15 Minutes With ... Restaurateur Larkin Hammond
Larkin Hammond says the secret to the restaurant business is to hire good people, train them well and treat them like family.
Born in Kentucky, she says she learned to cook from her Italian grandmother, working side-by-side in the tiny kitchen of her restaurant in a small town in West Virginia.
She studied agriculture at East Kentucky University, then launched a varied career that has included building power boats in Florida and two decades of selling real estate in Southern California. In 1998, she and her husband, Mark Hammond, decided to move to Lake Lure, N.C., and rejuvenate a waterfront restaurant that launched the Larkins brand.
Larkin’s joined the burgeoning Greenville restaurant scene in 2005, when the former Renee’s Steakhouse next to the Peace Center became Larkin’s on the River. That was followed by the launch of burger and milkshake spot Grill Marks in 2012 and Limoncello, Larkin’s Italian Kitchen concept in 2015. Grill Marks has expanded to locations at Haywood Mall and in Columbia and the company also operates event spaces The L and The Edison Room downtown and Larkin’s Sawmill at the end of North Main Street.
The most recent addition to the family is simply called Larkin’s, on the plaza of the Camperdown development in Downtown Greenville.
When she’s not in one of her restaurants, Larkin says she most likely will be tending the herbs, flowers and other crops growing on her farm near Easley. Her two Caanan dogs, Dawson and Cooper, are constant companions and love running on the farm and on the beach in Florida, where she and Mark have a home.
After 25 years in the restaurant business, Larkin says she is ready to wind down her career, looking forward to continuing the company’s practice of turning over mature restaurants to the teams that run them.
TALK GREENVILLE: Thanks for taking the time to talk. It’s been 25 years since you and Mark moved to this area and became restaurant owners here. What are you most proud of as you’ve built your business?
LARKIN HAMMOND: I’m most proud of the team that we have built. We have people who stay with us and are willing to go through the hard spots and good times. We’ve been able to sell restaurants to the people who work in them – we've done that with our North Carolina restaurants and we’re getting ready to do that in Greenville.
TG: Talk a little about your background – how did you get interested in restaurants?
LH: I didn't really have what you’d consider a stable childhood. I’m from Kentucky, but I went different places to live with aunts, uncles … for a while I lived with my grandmother in West Virginia. She taught me how to cook. She barely spoke English. I learned Italian. I had to. We spoke and worked in the kitchen all day long, because everything was done from scratch at her little restaurant, cooked on a woodstove. She taught me how to make these amazing meatballs -- the best meatballs ever. What Limoncello serves is her recipe. Also her lasagna, which is amazing. Those recipes are probably 100 years old and came with her from Italy.
TG: So how do you get from there to Florida and California and eventually to the Upstate?
LH: I went to Eastern Kentucky University and majored in Agriculture. I was going to be a horticulturalist. I got out of college, broke, with no job. But I’m fearless and have a vivid imagination. One of my friends was a boat racer and he and I got into the boat business in Florida. I sold my part about 40 years ago, but the company is still in business. After that, another friend in college who was from California asked me to come out and help her, fill in for one of her employees. I worked in real estate there for more than 20 years. Mark and I met when I sold him a house.
TG: That certainly worked out well. But what prompted the two of you to move east and to settle at Lake Lure?
LH: We both had very stressful jobs. I was in real estate, and he worked for PepsiCo. The first year of our marriage, we spent 250-some days on the road. We didn’t see each other. So we decided that was it. I got on AOL, and I found a restaurant for sale with an ad that said, “do you love waterskiing? You can water-ski to work.” That was at Lake Lure and Mark water-skied to work all summer. Also, my dad was four hours away in Kentucky, so at the end of his life, I was close by.
TG: You spend time in Southwest Florida these days, right?
LH: We do, but we have a farm near Easley, and I spend a lot more time there. My favorite things are having my toes in the sand or my boots on the farm.
TG: So, it’s a working farm?
LH: I definitely work it. Right now, I've been growing a lot of herbs, flowers, cucumbers and jalapenos. I'm working on bigger crops now that my life is settled down a little bit since opening the new restaurant, I will have more time to nurture the crops. My goal is to be able to supply Larkin’s and the other restaurants with some of my products. They're all going to be organic. I'm having a great time with the experiments right now.
TG: In Florida, were you affected by the hurricanes, especially Ian last year?
LH: It was bad. It was the worst one ever. Mark and I have been out in the yard trying to piece it back together. But I’m not complaining -- we know we signed up for it.
TG: Do the dogs like traveling?
LH: They travel very well. Get in the car and go to sleep. At the farm, they absolutely love running and running, and they run in the sand on the beach. They are beach dogs. One of them loves to get on the paddleboard. Don’t even have to ask, he's on it.
TG: What’s changed the most in the restaurant business in the past 25 years?
LH: The thing that's evolved for me is the way you have to run your business. You have to be more on top of everything, especially suppliers, with the demand for higher quality ingredients. You have to source those ingredients, which takes a lot of time. People laugh at me because I know where our beef comes from. I know everything about it. I know who grew it, how it was raised, how it was brought to Market. You need to know. I'm not going to put it on the plate just because someone said it was good.
TG: Is the industry, your restaurants in particular, still recovering from the pandemic?
LH: Well, it almost did us in. We sold just about everything we owned to just keep the restaurants open. So yeah, it was a tough go. What's not coming back yet is the catering business. Weddings are happening, but not the big corporate parties like they used to. It’s slowly coming back. I think the climate will change and there will be more reasons to celebrate and more reasons to go out than ever.
TG: With all of your different restaurant concepts over the years, what’s been the most surprising thing that worked … or didn’t work?
LH: The thing that didn't work was not following my gut and my heart -- doing more of an analytical, demographics, numbers study. When I would do that, we wouldn’t have the success we normally have. The thing that really worked well was Grill Marks … and Limoncello, both based on my heart and my gut. I was told that we would never make it at that (the Limoncello) location. But with the beautiful piazza with the fountain, it has the feel of being in a park in the middle of the city. It’s just the best.
TG: What makes a great restaurant?
LH: I think people are looking for an experience. There has to be an ambiance to the restaurant. There has to be great service – everyone from the dishwasher to the front of the house has to be their best in order for the chef's hard work to shine through. And there have to be great ingredients in everything you serve.
TG: You learned a lot of this just by doing it, right?
LH: I did. All the hard times and the good times. The restaurant business is a great profession to be in but it's not for the faint of heart.
TG: You see stories about how finding people to work in restaurants has been really tough recently. What do you look for in a potential team member?
LH: They have to look me in the eye, be sincere … and (laughs) love dogs and animals. We can teach you the skills, we can't teach you your values.
TG: You’ve had restaurants in several different places – is there something unique about Greenville’s dining scene?
LH: Greenville is magical. It's a magical place. I've been all over. There's nothing like the people and the culture and the small business climate. Especially the restaurants. We’re just poised to even grow even larger and have even more of them. I love more restaurants opening every day because that's what keeps it vibrant. You just want everyone to succeed -- if they don't succeed, that's a mark on the city.
TG: Speaking of experiments, I was interested to learn that you really leaned into gluten-free offerings on your menus. When you were developing those, what was the thing you most wanted a gluten-free version of?
LH: I discovered that sort of first-hand. I like great food and I can't have gluten. So, what are we going to do? We worked and worked, because a lot of the available products, I didn't like. They put too much sugar in everything and try to hide the flavor. It was difficult, but we did it. At Grill Marks, the fried pickles and onion rings, people don't even know they're gluten-free and they are so good.
TG: What’s next for you and the company?
LH: As my career is winding down, I want to watch my team that I’ve coached all these years create an even more successful business. I would like to become an advisor or consultant for people who want to start a restaurant. Help design menus and the inside of restaurants. I've designed nine restaurants and that's probably one of the biggest joys of my life. I’d like to be able to show people how to succeed in the restaurant business.
TG: Last question. What’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten?
LH: That’s the hardest question, because I love our food and I taste our food all the time. But the bone-in filet at Larkin’s is probably on the top of my list. It is a special cut just for us. It sits up on a bed of mashed potatoes and you look at it and it's just so memorable.
This article originally appeared on Herald-Journal: 15 Minutes With ... Restaurateur Larkin Hammond
