Take Tavern on the Green out of Central Park, for example, and the whole experience would be alien. Put Gary Danko somewhere other than Fisherman’s Wharf, and it simply wouldn’t be the same.
Chefs 105, a contemporary waterfront restaurant in its second year of operation on the Crystal Coast, is similarly a product of its Morehead City environment. From the vintage building’s idiosyncratic curves and angles to the picturesque al fresco views to the fresh seafood that comes off its wood-fired grill mere hours after being caught, Chefs 105 strives to get the most of its locale.
“Local, sustainable, fresh, seasonal—they’re all generic words but really important in the restaurant business, especially around here,” says Andy Hopper, the restaurant’s youthful but experienced chef.
“A lot of times it’s about restraining yourself. You don’t have to be whoever—Emeril—to make good food. Buy good products, restrain yourself, season them right, and people are normally pretty happy with that.”
But while Hopper is committed to letting the ingredients speak for themselves, his methodology is not without lofty influence. A 27-year-old Greensboro native, Hopper worked at The Four Seasons in Scottsdale, Ariz., and he was lured back to North Carolina from Chicago’s famous Spiaggia to open and operate the Morehead City eatery.
Chefs 105—named for its address on 7th Street and its sister restaurant in Greenville—has a handful of core menu items, but the ever-changing specials available to customers on a given day correspond directly with what’s available to fishermen. On the water in Morehead City, therefore, is the only place Chefs 105 could be.
AN INTRIGUING OFFER
When Michael Santos and Kevin Brighton, the owners of Greenville’s chic Chefs 505 restaurant, decided to expand their operation to Morehead City, they knew immediately who to call.
While earning a hospitality/hotel/restaurant management degree at East Carolina, Hopper had worked with the men at a Greenville hotel restaurant and at Chefs 505, which Santos and Brighton took over in 2002. Hopper, who had begun college at Arizona State as a graphic design major before spending a semester backpacking in East Africa, left his sous chef’s post at Chefs 505 for two years at The Four Seasons.
Bennette Hopper, his fiancée at the time, was keeping the books at a fine steakhouse in Chicago, halfway across the country. Andy Hopper, with an impending wedding date, left Arizona and went to Chicago jobless, “with visions of whatever,” he says.
Those visions turned into a position as sous chef at Spiaggia, the city’s only 4-star Italian restaurant and a consistent nominee for the prestigious James Beard Foundation Award, which Time magazine has called “the Oscars of the food world.”
“Some people don’t even get a chance to eat at a restaurant like that in their lifetime,” says Brighton, a New Jersey native. “He was working side by side with these people.”
“It was just an awesome experience, obviously,” Hopper says.
“It doesn’t get any better than that.”
Santos and Brighton, who met Hopper when the three men were in school at ECU, had kept Hopper on the back burner of their minds.
“We always said if we were going to do anything else, we wanted to have Andy involved in it,” says Brighton. “He’s somebody that we enjoyed working with, and we knew that he could take what we wanted to do to the next level, which he has done here, totally.”
Santos, the executive chef at Chefs 505, first discovered the vacant old oil company plant on the waterfront in late 2006. Built of brick in 1929 with a high, parabolic ceiling to allow oil trucks to enter, it was an unusual building that had housed a restaurant until about a year earlier. The partners called Hopper in Chicago to see if he had any interest in returning to his home state. There was only one way to find out.
The Hoppers were flown down to have a look at the structure, which showed signs of its lifelessness. The tour, to understate things considerably, went well. “We came here, pulled up to the waterfront, looked at the building and decided on the way home that we were going to leave Chicago and come down here and open a restaurant,” recalls Andy Hopper, now a co-owner of Chefs 105 with Santos and Brighton.
With help from friends and the families of all parties—the latter of which were extremely supportive, Bennette Hopper says—the group set out in February 2007 to open the place by May. There were walls to be painted, wood to be stained, menus to be written, wine to be tasted.
As they worked on the building, Santos, Brighton and the Hoppers—along with four dogs—rented a small house nearby. When they started to hire friends to work in the restaurant, their home life became a season of “The Real World: Morehead City.”
The restaurant opened, as planned, that May. By the summer, just a few months removed from the Hoppers’ November wedding, there were 11 people sharing the 1,000-square-foot, four-bedroom house with one tiny bathroom and no dishwasher.
The Hoppers look back on the unusual start to their business—and their marriage—and can’t help but shake their heads. “One day she looked at me and said, ‘If you don’t get me out of here, we’re going to have some serious problems,’ ” Andy Hopper says, and both spouses laugh at the memory.
Today, Chefs 105 operates with a nod to its Greenville origins. It shares many loyal, vacationing customers and a few essential dishes—a rib-eye, crab cakes and crab dip—with Chefs 505, but Andy Hopper, with help from Santos and Brighton, keeps the menu as fresh as the catches that come in off the sea each day.
Among the providers Hopper uses are Blue Oyster Market for local seafood; Garner Farms vegetables; North Carolina Elm Tree Farms lamb, from near Greensboro; Heirloom pork; and only prime and certified Angus.
“A lot of people might not care when they sit down to eat whether my lamb came from 2 1/2 hours, 3 hours from here,” says Andy Hopper, who changes the menu a few times a year to keep it seasonal. “But it didn’t come from Australia, I’ll tell you that.”
The spacious restaurant seats 126, but it’s even bigger than it looks. Down a colorfully painted, sunlit hallway near the main entrance is an expansive banquet room that seats 55 and can accommodate a cocktail party for 150 to 200.
Jeremy Weber, who started as a server at Chefs 105 the day it opened and was named manager this spring, says the restaurant’s owners offer their own twist to fine dining in Carteret County.
“I think they’ve brought something kind of new to the area in the way they’re presenting it, the way the dishes are done and the flavors,” says Weber, a Morehead City native whose family has lived in the area since the 1700s. “They all have such a broad spectrum of knowledge. They’ve picked up a lot of different things from a lot of different areas, and you see that reflected in their cooking and with having such good skills at what they do.”
And Brighton, who says he learns something new every time he’s in the kitchen with Hopper, believes he and Santos made the right move in bringing him to the coast.
“Andy’s always wanting to learn more, so you know that it’s not going to be mundane,” Brighton says. “You’re not going to come in and get the same thing every time you come in here. For somebody that has his motivation and his drive, that wheel is always churning.”
Hopper, despite his training and practical education in some of the nation’s finest kitchens, insists that his best tool is his understanding the importance of not doing too much to the food. Asked to recommend a must-try dish at Chefs 105, he is quick to answer: “A piece of local fish on the wood-burning grill with some extra virgin olive oil and sea salt,” Hopper says. “I mean, it doesn’t get much more like the ocean than that, you know?”
BALANCING ACT
As the Hoppers chat with a couple of visitors on the restaurant’s back patio—the site of live, free party band and reggae performances on Fridays and Saturdays all summer—two customers enter through the patio door facing the waterfront.
“Are they open?” a woman asks the chef, who’s dressed in street clothes. “We just want something to drink and an appetizer.”
“Oh, they have that,” he replies with a wry smile.
“They’ll definitely have that for you,” his wife adds as the women enter the dining room, unaware who “they” are. The Hoppers laugh mischievously, displaying the requisite sense of humor required of couples who spend so much time together.
Bennette Hopper handles the bookkeeping for the restaurant and tends bar when needed. She was the restaurant’s manager for the first year it was open, until Weber accepted the post when she took an accounting job at a local country club.
The Hoppers are one of many couples in the area who help operate a restaurant, but it’s unlikely that any of those couples met any earlier in life than they did. The Hoppers and the Cornwells—Bennette’s family—were friends before the restaurateurs were even born. The families lived on the same Greensboro street and remain close to this day.
The two went to elementary school, middle school and high school together, and they began dating when Andy was a junior and Bennette, now 26, was a sophomore.
“And we did have a crush on each other in elementary school,” says Bennette, who’s outgoing personality complements her husband’s easygoing style. “We didn’t go out in elementary school.”
Andy sinks into his chair and puts a hand over his face. “Please don’t print all this,” he says as they both laugh.
Andy Hopper can come across as somewhat guarded, but in a good way. He’s open and opinionated on matters epicurean but clearly uncomfortable talking about himself or his accomplishments, preferring to deflect credit to the owners and staff as a whole.
Hopper dismisses questions about the long hours required in the restaurant business, fearing that his fellow chefs would view it as complaining. “I feel guilty when I’m not here,” is all he’ll offer, no doubt to the knowing nods of those in the business.
What the Hoppers do have in common is a love of working out, being on their boat and their dogs, a black lab and a yellow lab. They’re deeply fond of their families, and they regularly have friends from Greensboro in town, many of whom help out at the restaurant. Creighton McNeil, who grew up with the Hoppers in the Piedmont, is described by Andy Hopper as his “right-hand man,” able to run the kitchen in his rare absence. “We’ve got some Greensboro in here,” says Bennette Hopper.
He’d never tell you, but Andy Hopper won first place for a black truffle and lobster risotto at the Beaufort Wine and Food Weekend gala this year, a fact announced with great joy by his proud wife. As she retrieves his medal and certificate to show off, Hopper again slinks in embarrassment, saying, “I’m glad to have her to do stuff like that, because I certainly wouldn’t do it.”
Bennette, by contrast, says, “He’s so humble. When I win stuff I’m like, ‘I won this!’”
The award, says Brighton, is another step toward building Chefs 105’s reputation as a fine dining destination. “We’re trying to put ourselves on the map here,” he says, “and serving great food like that, that’s how you’re going to do it.”
Andy Hopper, sitting on the patio and sipping a glass of iced tea before the dinner rush, opines about the advantages of running a restaurant in a vacation area. The customers, he’s learned, have generally left their troubles back home, and they’re usually in a good mood when they walk in the door.
“Let’s just keep it that way,” he says, hinting again at his minimalist approach to fresh seafood.
“I like Morehead, I like the attitude, I like Carteret County. It’s a big change from Chicago, but it’s an easy one to get into. It’s a nice lifestyle to get into.”
And so far, Chefs 105 has fit right in.