieris Sakellis. Louie described how he came laws. I fell in love with Cleveland old. He grew up in the diner busiCounty. I was driving around in ness in New York. By and by, he to own the Snack Shop. married his wife Maria who was “It was Fate,” he says. “In 1997 Boiling Springs and saw that the Hilda Holt with some piping hot club sandwiches and fries. the daughter of Shelby Café owner I came to Shelby to visit my inSee SNACK SHOP, Page 2
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