Home Care In Four Corners, NC

One of North Carolina’s most iconic restaurants may be rattling back to life, but there’s still no timetable for its return.

Crook’s Corner, the Chapel Hill restaurant that helped change the course of Southern dining, is working toward a reopening, possibly this year, said owner Shannon Healy, who took over the restaurant in 2019.

Crook’s closed in 2021 as one of the most painful restaurant losses of the pandemic. That loss appeared to be permanent, but Healy said he always hoped to bring Crook’s back.

“I’ve always said I would love to reopen it,” Healy said in a phone interview. “I’m trying to. I continue to try. We’ve cleared some hurdles. Other hurdles remain.”

Crook’s Corner was opened in 1982 by Gene Hamer and the late chef Bill Neal. The Franklin Street restaurant became one of the most celebrated and influential kitchens in the South, changing the narrative and expectations of Southern food and pioneering local ingredients and seasonal cooking.

Following Neal’s death in 1991, chef Bill Smith later took over the kitchen and steered it his own way until retiring in 2019. Hamer sold the restaurant that year to a group that included Healy, the owner of Durham’s Alley Twenty Six and a former Crook’s bar manager.

“I don’t have a crystal ball to have a time frame, but I would love to open this fall,” Healy said. “There are repairs needed to that building. I don’t want to lose the iconic nature of that spot.”

The possibility of a Crook’s return started floating through the Chapel Hill community earlier this year when the restaurant changed the wording of a sign on its door to “temporarily closed.” More recently another sign teased the potential sale of a Crook’s seasonal favorite, honeysuckle sorbet.

Then over the weekend, a tweet from Inside Carolina reporter Ross Martin further stoked the Crook’s rumor mill, suggesting the restaurant would return as early as September.

Healy said he couldn’t commit the restaurant to any kind of timeline.

“You clearly know something that I don’t,” Healy tweeted in reply. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love that. But as of this moment, I have no idea what you are talking about.”

The uncertainty in Crook’s return lies in the upgrades the restaurant needs to reopen, Healy said. Those upgrades include plumbing fixes and improvements to the restaurant’s patio, making it usable year-round.

Healy said that work is needed to ensure the long-term future of Crook’s.

“I want to open it so that it’s around for another 40 years,” Healy said. “There’s no reason to open it for a day or two. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right.”

In its four decades, Crook’s Corner has collected generations of fans, from UNC-Chapel Hill students to local residents and foodies. Healy said he’s fielding dozens of inquiries about Crook’s future, but the he doesn’t have any answers, only that it’s an enthusiasm he shares.

“What I’m doing now is horribly unpopular, but I’m acting in the best interests of the legacy of the restaurant,” Healy said. “I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I have to take my time and do it right. This is a love project. Besides my personal history at Crook’s, I believe it’s an important restaurant. And that’s what I’m doing it. I want it to be open for good.”

As for the honeysuckle sorbet, Healy said that’s not a guarantee either.

But plans are in the works to sell cups and pints of the famous frozen dessert out of the restaurant for a few hours a day. That sorbet will be the same as it ever was, made from locally foraged honeysuckle blossoms and mixed by former Crook’s chef Bill Smith.

“If we can do it, we’ll announce it,” Healy said.

This story was originally published May 2, 2022, 5:48 PM.

Kristian Bawcom corrects people when they call his Chapel Hill restaurant Four Corners a "sports bar."

The iconic Franklin Street establishment, named after legendary basketball coach Dean Smith’s “Four Corners” offensive play, is a sports restaurant, Bawcom explained.

“We make everything from scratch from the kitchen,” said Bawcom, who has owned Four Corners in Chapel Hill for 15 years. “We don’t buy stuff frozen, drop it in a fryer and serve it to people … we put a lot of love in our food.”

Bawcom is bringing Four Corners to the Wrightsville Beach area after buying the former Soundside Seafood & Raw Bar site at 2025 Eastwood Road, within walking distance of the Wrightsville Beach bridge.

According to a deed recorded Dec. 29, Bawcom's FOCO Restaurant Group paid $2.46 million for the property previously belonging to Urban Food Group of Raleigh. Patrick Riley of Wilmington-based real estate firm Cape Fear Commercial represented the seller, while CFC's Paul Loukas represented Bawcom.

Bawcom said the menu at his new restaurant will feature much of the same American cuisine as the Chapel Hill Four Corners, such as wings, baby back ribs cooked for 10 hours overnight, marinated ribeye steaks and pork chops, grilled salmon, fish and shrimp tacos and a variety of burgers. The Chapel Hill Four Corners, 175 East Franklin St., opened 45 years ago.

Previously called Boca Bay, the site of the Wilmington Four Corners was purchased by Urban Food Group from longtime Wilmington restaurateur Ash Aziz as part of a three-restaurant deal announced in 2019. Urban Food Group rebranded the restaurant to Soundside but ended up closing it in 2022, citing a lack of momentum, according to a StarNews story.

Bawcom and his wife, who have a vacation home close to the Wrightsville Beach bridge, noticed the Eastwood Road restaurant for sale on one of their walks on nearby trails. Other Chapel Hill transplants had been urging him to open a Four Corners location in Wilmington.

He plans to overhaul the Eastwood Road restaurant by knocking down walls, replacing the bar and flooring, installing a draft beer system and eventually opening an expanded outdoor dining area. He hopes to open the inside of the new Four Corners around the end of March or early April.

In the second phase of changes at the Eastwood Road restaurant, he plans to widen the existing patio and add an outdoor bar, TVs, fans and heaters.

“What we're doing out here is going to be amazing,” Bawcom said.

Bawcom, who grew up in South Florida, started working in the restaurant business as a high school senior in Florida. He studied business management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and helped grow restaurant groups in Houston and Florida. “I love this industry,” he said.

Bawcom said the second location of Four Corners will stay true to its UNC Chapel Hill roots but also be open to the fandom of other schools, including the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

“I am looking forward to the relationships I'm going to develop here,” he said. “There's no doubt it'll be fun.”

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The center city of Charlotte, known as uptown, is separated into four different wards. And roughly, at the center of those wards is the cross streets of Trade and Tryon.

The cross streets are host to hundreds on a daily basis. With a steady stream of traffic from foot and car crossing the midpoint, it's a perfect representation of how Charlotte is North Carolina's largest city.

While Trade and Tryon is home to this steady blur of movement, there are four figures you will always find standing at the Queen City's center.

Have you noticed the massive statues guarding the city center's four corners? The statues are representatives of Commerce, Industry, Transportation, and The Future.

(L to R) Commerce, Industry, Transportation, The Future

"The historic figures of commerce industry and transportation represent enterprises which have contributed to Charlotte's growth as a major commercial center. While honoring Charlotte's past, the three figures all look toward the fourth figure, the future," a bronzed description embedded in the sidewalk's brick says.

We caught up with Raymond Kaskey, the artist behind the statues, to learn a little more about their history.

Q: Where did the inspiration for these works of art originate from?

The Queen's Table was the client and it was the second project I've done with them. Back in 1989 I did the Queen Charlotte which was done at the airport, at any rate they were quite happy with it so they hired me to do their next project which was to do something in the square which represented the culture and history of Charlotte.

Q: Did you come up with the idea of the four representatives of commerce, industry, transportation and the future?

We (The Queen's Table) developed that idea together. Originally, it was supposed to reflect the history of Charlotte. But the future got in there because there wasn't an alternative.

For commerce, that was based on the fact that there was gold discovered in the 1830s and that's why the Mint was developed. For industry, the textile industry was big in North Carolina and Charlotte was a crossroads, Trade and Tryon is the center of the town... it was and is a crossroads as a transportation hub. So that's the genesis of the (transportation) figure, celebrating the workers who built the transportation network.

And then there wasn't really a clear cut fourth suggestion for the history, so the idea of the future was there but it was kind of an unknown, but we know that it involved babies and the next generation.

Q: What's up with the smaller heads underneath some of the statues?

In the gold mining figure and the little portrait head that showed up in the textile figure was my idea.

The one under the gold miner (commerce) was a portrait of Alan Greenspan, who was the head of the Federal Reserve Board. His portrait head was a humorist addition, a sort of representation of gold flowing into a piggy bank.

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I put my own head under the textile figure (industry), or as much as I could get it to resemble me as a young kid. I read the book 'Like A Family' that detailed the use of child labor in the textile industry. It wasn't necessarily a negative exploitation because people working on farms came into where the textile mills were and they liked to hire the whole family. So... it wasn't necessarily exploiting cheap labor, although there may have been some of that too. That's why there was a kid in there, what kid better than me?

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Q: Are there any other significant details you can tell us about?

On the future, there's a hornets nest that's an emblematic symbol that went back to the revolutionary war where the North Carolina soldiers were thought to be mad as hornets. And the baby in the future statue was one of the Queen's Tables members child who posed with the baby.

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Q: How long did it take you to complete the project?

It was completed in 1995. It was probably around two years, from '93 to '95.

We started out with six or eight inch models and then quarter size models to work out the details. I've donated all of that to the National Building Museum in D.C.

GREENSBORO — Now you can have your suds and see the field, too.

N.C. A&T will allow beer sales inside BB&T Stadium at the football team’s five home games this season.

Beer kiosks will be set up in four locations under the bleachers in the four corners of the stadium, separate from regular concessions, A&T athletics director Earl Hilton said.

“We will offer beer in the football stadium this year,” Hilton said, “but we’re not going to do it at any of the other sports at this time. Only at the football games.”

The sales are allowed under a new state law.

In June, Gov. Roy Cooper signed House Bill 389, which changed longstanding state policy and allows widespread beer and wine sales in athletics venues at North Carolina public colleges, similar to what's common at professional sports stadiums.

At its two-day retreat in July, A&T’s board of trustees unanimously passed a resolution allowing the Aggies to sell beer at football games.

Under the rules, customers can buy only one beer per person each trip to the beer station. Beer sales will end at the start of the game’s third quarter.

“There obviously will be people verifying the appropriate age qualifications,” Hilton said, “but I don’t know exactly what that will look like yet, whether it will be a wristband thing or if it will be showing an ID each time.”

North Carolina, N.C. State, East Carolina and Appalachian State are among other schools to implement alcohol sales under the new law as well.

The law allows public universities to sell beer and wine throughout sports venues during college games. Sales of mixed drinks in university-owned athletics facilities are allowed only during non-college sports events, such as concerts and lectures.

That’s a big shift in policy. Before the new law, alcohol sales were generally not allowed inside on-campus and university-owned sports venues, with some exceptions.

A&T, for instance, opened a beer garden at home football games for the first time last season.

But the 21-and-older area was contained within a fenced area outside the stadium’s bleachers. A large tent covered the grass near one corner of the north end zone, and the view of the game from field level was limited.

It was an experiment, Hilton said.

“The beer garden more than broke even,” he said. “There were some startup costs, but we made those back. I don’t know if we’ll run the beer garden this year because we’re selling beer in the kiosks. I’m not sure there’s a demand for it. That’s still being worked out.”

Hilton, a devout Mormon, said he didn’t know what brands of beer or kinds of beverages would be for sale.

“Dude,” he said. “I couldn’t even tell you the difference. I’ve never had a drink of alcohol in my entire life, and I really don’t know anything about beer.”

News & Record staff writer John Newsom contributed.

Contact Jeff Mills at (336) 373-7024, and follow @JeffMillsNR on Twitter.

ELON AT A&T

When: 6 p.m. Aug. 31.

Where: BB&T Stadium, A&T campus, Greensboro.

Preseason rankings: A&T No. 20, Elon No. 21.

Tickets: $31 general admission, $41 reserved; available at NCATAggies.com or (336) 334-7749.

If you’re like me and have called yourself a Charlottean for more than 20 years (we need a secret handshake), you may remember a time back in the early ’90s when Ballantyne was little more than undeveloped farmland on the southern periphery of I-485.

Before the resort, before the office towers, before the movie theater that vaguely resembles a spaceship. Times have changed, but there’s still one similarity to the days of old in the Ballantyne we know and love today.

Actually, there are four.

As you drive down what once were the quiet country roads of south Charlotte, you find yourself at a busy intersection marked by four towering archways. “The Monuments of Ballantyne” were commissioned by Charlotte developer Johnny Harris and created by Yugoslavian artist Boris Tomic, who spent the better part of three years crafting them in a brick factory in Salisbury.

At first glance, they appear to be mirror images of each other, but if you take a closer look, each tells its own unique story of Charlotte’s history.

Transportation.

Being in the shadow of 485, this seems like a natural place to begin. Featured on this arch is Cameron Morrison, nicknamed the “Good Roads Governor” for the role he played in establishing much of the transportation infrastructure our state uses today.

You’ll also find a map of the Native American crossroads that established Charlotte as a trading post, the historic trolley (welcome back, streetcar), which connected Dilworth to uptown Charlotte in the late 19^th century, and the train station that served as the midway point between New York City and New Orleans.

Technology.

Odes to Charlotte’s booming textile industry can be found all over this monument, including the spinning wheel and hand loom used for turning cotton into thread and cloth. Pay attention the right side of this arch, where you’ll find the Catawba River dam built on the property of one Dr. W. Gill Wylie. I’ll let you take a wild guess which lake it created.

Finance.

It wouldn’t be a story about Charlotte without a tribute to banking. Here you’ll find the likeness of former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl alongside Conrad Reed discovering gold in the late 1700s, as well as our branch of the United States Mint, awarded to Charlotte in 1835 thanks to the gold rush.

Human spirit.

For all you history and anthropology buffs, this one is a must-see. Revolutionary and Civil War tributes take their place alongside the various religious institutions around our city. On this monument, you also learn about the people. Each face has a story, and each name and face represents a cornerstone of the community we have become.

Today, this city within a city calls itself home to more 20,000 Charlotte residents and a multitude of businesses large and small. Times have changed, but the arches still remain, standing guard at the four corners of Johnston Road and Ballantyne Commons Parkway.

So the next time you find yourself in Ballantyne, take a little walk, read the placards at the foot of each monument, and learn a little more about the history of the Queen City.

Eric Osterhus

@EricOsterhus

This story was originally published October 6, 2015, 11:00 PM.