As a component of The Food Section’s partnership with The Assembly, I write a monthly column about food in North Carolina for the digital magazine’s readers. While some of the coverage is highly state-specific, this story by definition is applicable to eaters across the country, so wanted to share it here.
Markiss Stone has only been an influencer since late 2021, but the 39-year-old car salesman can speed read a restaurant dining room for its Instagram appeal.
No question that the Tupelo Honey Café in Indianapolis, where Stone lives, has plenty. When the company invited him to check out the location shortly after its April opening, he noticed the fizzy, sunset-hued sangria, named in homage to a Kendrick Lamar song, and the mac-and-cheese waffles capped with dill pickles.
“They’re hitting the majority of the must-do lists for 2023,” Stone said in a phone interview after his visit, the centerpiece of a reel viewed more than 250,000 times by Hoosiers who’d heard the Tupelo Honey hype. “They have the flower walls, since people in the 25-34 age range don’t want just four pieces of drywall, a nice selection of food, and a patio.”
He concluded, “Whoever is on the marketing research team knows how to attract a younger, more affluent audience. I didn’t think country food there.”
Since opening in Asheville in 2000, Tupelo Honey has morphed from a quirky late-night restaurant dressing up Southern ingredients for locals to a gargantuan restaurant chain simplifying Southern classics for the entire country. Having traded its signature sweet potato pancakes for stackable fried chicken, Tupelo Honey Café has 22 locations from Boise to Pittsburgh, with plans to open another half a dozen locations each year.
FSR Magazine, a trade publication, earlier this year reported that Tupelo Honey is projecting $100 million in revenue in 2024, based on an annual-unit-volume of $4 million, meaning each store rakes in more money than the average McDonald’s.
“We’re right there with Chili’s and Olive Garden,” CEO Stephen Frabitore told FSR. “That tells you that when we do our jobs right, the guest responds to us in a meaningful way.”
Tupelo Honey’s growth has been carefully managed by Frabitore, who bought the brand in 2008. The one-time trapeze artist didn’t have any restaurant experience, but he has a deep understanding of expansion: In the late 1990s, Frabitore was a top executive at Rexall Sundown, a Boca Raton-based vitamin and supplement producer acquired by a Dutch conglomerate in 2000 for $1.8 billion.
“Sundown has identified a category need, articulated it and executed it with its retail partners, and the consumer continues to vote positively,” Frabitore told Chain Drug Review in 1997.
Tupelo Honey declined to make a representative available for an interview, or answer any questions for this story, but it appears that Frabitore and other Rexall alums on his company’s board are intent on giving Southern hospitality a taste of their medicine.
Just weeks after Tupelo Honey opened its doors across from downtown Asheville’s Pritchard Park, then on the cusp of becoming the backdrop to the city’s notorious drum circle, the restaurant’s “upscale Southern cuisine with a twist,” received its first rave review.
Citizen-Times correspondent Susan T. Parke had only one complaint in her January 12, 2001 writeup: Her editor restricted her to one use of the phrase “to die for” when assessing a restaurant. Accordingly, the goat cheese grits were “amazing,” the pimento cheese omelet with roasted red peppers was “incredible,” and the filet mignon on homemade sourdough was “mouthwatering.”
Behind the scenes, though, the crew was struggling. Owner Sharon Schott went through three kitchen managers in 10 months as they hustled to pull off Schott’s vision of New Orleans-accented comfort food for hungry crowds. “It was a baby restaurant just learning to walk,” said Brian Sonoskus, a New Jersey native who was cooking at Magnolia’s Raw Bar & Grill when he saw Tupelo Honey’s classified ad seeking a chef.
As Sonoskus remembers it, the all-woman team in Tupelo’s kitchen was relieved to see a thirty-something Deadhead fresh off a recuperative wander through Latin America. “They had been interviewing a chef coat, clipboard guy,” he said.
Instead, Schott hired Sonoskus, who brought his laidback attitude and sweet potato pancake recipe to the fledging restaurant. When he arrived, Tupelo closed each afternoon at 3 p.m., but he pointed out how many customers were tugging on the locked front door. Before long, Tupelo had stretched out its schedule so days that began with early bird breakfasters ended with workers from other restaurants in search of post-shift drinks.
It wasn’t uncommon then for Tupelo to serve upward of 500 people a day. In 2004, one of those people was Rachael Ray.
After Ray featured Tupelo Honey Café in an episode of her popular Food Network show, $40 a Day, regular customers got used to waiting in even longer lines. Area reporters, half flabbergasted by the restaurant’s commanding success, sometimes polled tourists to see if the restaurant lived up to their expectations.
“We are 700 miles from home, and this has been the best all the way,” a Kosciusko, Mississippi visitor said after an order of pancakes.
But it wasn’t just the local press taking an interest in Tupelo Honey. Travel writers across the Southeast alerted their readers to Asheville’s must-eat restaurant, with the Tampa Bay Times recommending the crab meat omelet with edible flowers, and the Miami Herald praising the candied ginger cornbread.
There’s no way of knowing whether Stephen Frabitore saw either feature, but he and his wife, Jennifer—both alumni of Florida State University’s circus performance program—bought a Biltmore Forest home in 2008.
“He’s a very motivated gentleman,” Sonoskus was quoted as saying of Frabitore after the 2008 ownership change was announced.
A little over a year later, the Asheville dining public got an idea of what Sonoskus meant: A second Tupelo Honey was in the works for South Asheville. While Frabitore pledged it would retain the aesthetics of the original, it was designed to accommodate 150 people, or three times as many guests as the downtown location. For the first time, Tupelo Honey would take reservations.
Another first was a Tupelo Honey cookbook, issued in 2011. Sonoskus and marketing director Elizabeth Sims collaborated on the book, which formalized the restaurant’s brand as “sassy, scrumptious, [and] representative of the New South.”
The following year, Frabitore confirmed the rumor that Tupelo Honey was expanding to Knoxville. “It boils down to the fact that we have a good product in an underserved niche,” he said at the time.
For Sonoskus, the first opening was terrifically fun. Tupelo Honey fans in the habit of schlepping two hours through the mountains for sweet potato pancakes couldn’t believe they’d lucked into immediate access to their favorite restaurant. As in Asheville, the Knoxville restaurant brimmed with a can-do Appalachian spirit, and some wonderment that Southern food was suddenly saleable.
But then Tupelo made its way into markets where diners didn’t have warm memories of the little restaurant on College Street. Sonoskus went from slinging black bean burgers to making PowerPoint presentations to potential investors, always starting his pitch with the same line, guaranteed to make the bigwigs chuckle: “I’m from the South. South Jersey.”
When he was a student at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, fileting flatfish and simmering fumé, Sonoskus never imagined ending up in a windowed office overlooking Mount Pisgah. He couldn’t fathom supervising 900 employees or living out of a suitcase as he traveled from one new location to the next.
“After Knoxville, it got old fast,” he said of the 10 openings that came in quick succession. Greenville. Charlotte. Myrtle Beach. Raleigh.
By the time Tupelo Honey reached Raleigh in early 2015, it had overhauled its image. The chain came up with a salad menu, scaled back portion sizes, and retired its mustard-yellow dishware, even though the color was so synonymous with the restaurant that it backgrounded the dust jacket on that first cookbook. “We were photographing food and I was like, ‘We can’t make things look good’,” Sims told the Citizen-Times of the switch to white plates.
Looking good was very important. When Tupelo’s “latest and greatest thinking” was unveiled at its new Atlanta location in 2016, one of its exemplars was a fried chicken tower, assembled from two breasts, two thighs, four biscuits, and blueberry jam. Almost nothing on the menu was ordered more frequently.
Fried chicken has remained central to the Tupelo Honey brand, albeit not always arranged vertically. Brunchers these days can choose among fried chicken on a biscuit, fried chicken on a waffle, and fried chicken on a bun. The menu also lists avocado toast, a bacon-and-egg scramble, and shrimp-and-grits, but it’s the rare table at which someone doesn’t order the consistently tender chicken with a honey-sweetened crust.
When Tupelo Honey on June 13 declared its Las Colinas, Texas restaurant ready for guests, it illustrated its Instagram post with a reel of an influencer sampling the chicken and waffles—and “doing a little dance because it was so delicious.”
“I thoroughly enjoyed it,” Stone, the Indianapolis influencer, said when we talked. “I don’t know what seasoning they’re putting on it, but I loved it.”
The secret swaying factor in this case might not be salt or paprika. It could be the fruit-bright cocktails, the “kiss my grits” written in cursive neon light near the entrance, or data tracking that allows Tupelo Honey servers to scrutinize guests’ dining histories before going over the nightly specials.
None of those elements are in place at Star Diner in Marshall, North Carolina—the restaurant Sonoskus opened in 2017, after leaving Tupelo Honey.
Leveraging his relationships with local growers and his facility in the retrofitted service station’s all-electric kitchen, he and his wife, Kate, have made Star into one of western North Carolina’s top special occasion destinations.
Star isn’t a cheap meal. Sonoskus buys the best ingredients he can find, and lets guests linger at their linen-covered tables for two or three hours. But guests don’t seem to mind paying $28 for seasonal mushroom linguine with roasted red peppers, or $35 for scallops atop goat cheese grit cakes.
Sonoskus says he’s the most content he’s ever been, and western North Carolinians who miss the early, scrappy, offbeat Tupelo share his satisfaction. But for diners who prefer the contemporary iteration, there’s another Tupelo Honey Cafe opening in Knoxville next year, as well as one in Rogers, Arkansas. And Columbia, South Carolina. And Gainesville, Georgia.
By the end of 2024, Tupelo Honey will have locations in 17 states.
I appreciate this insight. I hate what Tupelo Honey became. Even when the Greenville outpost opened, it was a more upscale interior, but it still served the same great food of the original outpost. I could get a pancake bigger than my face at 9 pm if I wanted. It was never cheap, but you definitely felt like you got what you paid for. Then the switch happened. We went to brunch once and the cost didn’t align with either the amount or quality of food we received and this was way pre-pandemic. Since then, I have yet to be back. When your CEO is favorably comparing your to Chilis and Olive Garden, it’s obviously about the profits and not the food. It is a business after all.