Well-Schooled, Al Came Back to What He Loves

Posted on July 7, 2017

Let’s start with a little sacrilege. Al’s Burger Shack occupies maybe 12 feet of frontage on West Franklin alongside some 15 feet of picnic shelter. There’s often a line out the door. McDonald’s is across the street; beyond sharing that stretch of downtown, the two establishments have a little more in common.

Al Bowers ’88 owes a small but significant chunk of his success to that arched giant. It was his first employer, back when he was a student in Greensboro.

“I have a crazy creative side, but I do like structure,” he said. “I learned that at McDonald’s. I tell my staff, ‘I’m here to squash any kind of creativity you might have, because we are sticking to the program.’ ”

That might indeed sound to Al’s devotees like blasphemy. After all, they wait longer and pay more.

On an unseasonably warm February Saturday, the place is so jam-packed there’s no room inside for the owner. Which suits Bowers fine. He loves to work a room.

So he makes the rounds at the 10 outdoor picnic tables. That’s about the only seating Al’s offers, save for a few barstools inside. It’s a shack, y’all.

Bowers is slapping backs and shaking hands and hugging necks. Oh, and delivering orders from the small take-out window, refilling waters and wiping down soon-to-be-claimed empty tables.

“I do whatever the restaurant needs me to do at that time. Right now, it’s calling me to kind of hang out. I’d just be in the way in there.” The small kitchen has eight employees crammed together on this day, trying their best to keep up with demand.

---

---

Days like this, his shack teeming with happy customers, Bowers gets reflective. How’d he get here? Practice. Specifically, Pantana Bob’s, the Flying Burrito, and Merritt’s Store & Grill. He helped open the first of those and managed the other two. Cut his teeth as a student at the short-lived Jigsaws and broke into management at Spring Garden in Carrboro.

Bowers grew up in a family of mostly women. “They always took care of people, and a lot of it was through food.”

The first meal out he can remember was a cheeseburger, fries and vanilla shake from the long-since-shuttered Speedy Lunch in Chase City, Va., his mother’s hometown. “I just fell in love with the place. When I was thinking about what kind of restaurant to open, I decided I was going to go back to what I really loved, and I love hamburgers.”

He gets his work ethic from his dad, who was a department head in textile mills but also owned a construction company and a nightclub. “Side hustle,” Bowers says. “He always had something going on in addition to working for the man.”

It was at that first student gig that Al met Melody. He’d be the first to tell you that Al’s Burger Shack is not his story. It’s theirs.

He was a freshman washing dishes; Melody Adams ’85 had graduated and was co-managing Jigsaws while figuring out her next move. She managed wait staff, not kitchen. The freshman with the outsized personality soon got in on the regular staff spades game, and the two began to hit it off.

Bowers stayed with Spring Garden for a few years more after graduating with degrees in industrial relations management and sociology. He and Melody married in 1990. She worked as a paralegal while he continued to study restaurant management in jobs in Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Charlotte and Raleigh.

Then back to Chapel Hill, where he jumped into real estate as the two raised their daughters. He thought he was done with the restaurant business. Then the recession of 2008 hit, and he went back to the business he knew, the one that knew him.

His Aunt Aubrey taught him how to play blackjack when he was 2. That’s where Bowers gets his uncanny ability to remember customer names. He sings them out, and he puts them on the menu.

There’s Sean, the bacon burger named for his brother. Paco, the spicy burger dubbed with Al’s own high school nickname. The Marcus Paige, who gave Al’s a shout-out on national television during the 2016 Final Four. The Huff Daddy swerves away from beef to honor a fraternity brother with pork tenderloin, ham, Swiss, barbecue sauce and horseradish aioli on a baguette.

The booming Shack has enabled Al and Melody to open a second restaurant in Carrboro, bearing her name: Mel’s Commissary and Luncheonette. “It will be a ‘when we run out, we run out’ place,” Melody says — a couple of meat sandwiches, a veggie sandwich, a meat entree, a veggie entree, a few sides — an ode to her mother.

“She was an excellent Southern cook, and I learned at her feet,” Melody says. “It’ll be her chicken salad, her deviled eggs, her lemon bars, her caramel cake, her marinated vegetable recipe, her potato salad, her collards. This summer, when butter beans are fresh, I’m going to have a big ol’ pot of butter beans on the stove.”

Meanwhile, Al will have more names to memorize. He’s opening a second Burger Shack at Southern Village this summer, even tinkering some with the elbow room and the menu — turkey burgers, side salads, varieties of fries and 30 seats inside.

Like the Shack, a small space serving food made with love, a backstory and a structure that dictates what it is and what it ain’t.

–Matt Dees ’01

Paco Burger

For the guacamole:

2 ripe avocados, mashed
1 tablespoon chopped onion, sauteed
1 tablespoon minced garlic, sauteed
1 tablespoon minced jalapeno, sauteed
juice of one small lime
salt and pepper to taste

•  Mix avocados, lime juice, onion, garlic and jalapeno. Add salt and pepper to taste.

For the burger:

6 ounces ground beef (per patty)
hamburger buns
fresh tomato, sliced
pepper jack cheese, sliced
fresh jalapeno, sliced
salt, pepper and butter to taste

•  Salt and pepper both sides of each patty. Cook for 3–4 minutes per side on a very hot grill.
•  Butter inside of bun, then grill.
•  Top patties with pepper jack cheese.
•  Dress bun with guacamole on both sides, jalapeno below the patty and two tomato slices on top of it.