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The Pyewacket Restaurant (1977 - 2002)
by Charly Mann
For twenty-five years the Pyewacket was the best place in Chapel Hill to enjoy a sumptuous vegetarian meal and a delightfully sinful desert. It also had the best bar in town. The creative force behind this great restaurant was Mary Bacon, who had previously opened Somethyme and Anotherthyme in Durham. All of Mary’s restaurants offered incredible meals that were centered on great nutrition, presentation, inventiveness, and sophistication.
Pyewacket had it’s origins in Chapel Hill’s first vegetarian restaurant, The Wildflower Café, which was located between the former Colonial Drug Store and Record and Tape Center on West Franklin Street. Mary and her former husband, David Bacon, bought the Wildflower in 1977 turning it into the Pyewacket. Mary’s culinary genius made the restaurant so successful that it soon moved across the street in January 1980 as the anchor tenant of the Courtyard (this had been the location for thirty years of the Long Meadow Dairy Bar). The new restaurant was three times larger than the original. David, who was now solely in charge of the business, transformed this new incarnation from a natural food’s restaurant into a great restaurant that served healthy food. The menu changed every month to reflect seasonal specialties, and always featured an array of the best cuisines from around the world, including Mediterranean, Oriental, Southwestern and Middle Eastern.
Through much of it’s history Pyewacket drew large crowds from all over the Triangle. It became Chapel Hill’s favorite place to bring visitors and share a wonderful meal with friends. The best place to sit was the solarium room that looked out into the courtyard and the magnificent dancing couple sculpture. Each meal at the Pyewacket was a special experience that made one glad to live in Chapel Hill.
Inside of Pyewacket looking into solarium room
The Pyewacket Bar was Chapel Hill’s premier drinking establishment throughout the 1980’s and 90’s. What made it great were the two best bartenders in town Marc Formato and Breta Stroud, who knew how to mix some of the greatest alcohol concoctions every created, including their renowned Raspberry Tea made with vodka, gin, light rum, lemon juice, Triple Sec, and Chambord, and the Bossa Nova, which combined Myer's rum, Galliano, apricot brandy, and pineapple juice. I recall my favorite drink being their Windjammer.
Pyewacket Bar Speciality Drink Menu
By 2000 evening crime on West Franklin Street had curtailed people from venturing to the Courtyard at night. La Patisserie and the tobacco shop at the Courtyard closed first, followed by the Pyewacket in August of 2002. Today Penang, a Malaysian restaurant, is located where the Pyewacket use to be.
Comments:
kathy speas
5:22 PM Tue 11/17/2009
I worked that kitchen from 1981-1983, several VERY hot summers. I can still smell the walk-in beer cooler at Fowler's Grocery where we went to recuperate after work.
kathy speas
5:20 PM Tue 11/17/2009
I e-mailed Mary Bacon and asked her for the recipe for Lemon Tamari dressing (a little googling and you can track her down), as I have been craving it for YEARS. I swore upon my life that it was not for commercial purposes, and she graciously sent it to me! I would share it with you, but I don't want to dishonor her gracious sharing of the recipe. (I did cook in that kitchen from 1981-1983, but she wouldn't have remembered me). She'd probably send it to you too. Ask her!
Patricia Fields Neubert
12:00 AM Thu 8/20/2009
I returned to Chapel Hill in the summer 1981 for my 10th class reunion (CHHS 1971) and my parents took me to lunch at the Pyewacket.
I loved the "Morning Star" salad so much, I sketched a diagram of it on a paper towel from the ladies room and to this day, have it stuck in one of my cookbooks! Oh how I miss the Lemon Tahini dressing!
But I also remember the Dairy Bar at that location - great hamburgers and milk shakes.
Fagan Goodwin
9:21 AM Mon 5/18/2009
Oh the memories. I worked here toward the end. Some of my FAVORITE people and food! We miss you!!!!
Stephen Davis
11:55 AM Wed 5/6/2009
There should be a commemorative plaque at the Courtyard noting the history of this great restaurant.
Missy Harrison
10:25 AM Tue 5/5/2009
Thanks for keeping the memory of this great restaurant alive. I hope David Bacon is doing well today.
Mary Brill
5:11 PM Mon 5/4/2009
There will never be another Pyewacket. Everything about it was unique. I do not think it will ever be economically feasible to have another upscale vegetarian restaurant in Chapel Hill.
Kip Frances
3:25 PM Mon 5/4/2009
I lived in Chapel Hill and Raleigh from 1982 until 1997. The Pyewacket was my favorite restaurant. It is incredible to me that a place that was so great, and also so crowded, could have gone out of business.
Chapel Hill is located on a hill whose only distinguishing feature in the 18th century was a small chapel on top called New Hope Chapel. This church was built in 1752 and is currently the location of The Carolina Inn. The town was founded in 1819, and chartered in 1851.
What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls. or the crisp October nights. No, our love for this place is based upon the fact that it is as it was meant to be, The University of the People.
-- Charles Kuralt
Dark Side of the Hill -- Pink Floyd, the creators of the most popular album in history, Dark Side of the Moon, took the second half of their name from Floyd Council, a Chapel Hill native, and great blues singer and guitarist. He once belonged to a group called "The Chapel Hillbillies".
Check out Charly Mann's other website:
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
There would probably be no Chapel Hill if the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees in 1793 had not chosen land across from New Hope Chapel for the location of the university. By 1800 there were about 100 people living in thirty houses surrounding the campus.
The University North Carolina's first student was Hinton James, who enrolled in February, 1795. There is now a dormitory on the campus named in his honor.
The University of North Carolina was closed from 1870 to 1875 because of lack of state funding.
William Ackland left his art collection and $1.25 million to Duke University in 1940 on the condition that he would be buried in the art museum that the University was to build with his bequest. Duke rejected this condition even though members of the Duke Family are buried in Duke Chapel. What followed was a long and acrimonious legal battle between Ackland relatives who now wanted the inheritance, Rollins College, and the University of North Carolina, each attempting to receive the funds. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and in 1949 UNC was awarded the money for the museum. Ackland is buried near the museum's entrance. When the museum first opened, in the early sixties, there were rumors that his remains were leaking out of the mausoleum.
The official name of the Arboretum on the University of North Carolina campus is the Coker Arboretum. It is named after Dr. William Cocker, the University's first botany professor. It occupies a little more than five acres. It was founded in 1903.
Chapel Hill's main street has always been called Franklin Street. It was named after Benjamin Franklin in the early 1790s.
Chapel Hill High School and Chapel Hill Junior High were on Franklin Street in the same location as University Square until the mid 1960s.
The Colonial Drug Store at 450 West Franklin Street was owned and operated by John Carswell. It was famous for a fresh-squeezed carbonated orange beverage called a "Big O". In the early 1970s, I managed the Record and Tape Center next door, and must have had over 100 of those drinks. The Colonial Drug Store closed in 1996.
Sutton's Drugstore, which opened in 1923, has one of the last soda fountains in the South. It is one of the few businesses remaining on Franklin Street that was in operation when I was growing up in the 1950s.
Future President Gerald Ford lived in Chapel Hill twice. First when he was 24, in 1938, he took a law couse in summer school at UNC. He lived in the Carr Building, which was a law school dormitory. At the same time, Richard Nixon, the man he served under as Vice President, was attending law school at Duke. In 1942, Ford returned to Chapel Hill to attend the U.S. Navy's Pre-Flight School training program. He lived in a rental house on Hidden Hills Drive.
I still make my MSBs and Delancey Street Specials, but they are never as wonderful as just being there. I miss it so much. So many lovely, lovely memories.