Crook’s Corner Southern restaurant in Chapel Hill NC closing

Crook’s Corner, a cornerstone in Southern meals and an early spark in the creation of the Triangle’s fashionable eating scene, has closed.

The icon of seasonal, Southern dishes, torch-bearer of shrimp and grits and Chapel Hill mainstay introduced the closing Wednesday in an e mail.

“With an incredibly heavy heart I must share the news that we are closing,” the restaurant wrote in an e mail. “The position we find ourselves in, exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis is no longer tenable.”

Crook’s started as a Franklin Street fish market in the Nineteen Forties. But in 1982, chef Bill Neal and Gene Hamer opened a small restaurant that may alter the world’s understanding of Southern meals.

Cooking dishes tied to the seasons and treating regional greens like treasures, Crook’s elevated the fame of Southern meals. Suddenly, tremendous eating included dishes like fried catfish or stewed okra and tomatoes or peanut soup. A bowl of Crook’s shrimp and grits has been spent 40 years as one of the beloved dishes in the South.

‘Food of this place’

Following Neal’s dying in 1991, chef Bill Smith took over the kitchen and led the restaurant for almost 30 years till his retirement in 2019. Hamer bought the restaurant to a gaggle that included former Crook’s beverage director Shannon Healy and Gary Crunkleton.

“It was food of this place,” Healy stated in a cellphone interview. “Bill Neal carried the idea that Southern food was as worthy of celebration as any other food. That was the underlying premise, that Southern food was just as worthy as French food or Italian food.”

Healy stated he first fell in love with Crook’s as a diner consuming a plate of fried oysters that modified his life. Unlike the gummy, chewy and fried-into-oblivion variations he stated he knew from rising up in Florida, these had been barely fried, crunchy from a cornmeal breading and nonetheless creamy like a steamed oyster.

“It was a revelation to me,” Healy stated. “They were using aioli and calling it garlic mayo. They were taking fancy food and making it approachable. It was an ethos I really loved.”

Even in retirement, Smith would typically discover himself again in the Crook’s kitchen in some vogue or one other. Most just lately he made the season’s batch of honeysuckle sorbet, filling a restaurant freezer with the candy late spring gold.

“That’s probably my favorite dish,” Smith stated. “No one had ever done anything like that before. It’s mysterious, it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s delicious.”

The truest Crook’s dishes had been those who danced with the seasons, just like the honeysuckle sorbet, which Smith would typically forage from 1000's of blossoms. In the summer season, followers would search for Crook’s dish of chilly fried rooster and a thick slice of watermelon, and in the autumn, wild persimmon pudding that appeared to style like these first chilly nights of the yr.

Smith stated seasonal cooking additionally meant improvisation, taking no matter confirmed up on the backdoor and placing it on a plate.

“It was kind of ‘seat-of-my-pants’ cooking,” Smith stated. “Farmers would just show up at my door with two bags of tomatoes and so I served tomatoes that night. The menu was completely fluid.”

The first restaurant job James Beard award-winning Mississippi chef John Currence had was in the Crook’s kitchen, the place he was initially fired as a busboy. He’d later be rehired as a dishwasher and rapidly labored his method although the kitchen, fortunately pitching in with prep cooks chopping kilos of mushrooms and scallions for bowls of shrimp and grits at dinner. He stated Bill Neal’s obsession with meals taught him to understand the present of peppery arugula and admire taste.

It was at Crook’s that he first bought a dish on the menu, a deep fried French toast, which continues to be served at his Big Bad Breakfast eating places.

Legitimizing Lowcountry meals

“Crook’s was the first restaurant to really legitimize the Sunday supper meals of the Lowcountry,” Currence stated. “Prior to that it was unheard of. My grandmother ate at the restaurant and was astounded we sold a plate of pimento cheese for $4.50.”

Pointing to cooks like Currence, Healy stated the affect of Crook’s is felt nightly in eating places all through the South.

“Generations of restaurants can trace their lineage back to (Crook’s),” Healy stated. “It’s had enough of an impact it’s legacy is well protected.”

Drew Jackson writes about eating places and eating for The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun, overlaying the meals scene in the Triangle and North Carolina.