by Kristen Wile

Letty Ketner, owner of Letty’s on Shamrock for more than a decade, opened her restaurant in East Charlotte at age 58. Before opening Letty’s, she had been working at retirement community Aldersgate, and could see changes coming to the management of the culinary program there. Never one for corporate culture, she sought her next career move.

“I was a little long in the tooth to go back to waiting tables or bartending,” Ketner says. “I didn’t want to get out of the industry, but I didn’t wanna go somewhere.”

When she learned that Foskoskies on Shamrock was closing, Ketner decided she couldn’t see Charlotte lose another treasured restaurant space. The brick building on Shamrock Drive was also the longtime home of Pike’s Soda Shop — a restaurant Ketner frequented on Fridays to enjoy their honey pecan fried chicken, a dish that would become a mainstay on the Letty’s menu with the blessing of Mrs. Pike. So when others would have been planning for their retirement, at nearly 60 years old, Ketner opened Letty’s on Shamrock.

As a business owner, Ketner ran things differently than the norm. She encouraged a more casual, personal style of interaction between guests and waitstaff; it wasn’t unusual to see a server sitting and chatting with a table as if they were old friends, because they probably had become so. The menu took on the same familial feel as the service; Ketner used to trial menu items at family gatherings, cooking them for holidays and getting feedback.

Now, after a dozen years as the proprietor of a beloved neighborhood restaurant, she’s packing up the belongings that have slowly collected there — the decor that gave the restaurant its lived-in personality, momentos of more than a decade of food service, and papers that piled up over the years. Thoughts of retirement were spurred by a simple question from a regular: Why don’t you ever take time off? 

“He said, ‘Nobody goes to the grave saying I should have worked more,'” Ketner recalls. “I kind of dwelled on that and let it ruminate a little bit, and then in September I’d pretty much made up my mind.”

At the same time, two key members of the Letty’s staff expressed interest in moving on. The building is owned by Jesse Pike, owner of Pike’s Pharmacy, and the lease allows for subletting with Pike’s approval. With interest from others in the space, Ketner decided to close up shop at the end of the year. Much of her staff decided to stay on until the end.

The restaurant industry has changed significantly in the years since Letty’s opened. Ketner says one of the hardest shifts to manage was the post-pandemic preference for delivery, with services like DoorDash and Grubhub. The costs of using delivery services was so high it made the profit margin even smaller than normal restaurant margins, and she didn’t feel comfortable putting the added strain of unpredictable takeout on her small kitchen, which can fit just three people comfortably, including a dishwasher.

As Charlotte’s grown, Ketner also noticed an allegiance of diners to restaurants in their own neighborhoods.

“One, you’ve got them only eating in their neighborhood, and then two, they don’t go anywhere,” Ketner says.

The honey fried chicken, once a draw for people around the city, was no longer enough to drag people across a town with bigger city traffic. Paired with two hip replacements and battling AFib, Ketner was ready to give up the restaurant life.

“If you’re gonna own a restaurant, you need to be 35,” she says. “You can push it at 40, at 45, but 58 was not really wise on my part.”

In retirement, Ketner doubts she’ll relax much. She plans to travel, spend time with her family, and volunteer with organizations like Samaritan’s House. And she hopes to have reminders of how much people loved her restaurant now and then.

“It would be really sweet if 2,3,4 years down the line I read in some Facebook post or somebody makes a mention somewhere that they missed the fried okra at Letty’s, because nobody does it better,” she says. “And there’s some truth to that nobody does. That would be really sweet for me to see that we made that big of an impression on somebody.”