Bacon. Lettuce. Tomato.
Together, they make up a tiny slice of the South. Slather mayonnaise on two pieces of bread, dust with a shake each of salt and pepper, and call it lunch. A classic BLT. But that is not a Merritt’s Grill BLT.
Let’s break it down.
The bacon comes from a North Carolina farm, sizzled to perfection. The tomatoes are as big as baseballs, plucked ripe red from in and around North Carolina. The lettuce, trucked in directly from farms in California and Texas, is separated by a five-person team into single leaves the size of dessert plates.
The iconic red pick-up truck outside of Merritt’s Grill nods to the business’s former days as a gas station. photograph by Anna Routh Barzin
In the kitchen, the lettuce and tomatoes are arranged like playing cards on serving trays, then delivered a few steps away to two people tasked with creating four kinds of BLTs. Those BLTs can tip the scales.
The Baby BLT is the lightest, weighing in at half a pound. But the Triple BLT? That’s one daunting skyscraper of a sandwich. It comes with a warning on the menu: “Not for the faint of heart; a full 1 pound of bacon with four layers of lettuce and tomato.” It even has its own T-shirt, displayed beside the cash register.
Sourdough.
Bacon.
Bacon.
Bacon.
Lettuce.
Tomato.
Sourdough.
That says everything. That is a Merritt’s BLT.
• • •
The Merritt’s BLT is the go-to sandwich of Chapel Hill, crafted in a spot as cherished as the Old Well. Restaurants and coffee shops along Franklin Street may come and go. Yet, five minutes south of UNC’s campus, Merritt’s remains as it always was: a place of moments and memories that thrum the heart.
The small white building is a former gas station that opened in 1929. Back then, Orange County was more country than cosmopolitan, and the college town of Chapel Hill seemed far away.
Not anymore.
Merritt’s began as an Esso station in 1929. Photography courtesy of Merritt’s Grill, Photographed by Anna Routh Barzin
At lunch, customers young and old play their own version of Frogger as they stop, start, and stop again before speed-walking or jogging across three lanes of traffic on South Columbia Street. When they reach Merritt’s, they step into a time capsule that represents — through smell and touch, sound and sight — the best of Chapel Hill and North Carolina. Songs by James Taylor spill from a loudspeaker. Cheerwine comes in bottles. Carolina blue is eye candy everywhere. The scent of wood-smoked bacon hangs over the back parking lot like a strong perfume.
Customers start conversations with strangers and share lunch with people they just met. They take photos of their surroundings and hear thank-yous after someone delivers a menu or holds open the restaurant’s only door.
If they’re lucky, they’ll see someone from the storied fields and courts of UNC: soccer star Mia Hamm; basketball guard Marcus Ginyard; football coach Mack Brown; or quarterback Drake Maye, now starting for the New England Patriots. Maye comes in with his family, obliges anyone who asks for a selfie, and sits at one of the 20 or so tables walled by a grove of bamboo out back.
As customers wait for their sandwiches to be assembled, they exchange stories about how their parents or even grandparents used to come to Merritt’s. photograph by Anna Routh Barzin
The BLTs, wrapped in white paper and delivered in brown bags, are the real lunchtime draw. But so are the chances to make memories, hear stories, and see snapshots of everyday Chapel Hill every few feet.
First, the stories.
UNC basketball coach Dean Smith supposedly played poker downstairs. A young James Taylor joined his brother Livingston and played acoustic for free on a small stage in front of the bamboo grove. Eben Merritt, who owned the place when it was a gas station, was also a heavy-equipment operator who dug out the footings to support the structure that became Kenan Stadium in 1927.
And of course, there’s the storied Triple BLT, Merritt’s edible star. Who orders those?
“Fourteen-year-old boys,” Paula Toogood says. “They can knock out a triple.”
Customers, fresh off a plane, walk in with luggage still in their hands and order a BLT.
Paula; her husband, John; and their 28-year-old son, CJ, are the third family to own Merritt’s. And yes, she’s seen her share of teenagers tackling the Triple BLT like some rite of passage. CJ has witnessed customers, fresh off a plane, walk in with luggage still in their hands and wax poetic about a Merritt’s BLT before ordering one more. And, of course, he remembers the guy who rushed in wearing a patient wristband from a local hospital.
“I asked him, ‘Does your doctor know you’re here?’ and he told me, ‘No, I want to enjoy life, and this is the place to do it.’”
CJ knows the draw: “It’s the bacon, man.”
• • •
Years ago, John Toogood walked into Merritt’s for a sandwich and had an epiphany: We could sell Merritt’s our bread. He and Paula, who met as undergrads at Penn State, own The Bread Shop in Pittsboro, and he knew they could offer Merritt’s at least eight different types of bread.
Robin Britt photograph by Lissa Gotwals
John introduced himself to Robin Britt, who took over Merritt’s in 1991 with her husband, Bob. Robin invited him down 11 steps behind the cash register to the Britts’ office, situated beside the dug-out bays where Merritt could once stand upright and work on cars.
“Can we pray before we start?” Robin asked.
That one meeting closed the sale. For more than 15 years, John and Paula supplied bread to Merritt’s. After Robin died in April 2014 at age 61, nine months after being diagnosed with cancer, her presence at Merritt’s never went away. Just look — and listen.
In the window, written in pink chalk on the black base of a serving tray, is her favorite phrase: “You are loved.”
Robin created the Merritt’s BLT for her husband. For years, she made him a BLT for lunch. When people asked her about Merritt’s delectable signature, she would tell them the story of what she called the “love sandwich.”
“She was the juice behind Merritt’s,” John says today. “The reputation she built is the reason we have had success.”
The Britts first ran Merritt’s as a convenience store with a grill. In 2008, to weather the Great Recession, they created a menu full of Southern staples, from banana pudding to a fried bologna sandwich. Merritt’s thrived. Robin made that happen. But not just for food.
Today, Merritt’s reflects the social atmosphere created by gas station founder Eben Merritt, who watched people gather around a potbellied stove inside and what he called the “liar’s bench” outside. photograph by Anna Routh Barzin
“People will come in and say, ‘I knew her’ or ‘We talked to her all the time,’” John says. “She was a special lady. She cared for people.”
Angel Juarez, Merritt’s kitchen manager, can attest to that. His mom used to work in the kitchen, and she told him stories of Robin’s graciousness. If someone in the kitchen was financially strapped, she would loan them money and say, “When you can, pay it back.” Juarez knew her as “Miss Robin.”
“She would be ecstatic with what Merritt’s has become,” he says. “She had a vision of what it would be, and it’s this. Definitely this.”
• • •
In September 2021, the Toogoods bought Merritt’s. John and Paula needed their son’s help, and CJ discovered a new passion.
In 2019, he’d graduated with a finance degree from Elon University. He’d earned All-American honors as an offensive tackle for the Phoenix and signed as a free agent with the Baltimore Ravens. His pro football career didn’t last, and he left looking for a brand-new direction in his life. He found it at Merritt’s.
He huddled with his parents and applied his business acumen and the discipline he learned from the gridiron. Together, they gave Merritt’s a 21st-century upgrade that relieved the frustration felt by customers who used to wait anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour for a BLT.
The Toogoods began selling their bread to former co-owner Robin Britt before eventually buying the grill in September 2021. photograph by Anna Routh Barzin
The Toogoods instituted technology that eliminated the time drag of paper tickets. They bought new equipment, doubled the staff, upgraded both parking lots, and covered the seating area out front with large umbrellas. Their improvements have made Merritt’s more comfortable and created a process that delivers BLTs within minutes during any lunch rush.
Even with all those updates, the Toogoods knew what they could never change: the Southern-casual vibe that has made Merritt’s a Chapel Hill institution, and the BLT that the Raleigh News & Observer named one of the 25 tastes that define North Carolina.
“It’s a big responsibility, a weight on our shoulders, but it’s a good thing to have,” CJ says. “Merritt’s is not ours. It’s everybody’s, and we have to keep it the way it was, the way people remember it, so they can have more memories.”
• • •
From any spot at Merritt’s, the allure unspools in minutes. Take this lunch: A trio of tourists speaking Japanese takes selfies beside Merritt’s red 1964 Ford pickup, its truck bed filled with flowers. Wave after wave of 20-somethings dressed in Carolina blue pours in. At a table sits an older couple, dressed in Tar Heel swag from shoulder to shin. When they retired and moved to Chapel Hill a few years ago, their daughter, a 2015 UNC grad, told them they needed to eat at Merritt’s.
So they do. Every week. They order much from the menu. But what first sold them? It’s simple.
Bacon.
Lettuce.
Tomato.
Merritt’s Grill
1009 South Columbia Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
(919) 942-4897
merrittsblt.com
photograph by Anna Routh Barzin
The famous BLT at Merritt’s Grill is no lightweight sandwich. When you consider that a pound equals 16 ounces, each BLT carries a culinary heft that’s legendary in North Carolina. A single weighs 11.5 ounces; a double weighs 15.7 ounces; and a triple weighs 20.2 ounces. Even the Baby BLT — weighing in at 8.2 ounces, or half a pound — is plenty heavy. How does that heaviness happen?
1 leaf of lettuce
2 slices of tomato
4 pieces of bacon
2 leaves of lettuce
4 slices of tomato
7 pieces of bacon
3 leaves of lettuce
6 slices of tomato
9 pieces of bacon
4 leaves of lettuce
8 slices of tomatoes
12 pieces of bacon
From the stone that built Mount Airy, one man shapes a living story of community.
Snow in North Carolina may be fleeting, but when it falls, the state settles into a peaceful pause.
A long-forgotten series of recordings from 1925 puts a new spin on the beginnings of one of our most enduring music genres.
In tight-knit Southern circles, recipes get around. The ones that impress find their place in community cookbooks, local encyclopedias of care and feeding.
