In a way, it all started with the coffee-and-cookie hour. Eight-year-old Matthew Rogers had spent the morning curating the spread before him: cups of lemonade, cookies in varying shades of vanilla and chocolate, and empty mugs awaiting strong Episcopalian coffee. With everything finally set just so, he didn’t want anyone to touch it. Not yet. Once his father, the pastor, spoke the benediction and the congregants came pouring out, then Matthew would step back and watch the magic happen. The room would fill with laughter and overlapping conversations, and he’d know that his perfectly assembled table had helped make that happen and had drawn people closer together.

It’s been more than 50 years since Rogers was a kid serving cookies in church. But chances are if you step off Main Street in Hendersonville and happen down Third Avenue today, you’ll see him in that same position: standing back to observe his handiwork. In Three Chopt Sandwich Shoppe, the restaurant he bought from Jim Young back in 1990, the now 66-year-old Rogers often watches from the open kitchen as the lunch crowd leans into the sandwiches he’s arranged just so. For him, this is the sweet spot, seeing the spread he’s laid out bring people together.

Every table gets a bowl, and every guest gets a hello from owner Matthew Rogers. photograph by Tim Robison

I’ve been one of those people since I needed a booster seat, shoveling in the free popcorn while I waited on my sandwich. Over my lifetime, the most reliable fixture in Three Chopt has been Rogers, framed by the giant serving window, facing the dining room instead of the kitchen, while he makes sandwiches in his Cincinnati Reds hat and surveys the crowd. Watching the magic.

But owning a sandwich spot in a small town isn’t all satisfied watching from a distance. When he’s caught up on orders, he’ll appear from the kitchen to float among the tables. “The Cardinals are on a skid,” he might tell my dad, a St. Louis fan. They’ll talk baseball before Rogers moves on to hand bowls of fruit to kids or ponder the state of SEC football with a table of attorneys. Or sometimes, when the mood strikes, he’ll take to song right there in the middle of the room, belting out so that everyone turns to listen, as if they’re a family at one big table and not strangers scattered among many.

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In 1996, When Three Chopt moved to its current home on Third Avenue, a contractor friend from church offered to help Rogers transform the former flower shop into a restaurant. But the budget was tight: “I have enough money, I think, for plumbers and electricians,” Rogers told him. “But I don’t think I can pay you.”

Unfazed, the contractor showed Rogers how to lay the floor and build the shelves. “You’re going to help the community here,” he explained. “I can do this for you.”

Rogers compensated him the best way he knew: with free lunch. That, and living up to the contractor’s prediction.

Despite the challenge of running a restaurant for more than three decades, Rogers meets adversity and welcomes customers with his familiar smile. photograph by Tim Robison

Singing or not, lunchtime is a community event at Three Chopt. Retirees join suited men and women from nearby law offices and families with small kids visiting Hands On! Children’s Museum around the corner. When they sit, guests are handed bowls of popcorn and menus full of names — Radiant Rosy, Sweet Sue, Lovable Larry, Bountiful Barrett.

Most of the sandwiches are named for family. My go-to, Elizabeth’s Mile Marker — turkey, bacon, Swiss, lettuce, tomato, and house-made honey mustard on sourdough — is named after Rogers’s sister, a teacher. Radiant Rosy is Rogers’s wife and co-owner of the restaurant (grilled chicken, provolone, lettuce, tomato, and house-made ranch). Dearest David is his father (roast beef, turkey, Swiss, lettuce, tomato, and Thousand Island), and Apple Raisin Annie — the best seller — his mother (chicken salad, golden raisins, Granny Smith apples, lettuce, tomato, and honey mustard).

The sandwiches, like the coffee and cookies, are a means to an end: a way to take part in a place but also a way to shape it for the better. “Give them their money’s worth,” Rogers’s grandfather always advised. “And then give them something a little extra.”

His grandmother’s needlepoint — “The gift is small but love is all” — hangs on the wall.

For Rogers, the whole endeavor is about community. Dozens of high schoolers have slung sandwiches here on their way to somewhere else. “She’s a surgeon now,” he says, pointing to a Polaroid of a teenage waitress on the wall. He hosts pancake breakfast fundraisers for Big Brothers Big Sisters and spaghetti dinners for the Boys & Girls Club. He’s watched kids — like me — eat handfuls of popcorn until one day they’re adults, scooting their own kids up to the table to order, making their own banter about the state of the National League Central.

An homage to family, a shrine to where it all began, resides in the corner of the restaurant. His grandmother’s needlepoint — “The gift is small but love is all” — hangs on the wall alongside family heirlooms and old photographs. Pictured there are Rogers’s paternal grandparents, who came by train with other Swedes to settle in Tryon more than a century ago. Dearest David stands upright in his army uniform. Apple Raisin Annie ­— who helped him get started in the restaurant business after college and who served in the Peace Corps at age 65 — smiles there, too.

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A side effect of feeding people for nearly 40 years is that now nearly every inch of the walls is covered by something: Cincinnati Reds baseball memorabilia, pictures of waterfalls, notes from Boys & Girls Club kids, framed quotes. And, of course, photos of former employees and longtime diners, because the family corner is always growing. After all, Super Sam (a wrap of turkey, Swiss, cucumber, banana peppers, and Italian dressing) wasn’t a blood relation but a firefighter who could fix anything. Marvelous Marvin (turkey, roast beef, Swiss, cheddar, banana peppers, onion, coleslaw, horseradish, Thousand Island, and Dijon mustard) wasn’t kin but he was a champion for the Special Olympics. Helping out and hanging around are ingredients enough to wind up in the family and on the menu.

When a blizzard brought Hendersonville to a standstill in 1993, Rogers stayed at Three Chopt. He knew his house in the Big Hungry community would be cut off from the world when the snow fell, so he bunked in the finished space below the restaurant and woke to a world covered in white. The only movement on Main Street that morning were crews trying to clear the roads and sidewalks, so with his restaurant open and everything else closed, Rogers trudged up the hill midday: “I’ve got soup and chili and some hot tea; just come down, and it’s on the house.”

A die-hard Reds fan, if Rogers is missing from the Three Chopt kitchen, there’s a good chance he’s singing the national anthem before a game up in Cincinnati. photograph by Tim Robison

Before long, his tables were filling with city and DOT workers looking for a little shelter from the cold. He kept the bowls of chili flowing as everyone thawed out. “And then, of course, the lawyers showed up,” Rogers remembers.

As the room filled with laughter and warmth, he stepped back for a beat to watch from his usual spot in the kitchen. He liked what he saw spread before him: orange vests, suits and ties, and steaming soup. People coming together because of a carefully arranged table. “That,” he says, picturing the scene three decades later, “is the joy of community.”

Three Chopt Sandwich Shoppe
103 Third Avenue East
Hendersonville, NC 28792
(828) 692-0228
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