Off the Griddle but Still in the Heart
The owners of a college-town icon that closed during the pandemic share their secret sauce for keeping its spirit alive.
There was one restaurant that felt like home when you were in college.
Not because the food was comforting, though it always was. Not because you’d spot someone you knew there, though you usually did. It felt like home because an actual family had been working behind the counter long before you arrived on campus with your homesickness, your Walkman full of Smiths songs, and your hopes that your potluck roommate would leave her pet python at home in Portland. (She did not, but that is another story.)
For me—and for a lot of other people who attended the University of North Carolina—that restaurant was Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, a breakfast icon that opened in 1972. A senior I was dating introduced me to Ye Olde when I was a sophomore in 1993, and I was immediately smitten by the bustling, narrow eatery and its protective, attentive, spirited staff. Joyce, our server, routinely poured her sugary voice over our booth like she was casting a spell, teeing up my date so that he had no choice but to pay me compliments.
“Doesn’t she have a beautiful smile?”
“Yes, she does.”
“That must be why you love her.”
“Actually, it’s because she pays.”
The witty guy left for law school, but my relationship with Joyce endured. When I went to see her the following fall, she asked me where “that nice young man” had gone—and promptly tried to set me up with a basketball player who was carb-loading alone at the other end of her counter.
“You two would make a nice couple,” she told us, winking.1
Love—or something like it—was always cooking at Ye Olde. For 48 years, until it closed its doors for good in 2020 due to the financial strain of the pandemic, the place was made for first dates, friendship, convalescence, community, and celebration.
It was made for family.
Ye Olde’s credo was ensconced behind its walls—literally. When Jimmy and Linda Chris moved to Chapel Hill to renovate the family-owned building where they would open Ye Olde, they purchased brick and timber from a salvage yard 80 miles away. They later discovered the materials had come from the Greek Orthodox church where they had been married, and where both Jimmy and his oldest daughter, Nicole, had been baptized.
“Jimmy was once asked what he attributed his success to,” Linda recalled of her husband, who died in 2012 at age 71. “And he said, ‘I took the bones of my church and built them into the building.’”
He built his life into the restaurant, too, and invited everyone to come inside—even when a staff shortage struck the morning after his daughter Melissa’s wedding in 2003.
“He said, ‘I have to go in. I have no choice,’ Linda said. “I reminded him that we had a lot of people in town, and he said, ‘They’ll come to say goodbye there.’ And they did, one after another, trickling in, saying hello and saying goodbye while he worked the grill.”
Ye Olde diners multiplied in families over five decades, wave after wave of familiar faces. They were professors and politicians, electricians and mechanics. They were patients at the university hospital, taking a cab to Ye Olde and struggling to walk inside for their favorite meal. They were students who graduated and came back with their children and grandchildren.
Four years after Ye Olde served its last omelet, Linda and her daughter, Melissa Peng, reflected on the lessons they learned from the restaurant, its impact on their lives, and its echoes in the community it helped define.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did the two of you grow personally through your experiences at Ye Olde?
Melissa Peng: When my dad passed, Mom and I decided to jump in together and run Ye Olde as a team. We worked toward our own vision of running the business. We asked customers for input. We worked on the quality of the food and efficiency. We told stories on the back of the menus. Mom is really great with that sort of thing—she was an English major at Wake Forest—so it was time for her to shine. My dad had created the business with her. They created the recipes in their apartment when they moved to Chapel Hill. So it was time for her to fill the space with her voice after all those years of my dad being on-site running it.
And I found that it related well to my college major. [Ed. note: Peng, a Hollins graduate, is an accomplished former dancer and choreographer who worked with the American Dance Festival.] Dance is communal. It’s really about the community you’re moving with. And there was a lot of movement inside the waffle shop. On the weekends, especially on game days, we had to move as a team, we had to be in sync. I carried what I learned running and operating a dance company right into the waffle shop: How do you get everyone to work together? How do you avoid it becoming mundane? The customers who came in fueled us. You have this inner energy, but then you have this external group of people bringing something to you daily. You never knew what was going to walk in your door.
Linda Chris: It was like a performance. Really, the restaurant evolved over time with each of our skills. My husband was Greek, and Greek people love to welcome and feed you. Melissa was in dance. I am a retired social worker. We each brought something different. I was a little bit incognito because I would come in dressed in a Ye Olde shirt and a hat. And sometimes people thought, Oh, this is just an older woman who needs to supplement her income. So people shared with me; they were very frank, and I liked that because I could get input about what they liked, what they didn't like, what was acceptable, and what wasn't.
And you learned what mattered to people. I would say to a couple, “Maybe you don't want to sit in front of the dishwasher.” And they'd say, “No, we do, because that's the spot where we met.”
The beautiful thing about the waffle shop was that you could have the mayor or (former UNC System President) Bill Friday sitting next to a maintenance worker or a student, and they could be having a conversation. We were known for that, too, because people felt at ease; they felt a wholeness and a connection. They felt free to converse with one another. And that was really interesting, the exchange of ideas.
It was also a place of genuine kindness. For new students coming in, it wasn’t just about the comfort food. It was also about the person behind the counter asking them what they were studying and showing real interest.
MP: I loved getting to know the students. I remember there was a guy who skateboarded to Ye Olde over all four years. He stored his skateboard under the counter while he ate.
LC: Oh, it was always exciting when school would begin and the freshmen would come in with their parents who had known us or heard about us. Parents would ask me to keep an eye on their children. They would actually give me their numbers so I could contact them if need be. I never had to call anyone, but if I had to, I could have. I understood. I had two daughters. When a mother a father send their children off, they want to feel like they’re going to be OK, right?
Right! I have been swept up by people all my life who weren’t my family, who have just sort of guided me because I seemed like I needed it—and I usually did.
LC: And they made you feel like you belonged.
And they made me feel like I belonged. Exactly. I want that for my kids, too. I hope they’ll read these newsletters when they’re feeling a little lost in life. But I also hope they’ll find their own Joyce, their own Linda, their own Melissa.
LC: I think that’s important, too. We created that feeling of belonging by greeting people not just with that scent of sweet waffles and pancakes and cinnamon and comfort that reminded them of home, but also by welcoming them in. When Melissa and I started working together, we refocused the staff on greeting people when they came in the door, as you would a guest in your home.
MP: We set an example at the shop, and people noticed. I was thinking about the question you posed when you reached out to us: “How do you build a community?” You are a community, and then people gravitate to it. You see it. You recognize it, you feel it. You walk into a space and know you’ve found one.
LC: You can’t just create it. It has to develop. People know when you are genuine.
MP: It takes time. It’s a commitment of work, heart, time, effort.
I think that’s the loss that everyone feels when a place like Ye Olde closes. There’s the passing of all that important history, but more deeply, you’re saying goodbye to a feeling that can’t easily be recreated. Even as a customer, it feels as if a part of your own family is gone.
LC: I get teary now thinking about what you’re saying. We come upon people now in the community who see us out grocery shopping, and there’s this recognition. It’s, Where do I know you from? When Jimmy was alive, I would experience that with him. He was a little bit like a celebrity.
And you know, the other thing is, when we closed during the pandemic, none of us actually had our last breakfast.
MP: That’s right. We were so busy that weekend before the forced closure, and I was just absorbing it. We didn’t know (March 15th) was going to be our last Sunday. We didn't know what the future entailed. It was a scary time. And when the governor’s order for closure came in, we realized that we couldn’t repurpose with a take-out window to keep afloat and still be us—the place of community that was so much a part of our identity. We wanted to go out with all of those feelings of nostalgia that people had for Ye Olde intact, the feelings we had for it, too.
How does Ye Olde continue to influence your lives now?
MP: I know that I greet people now the same way I would at Ye Olde: I genuinely ask how they’re doing. Do they need anything? What are their interests? Even people I meet now with whom I have no connection, who have no idea that I ran a restaurant. I try to carry what I learned about connecting at Ye Olde into the rest of my life.
And there are ways that it still appears in everyone’s lives. When we decided that we would close the restaurant for good, we talked about what to do with everything inside. We donated food to our staff and to the community, auctioned t-shirts to raise money for the Lineberger Cancer Center at UNC, and donated our equipment to [substance abuse treatment facility] TROSA.
LC: The church across the street got the plates, the coffee cups, and the pans. It was all dispersed. The pieces of Ye Olde went out into the community, like a series of organ donations. We spread our love and our family around. All of its heart. Just like the timber and the brick from the church had helped build Ye Olde. Jimmy would have loved that because everything was used again. So you feel its presence all around.
You’ve been careful about what goes in the space next, too.
LC: Yes, we took many years to decide. We went through so many applicants, met people on-site, and told them our story and how it means a lot to us. We didn’t want a franchise or a chain. [Michelin-starred chef Brandon Sharp and his wife, Chapel Hill Town Council member Elizabeth Sharp, plan to open Próximo, a Spanish tapas bar, in the space.]
MP: We’ve now seen it gutted down to the original brick. That’s what people are going to see when they enter the building. We’re thrilled because we feel like we’ve passed on the integrity that Mom and Dad created with Ye Olde 50 years ago.
LC: We began with a vision that became a reality, that became an institution, that became iconic. But that was not on our minds back then. We were so young, and we had dreams, and we just decided that we would make them happen. And we did. We left a legacy of connection. ♣
NEXT WEDNESDAY: What I’ve learned from Other People’s Parents about turning absence into plenty … and more of Linda Chris’ and Melissa Peng’s memories from Ye Olde.
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At 5-foot-1, I had an easier time crawling under the counter in embarrassment than the 7-foot center.