In September of 1992, Harper’s Restaurant opened on Fairview Road in SouthPark. Just shy of 32 years later, it will close its doors. Tom Sasser, owner of Burke Hospitality, explains that Harper’s was going strong as a neighborhood staple when the landlord decided that the building would be transformed into a bank. Burke Hospitality also owns Mimosa Grill, Taco Molino, Horace’s Hot Chicken, and One Catering. 

UP: What’s the story behind Harper’s closing?
Tom Sasser: I’ve been working closely with the landlord since they had this idea of doing a bank in our location. I was very optimistic that we might be able to stay, but it finally got to the point where that was the direction the landlord wanted to go. We worked together to come up with a closing date of Saturday, July 20. We wanted to stay and we would have stayed if we had been given the opportunity, but now we’re going to move on. We’ll try to turn this sad thing into a positive thing and look for other opportunities.

UP: Do you see this being the last chapter for the Harper’s brand?
Tom Sasser: Well, I still have a Harper’s in Greensboro, North Carolina and plan to keep operating it. I hope I can find a way to do another Harper’s or a version of Harper’s in Charlotte as well.

UP: How do you see this affecting your other concepts?
Tom Sasser: It’ll strengthen our other businesses. We’re working hard with our staff to get them all repositioned in our other businesses and make sure it’s the business that they want. 

UP: What do you think made Harper’s the Charlotte staple that it was? 
Tom Sasser: Harper’s has always been a scratch kitchen. We’ve always embraced using as many local ingredients as we could get seasonally and making everything in-house. When we started, there were some good restaurants in town and there were some chains in town but we had a sense that Charlotte was getting ready to explode and grow like it has. We thought that it would be a good place to start and I grew up in North Carolina, so it was kind of coming home for me. I also used some family recipes. My first chef was my sister, Sarah Williams, and she and I worked together on the recipes. Some of them were things that we grew up eating. My mother was an incredible home cook as was my grandmother. And we incorporated a lot of the things that we grew up with into the opening of the restaurant that are still on the menu today.

UP: Any final thoughts you’d like to share on Harper’s? 
Tom Sasser: We’re just thankful to have had an incredible run. We have had the chance to work with a lot of career restaurant people that work in this area at other restaurants and a lot of them still work for us. We’re proud of that and we’re proud of them and what they’re doing. And our guests have been fantastic. We’ve got so many regulars and I’ve had a lot of people reaching out to me today just to thank me for all of the memories they have. Some raised their children in our restaurant or it was the first restaurant they brought their kids to. I have clients that say it was the first place they ate when they moved to town and then became regulars. We’re really thankful for the folks that have worked with us and continue to work with us and for those guests that came in and became part of the Harper’s family.