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Pals relish burger
Twenty people – from business executives in three-piece suits to long-haired students – line up outside on Hillsborough Street. They’re waiting for what they claim is the best burger money can buy.
Wedged between Odom-Taylor Service Station and the Resurrection Church of Jesus Christ is a little cinder-block building with a 1950s plywood awning painted battleship gray and white.
Twenty people – from business executives in three-piece suits to long-haired students – line up outside on Hillsborough Street. They’re waiting for what they claim is the best burger money can buy.
The Char-Grill: “Home of the Hamburger Steak Sandwich” (according to the sign out front) and a throwback to the days of T-birds, poodle socks and good buys.
“It’s an old-time classic place in Raleigh,” says Barrett Kays, a Raleigh businessman who frequents the place.
Head over in that direction, and a quarter-mile away your mouth begins to water from the aroma of charcoaling hamburgers. You stand outside to order your meal by writing up your own ticket. You peer through the glass windows that surround the building and watch the cooks in their navy pants, starched white shirts and white paper caps as they brown your burger on an open-fire grill.
You wait for your number to be called on a microphone that echoes for two blocks, then you pick up your dinner in a white paper bag and plastic foam cup and go back to your car to eat. (The two picnic tables outside are usually taken.)
You relish every bite, and you come back.
“It was the first place we went in Raleigh when we had a reunion,” says Gina Ellis of Wilson, who graduated from St. Mary’s College last year.
Angela Patrick of Greenville agrees. When Miss Patrick lived in Raleigh a few years ago, she became a Char-Grill fan. “It’s nostalgic,” she says. “It’s stayed wonderful. It’s like a welcome home to Raleigh.”
Raleigh first tasted the Char-Grill’s delights in 1959, after the original owner, Bruce Garner, moved his own house off the site so he could build the eatery on Hillsborough Street. After his death around 1970, his widow leased the building to a series of individuals before the current owners, Ryon Wilder and Mahlon Aycock showed up.
As fraternity brothers at Atlantic Christian College in Wilson in the early 1970s. Wilder and Aycock had talked of going into business.
In 1975, both were out of school and the Char-Grill stood empty – a red, white and blue building with “grease that thick,” says Aycock, his index finger and thumb several inches apart.
Their reaction, Aycock recalls, was, “What the heck, we’ll give it a shot.”
The Char-Grill was reborn.
“We both worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week,” Wilder says. “One of us would sit back in the chair back there and sleep during the afternoon when we weren’t busy. We couldn’t afford to hire anybody.”
Aycock laughs and adds, “We didn’t have any business, so it really didn’t make any difference.”
After about eight months, word began to spread that they were doing the burgers the old-fashioned way. It was about two years before one of them could take a day off and not worry.
“And sleep!” Wilder says.
Today the Char-Grill has three full-time employees aside from the partners, and two college students who work part time. Every day, they serve hundreds of customers who line up outside for hamburger steak sandwiches made with either a half-pound or quarter-pound of meat. Wilder and Aycock order up to 1,000 pounds of hamburger a week to keep their customers happy and well-fed. Prices range from 90 cents for the tree-ounce regular hamburger to $3.54 for the half-pound hamburger steak with fries and a soft drink.
The Char-Grill is open until 1a.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays and until 2 a.m. on Wednesdays through Saturdays. It gets hectic sometimes, but the effort’s worth it, the owners say – especially when it results in a following that even goes beyond the state’s borders.
A couple from Tennessee stopped by recently, and a St. Mary’s graduate from Maryland came by at Christmastime and made a point to tell them she was an old customer. “These people that ate here 15 to 20 years ago are coming back ‘cause they enjoyed it then,” Wilder says.
Their regulars send them Christmas cards and bring them cakes. Some have even come by to show the pair their new baby.
“We have customers that we can almost tell you what they’re gonna order,” Wilder says. Almost as if to prove his point a customer walks up, and before he even gets to the window to order, Wilder calls out, “A large orange?”
The customer’s wife, Wilder says, “needs to have a large orange each morning.”
Aycock smiles. “It seems like a big family sometimes,” he says. “You see some folds and they say, ‘I drove all the way from so-and-so just to get one of these hamburgers.’ You know, that makes you feel good.”
The owners are often asked about expansion, Aycock says. A Kinston physician once called about opening a Char-Grill on some land he owned. “He said if we weren’t interested in selling or franchising, he would like to know what exchange our stock was on because he was interested in purchasing some,” Aycock recalls.
“We got a big laugh out of that.”
But perhaps the best recommendation for Char-Grill food comes from the owners themselves. After eight years of serving hamburgers, the two aren’t tired of them yet.
“I eat a hamburger every day of my life,” Wilder says. “Sometimes I even eat ‘em for breakfast!”
Written By: nbdtodd
Date Posted: 7/9/2007
Number of Views: 514
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