Most travelers are familiar with the free continental breakfast included with mid-tier hotel stays: Fruit Loops and Raisin Bran in self-serve towers, muffins and bagels in a plexiglass cabinet, cups of yogurt and, if you’re lucky, waffle batter and a hot iron. Despite some brands experimenting with reducing or eliminating this freebie, it’s still relatively commonplace. Free dinner, on the other hand? That’s unheard of.
So, the billboard along Interstate 40 advertising a Free Southern Supper at the Days Inn in Candler, North Carolina, is a brilliant marketing ploy, likely to make most travelers do a double take. Hearkening to the mountain region’s boarding house days of yore, this Days Inn is willing to feed you not once, but twice—all for the cost of your room ($90, if you stay on a Tuesday).
The Days Inn in Candler has never been anything but. The brand opened here in the 1960s. Back then, the perk was getting a full tank of gas with your overnight stay. (Talk about a perk that’s unimaginable in today’s climate.)
Melton Harrell of American Motel Management (AMM), who operates several small motels and hotels across the Southeast, owns this 116-room roadside motel. Around 2016, Harrell paid a visit to his property and noticed some tired workers from the nearby paper mill eating a makeshift dinner out of the vending machine.
“They were doing something that required them to work long days and they were just exhausted,” he said. “We decided to give those guys free supper since we already had the kitchen set up for breakfast. It turned into every day for everybody.”
Harrell also started offering supper at two of his other establishments: a Super 8 in Lake City, Florida, and another Days Inn in Natchez, Mississippi.
The Candler paper mill shut down in 2023, but the Free Southern Supper had by then become a fixture. Jim Laub, who’s been the motel’s general manager since 2016, says guests appreciate it as much as the workers did.
For vacationers from Kentucky or Ohio on their way to the East Coast beaches or Florida, he said, “It’s a good stopping point… and there’s nothing to eat here.”
That’s a problem for many of the Days Inn guests, from truckers with broken-down rigs (there’s a diesel repair shop just down the road) to weary travelers who don’t feel like returning to the traffic-laden nightmare that is I-40, even though the comparative mecca of food offerings in Asheville is only a few miles east.
“It’s a stressful drive,” Laub said. “It’s not exactly a jaunt into town. If I had a dime for every time somebody said, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so glad to get off 40!’”
Laub has to be prepared to serve every guest that’s staying at the hotel, even though that’s a rare occurrence.
“You could have a full house, and you may not serve anybody,” he said. “[But] we see a lot of people that plan on being here because they know we have supper.”
Back in 2016, the initial offering was decidedly simple—a cup of soup and packaged crackers to satiate the paper mill workers. Now, it’s evolved into more of a true meal. On the Wednesday night I visited, supper was chicken stew over mashed potatoes with lima beans and dinner rolls. I don’t think I’ve had lima beans since my mother served them to me 30 years ago.
“It could be anything from spaghetti to a vegetable casserole, soup, cornbread,” said Laub. “Macaroni-and-cheese with beef, like Hamburger Helper. Sometimes, if you’re feeling froggy, you’ll put some tomatoes in there. It’s things that aren’t going to break the house. We’re obviously not doing prime rib. Like a Southern cook, we’re taking five pounds of chicken and making meals for 60 people.”
When it comes to stretching ingredients, Laub says the Days Inn abides by the “the Southern mother rule.”
“If you don’t like it today, you’re going to love it tomorrow,” he said. “You’re reusing something that you cooked maybe a couple of days ago, which in the case of chicken stew, soups, and stuff like that, it’s often better.”
Considering the creativity and resourcefulness this role requires, Laub says it’s hard to hire for the dinner shift. He ends up doing most of the cooking himself. Laub started in food and beverage, operating hotel restaurants in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where a cook he called Maddie could make a week’s worth of lunches from ground beef:
“She would start Monday with meatloaf, then it would be shepherd’s pie, and by the end of the week, it could be taco meat or something. I was always very respectful of that.”
If repurposed leftovers at a small highway motel doesn’t sound gourmet, that’s because it’s not supposed to be. The Free Southern Supper is about sustenance, convenience, and affordability.
“Going to a restaurant is, for most of us, something we do for pleasure and joy, not necessarily because we’re hungry,” said Harrell.
Free breakfast and supper allows Harrell’s guests to save their money and energy for the restaurant experiences they want to have.
I asked both Harrell and Laub—why call it supper? Why not free dinner? They answered the same way.
“Supper is a more Southern term,” said Harrell, who grew up in the Florida panhandle, within striking distance of the Alabama state line. “When I grew up it was always supper. We had breakfast, dinner, and supper—we didn’t have lunch.”
Supper, he said, was a better fit, because this stretch of western North Carolina—where no self-respecting host is going to let someone eat dinner out of a vending machine—“is the real South.”
A feature-length documentary about the closure of Canton’s paper mill, Papertown, is set to screen in Haywood County this Sunday, days before its world premiere at Mountain FilmFestival. At press time, there was still room at the Days Inn.
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