Chef Clark Barlowe, owner of Heirloom Restaurant. Kristen Wile/UP

Clark Barlowe, the executive chef and owner of Heirloom Restaurant in Coulwood, closes on the sale of his restaurant this week. Heirloom opened back in February 2014, and earned accolades for sourcing exclusively from North Carolina. Regulars have been crowding the restaurant this week to say their farewells, but Barlowe will remain in town until moving to Oregon this summer.

“I’ve said a lot of goodbyes, and people have made me cry a lot,” he says of the last few days at the restaurant.

If you can’t make it to Heirloom this week, Barlowe will be consulting there for the next two weeks, and helping out in the kitchen during restaurant week. We spoke to Barlowe about how Charlotte has evolved and his ups and downs since opening Heirloom. —Kristen Wile

Unpretentious Palate: Why did you decide to sell the restaurant?
Clark Barlowe: Gracelyn and I have been talking about it for the last year and a half, what our plans were going to be once she finished her PhD at Chapel Hill. We’ve been going back and forth on, would we sell the restaurant? Would we try and keep ownership in it and have our employees manage it? Back in February, she got offers from Vanderbilt and the Oregon Social Learning Center, which is where she is taking a job, and a couple around here as well. It just ended up that this Oregon opportunity was far and away the best opportunity for her career and for us to make a clean move. If we were going to leave Charlotte to go to a different city, it didn’t make sense to go to Nashville or just another Southern city. Once she accepted that job, we decided it was probably in the best interest of the restaurant to let it go to new owners, to people who could actually be here day-to-day and run the restaurant. We put it up for sale and a few weeks later we met the Murphys, and they seemed like the perfect little stewards of what we’ve been doing. They’re passionate and want to do everything the same way we’ve been doing it and just maintain and build on what we’ve been doing.

UP: Will Myles Scaglione continue running the kitchen?
CB: Myles will continue to be the chef de cuisine, but then they’ve added two new members. You’ve got Jerry Sizemore, who is sort of a friend of the Murphys, and he’s coming up from Florida and he’s going to take over the executive chef responsibilities. Then you have Patrick Murphy, who is the son of Linda and Scott (who have bought the restaurant), and he’s going to take over the chef/owner responsibilities and do a lot more catering, those sorts of things.

UP: How are you feeling knowing this is your last week as the owner of Heirloom?
CB: It’s a little bit surreal, and I think I’m still in restaurant owner mode. Like as we sit here talking right now, I’m responding to a negative review on Google. So it never stops, there’s always something going on. Until January 7, which is my last day of consulting, I don’t think I’ll really have let up.

UP: You mentioned you’ll be working in other kitchens around town until you move, are you planning on taking any time off?
CB: I’ve got a few projects that I’d like to work on personally, like a YouTube series and just some things I’ve been putting off that I’d like to be working on. That’s the plan as of right now, take January and February, work here at this restaurant, finish everything here, then take February to finish up the cookbook and everything, then get back into kitchens sometime in March.

UP: As a North Carolina native, how far has Charlotte come in your lifetime in terms of its restaurant scene?
CB: I can remember as a kid coming to Charlotte, and Charlotte was like, the big city. Even back then — this was probably in the mid-’90s — we’d come down to Charlotte and go out to eat for dinner and it was very much a corporate town. And it was that way for a long time, even when I was in culinary school here. That was 2005, 2006, and 2007. You had some independent restaurants — Harper’s Restaurant Group was doing some really neat stuff, Tim Groody was doing some really neat stuff, Greg Zanitsch was doing really neat stuff. But it was a small minority of the restaurants that were independently, chef-owned restaurants. Now, I think we’ve gotten to the point where I still think the majority of restaurants are corporate-owned restaurants, but I’d say it’s getting closer to a 50-50 split.

UP: What do you think is one thing Charlotte needs to improve upon to makes its culinary scene better?
CB: It just comes down to support of independent restaurants. People need to vote with their dollars and go out to eat and support independent restaurants that are supporting the community. Just the simple metrics of it is that 70 cents of every dollar that you spend at a locally owned restaurant, not even a locally sourced restaurant, stays in the community. That same can’t be said for going to Corporate Restaurant A or Corporate Restaurant B. Charlotte loves things that are new — everything about it. It’s a new airport, it’s a new this, it’s a new that. Charlotte just loves things that are new, but as soon as the newness wears off of something, Charlotte seems to forget it was something they liked initially. And it’s the same for everybody, it’s the same for neighborhoods, it’s the same for restaurants, it’s the same for buildings, same for museums. It’s the same for everything, and we can chalk it up and say, ‘Oh, it’s a Millennial thing,’ but it’s been that way for as long as I can remember in Charlotte. So I think that attitude has to change, and once that attitude changes, then we’ll see our food scene becoming something more like Charleston or Nashville, or these cities that have a long standing tradition of great restaurants, and great restaurants that have been around for decades.

UP: What is your proudest moment as executive chef and owner of Heirloom?
CB: The mushroom legislation. That will be something that is here long after I’ve died and gone away — it will be legal to serve wild mushrooms in North Carolina restaurants, and that was something I got changed. When we first opened the restaurant, it was illegal to sell wild mushrooms in North Carolina restaurants. You couldn’t go out, pick a mushroom, and serve it in the restaurant, they had to come from a USDA or NCDA-inspected facility. In the food code, it said mushrooms could be approved by a mushroom expert, and there was never a qualification for what a mushroom expert was. We lobbied the state and eventually got things changed, we have legislated what a mushroom expert is now. I took the class a few years ago, and now I’m a qualified mushroom expert, and I was the first chef to be a certified mushroom forager in the state.

UP: What is something you would have done differently if you could go back and do this whole thing over again?
CB: I would manage people differently. I wish I had matured a little bit faster. I was 27 years old when I opened my restaurant and it was my first restaurant as an owner. I turned 27 a day after the restaurant opened. I was really young, and I think managing people I could have done some things differently, and managing relationships I could have done some things differently. But to say that would be to say I’m unhappy with where I’m at right now, and that’s not the case at all. If I had changed something then, maybe I wouldn’t be where I’m at. So I’m really happy with where things are, and I really wouldn’t change anything that I’ve done. Maybe I would have just made some people feel better about themselves.

UP: Do you hope to open another restaurant?
CB: I have a couple of projects that we’re tinkering around with. Yes, I am looking to maybe open another restaurant, but it would have to be some specific thing at this point. I’m not just opening a restaurant to open a restaurant anymore, and for me, there has to be some social component of the restaurant, something we do that benefits the community or benefits people. I think that’s what we’ve done here at Heirloom, we benefit North Carolina farms. I’m thinking a little bit bigger than that now, and thinking about how we could impact the whole community or a city or a state with a restaurant.

UP: Are you planning to eventually move back to Charlotte?
CB: I don’t think I’ll move back to Charlotte. I might move back to North Carolina eventually, or not. I lean towards staying in the Pacific Northwest right now.