Around Town: The Bookshop Reaches Final Chapter

Posted on March 13, 2017

In the mid-1980s, Bill Loeser and Linda Saaremaa decided to go into the bookselling business and bought the long, narrow building at 400 W. Franklin St. “Buying a building scared the pants off of me,” Loeser recalled. When the couple discovered a leak in the roof, they had to scare up still more cash to make the repair.

However, once the shop opened, on July 14, 1985, customers flowed in.

“We did well for a long time,” Loeser recalled. “We were a regional force — people came from Greensboro, Winston-Salem … all over.”

By 2007, when Loeser sold the shop to current owner Eric Johnson, the internet already was making bookselling a challenging business for brick-and-mortar stores. Nonetheless, Johnson and manager Betty Schumacher not only managed to keep the bookstore going but did well enough to expand inventory, adding more new titles, more children’s books and more rare and out-of-print books. Schumacher brought in two rescue cats, Elmo and Red, who sunned themselves fetchingly in the front window and prowled down the aisles after bookworms.

The summer months were especially busy. While other businesses languished after the students left town, tourists pounced on the shop’s exceptional collection of Southern history and alumni stopped by to reminisce about days gone by, when answers to scholarship’s most vexing questions could be found only between the covers of an out-of-print book.

But just a couple years into its fourth decade, The Bookshop is closing in late July. Loeser decided to put the building on the market (asking price: $1.2 million), and Johnson plans to merge his Chapel Hill inventory with that of two bookstores he owns in California. Schumacher isn’t looking forward to a world where books seem to matter less, but she’s happy about one thing: A former employee will be taking Elmo and Red home.

Hours: Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.- 9 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sunday, 1-5 p.m.

The Bookshop, 400 W. Franklin St., Chapel Hill, 
919-942-5178

La Residence Returns

From the frying pan of new construction all around it, to the kitchen fire that closed the restaurant for six months, La Residence has been through a lot this past year. “We had to take the building down to the studs,” said longtime co-owner Fran Gualtieri ’73. Luckily the fire and smoke spared the decorative millwork framing the doorways, walls and fireplace in La Residence’s 100-year-old home.

The restaurant dates to 1976, when R.B. Fitch Jr. ’55, creator of Fearrington Village, invited Bill and Moreton Neal to start a restaurant on the dairy farm property he’d bought from the Fearrington family. The Neals called their new restaurant La Residence, since they were living above it. What diners expect from contemporary Southern cuisine — such as its fusion of Creole and ’cue — was conjured in the laboratory of the kitchen at La Rez.

Two years into the business, the Neals moved the restaurant to the first of its two old houses on Rosemary Street. Bill Neal left to start Crook’s Corner with Gene Hamer ’73, and Moreton Neal hired another promising young chef for La Rez, Ben Barker, who later started the Magnolia Grill (and who is now involved with his son Gabe Barker’s Pizzeria Mercato in Carrboro). Diners made pilgrimages from near and far, and innumerable students earned their first decent wages and lessons in hospitality in the kitchen and dining rooms.

Frances and Thomas Gualtieri bought La Residence in 1992. They already were connected by friendship to the Neal family, and at various times Neal children worked alongside Gualtieri children. The restaurant remains a family business: The Gualtieris’ eldest sons, Thomas “Dieter” ’01 and John, manage the day-to-day business, while their youngest daughter, Dia, works as a host and special events assistant.

Moreton Neal, who became an interior designer after managing La Rez for more than a decade, was lured back for the renovation. She chose a deep gray (“gauntlet gray”) for the walls, accented with a vivid Mediterranean blue, and white trim.

Paintings and prints that survived the fire are remounted, new chandeliers and sconces have been hung, and the new stainless-steel professional kitchen practically glows in the dark. Frances Gualtieri plans to enclose and upgrade the patio later this year. Another novelty: Though many native French speakers have passed through over the years, La Rez never had a real French chef until now: Oscar Gnapi.

Hours: lunch, Thursday-Friday, noon-2 p.m.; dinner, Tuesday-Sunday, 5:30-8:30 p.m.

La Residence, 202 W. Rosemary St., Chapel Hill, 919-967-2506

‘Not Yo Mama’s’ Lunch 
at Luncheonette

Adam Rose, the former executive chef at the Siena Hotel’s Il Palio, has opened a lunch-only restaurant inside Chapel Hill’s Europa Center, aptly named Luncheonette.

The ambience is very much that of a diner, where customers can hear the orders sizzling on the griddle while sitting nearby in green leatherette booths. Or they can take their lunch out into the spacious atrium, with its palm trees and potted plants. Prices range from $4 for “Not Yo Mama’s Collards” to $16 for a lobster roll served with lemongrass aoli and potato salad. Pasta dishes include Rose’s butternut squash ravioli, always popular when he called the pasta shots at Il Palio. Rose also has started a new business, aRose Hospitality, offering private catering and pop-up dinners for up to 30 people.

Hours: 11 a.m.- 2:30 p.m. weekdays.

Luncheonette, 100 Europa Drive, Chapel Hill, 919-933-2473

— Ann Loftin