Former Parisians and longtime residents find pleasure in Whiteville’s small-town calm.
Within the old brick walls of Anthony’s Italian Restaurant in Whiteville, families and couples sit at varnished wood tables eating plates of chicken parmigiana and shrimp alfredo. The lights are low, the red wine and sweet tea are poured, and owner Anthony Grippi is busy in the kitchen. Too busy for conversation. Maybe another day.
But after the mealtime rush, he spares a few minutes to give a thumbnail sketch of his journey from Italy to Whiteville, the Columbus County seat that is 50 miles west of Wilmington. He was born in Sicily and moved to New York as a child in 1973, where he worked in his family’s restaurants. His culinary skills brought him south to Wilmington and eventually to Whiteville, where he made a much-raved-about stromboli at Mama Rita’s Italian Restaurant.
Whiteville’s grand Victorian houses, with their wide porches, big trees and luxuriant yards, held him in thrall. “That’s what attracted me, you know,” he says in a thick New York accent. The small downtown also impressed him. “How quaint it was, you know what I’m saying? Very homey feeling.” When Mama Rita’s closed in 2014, he seized the opportunity to open his own restaurant.
Grippi is not the only restaurateur in Whiteville with a non-Southern accent. At nearby The Chef & The Frog, the chef is from Cambodia and “the frog” is from France. “If you don’t like French people, you can just refer to them as frogs,” says co-owner Guillaume Slama, citing the habits of some French-averse Brits during World War I. How he and his wife met and built a life sounds like a fairy tale. “We had a lot of different things happen to us,” he says. “The Cambodian princess kissed a frog, and she turned into a beautiful chef.”
Slama and his wife, Sokun, met in Paris. In 1979, when she was seven years old, Sokun and her family escaped from Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime and made their way to France. As a child, Sokun learned to fuse Cambodian fare with French cuisine, impressing both her family and the neighbors in her refugee community.
Guillaume and Sokun dated, fell in love and exchanged wedding vows. They moved to Atlanta when Guillaume took a job with an engineering company. But Sokun’s superb cooking prompted them to open a bed and breakfast with a restaurant in Washington, Ga. That lasted a couple of years until the Great Recession devastated the hospitality business.
As it happened, Whiteville businessman Jesse Fisher was visiting and told Sokun that her catfish sandwich was the best sandwich he ever ate. Fisher, whose family has been involved in local lumber and other businesses for more than a century, urged the couple to open a restaurant in downtown Whiteville.
The Slamas had never heard of Whiteville or been to North Carolina. But facing huge business losses and eventual bankruptcy in Georgia, they called Fisher three months later to take him up on his offer. “It was completely a leap of faith for us. Things were going so great that a year and a half into it, we bought him out,” Guillaume says. After another year and a half, they bought 6,000 square feet of space on Madison Street, where they serve chimichurri steak, beef bourguignon and roasted pork belly.
Guillaume estimates half of his business comes from out-of-towners, those from the booming coastal communities of neighboring Brunswick County and from as far away as the Triangle. The blend of Cambodian and French dishes has earned the restaurant a glowing reputation.
The former Parisians are world travelers who have become enamored with a small N.C. town surrounded by cypress creeks, soybean fields and piney woods. “I love it. I really do love it over here,” she says. “It’s calmer; everything is slower. You make an adjustment.”
Hurricanes and a resurgence
Whiteville was named in 1810 for James B. White, who owned about 2,000 acres, including the original town site. As the seat of Columbus County, it continued to flourish when the Wilmington and Augusta Railroad came through, building a depot in 1903 known as Vineland Station. It earned its name from the area’s scuppernong vineyards, with the grapes being shipped out on the trains.
During the second half of the 20th century, Whiteville was an important banking town in North Carolina. It was the home of United Carolina Bancshares, which expanded through acquisitions of banks in Fayetteville, Greensboro, Raleigh, Greer, S.C., and other cities. It was the eighth-largest N.C. bank when it was acquired by BB&T for nearly $1 billion in 1997. BB&T’s successor, Truist Financial, still has a call center in Whiteville.
These days, the area has an industrial base. The vast pine tree plantations feed the International Paper mill in Riegelwood, 30 miles east of Whiteville, employing about 800 people. Atlantic Corp., maker of packaging materials, has about 250 employees in nearby Tabor City. National Spinning, supplier of fiber-dyed spun yarns, is located in Whiteville, with roughly 200 people on the payroll.
The Chef & The Frog managed to rebound after Hurricane Florence swept through the region in 2018, flooding much of the downtown with about 2 feet of water. But a few other businesses never recovered from the second storm to pound the city in two years. Hurricane Matthew had flooded homes and businesses in 2016. “When you look at where downtown Whiteville was three years ago, and to see where this town is after going through COVID and everything, it’s just absolutely amazing,” Mayor Terry Mann says.
Mann is standing outside Vineland Station, the refurbished railroad depot, for an informal meeting with other city officials and organizers. They’re discussing the city’s marquee event, the North Carolina Pecan Harvest Festival, which draws several thousand of people on the first weekend of November. The celebration was suspended in 2020 because of the pandemic, but Mann says Whiteville has otherwise powered through. “We didn’t lose a single business in the city because of COVID.”
In June, Whiteville became a North Carolina Main Street community, a program of the state Department of Commerce that provides expertise for center-city economic development. Whiteville’s downtown Madison Street has some energy. There are popular old standbys for lunch, like Ward’s Grill and Ed’s Grill. You can sit down for an orangeade at an old-fashioned soda fountain inside Guiton’s Drug Store. You can grab a coffee or ice cream at Sophie’s Bistro-Café or a cupcake at Piggypies Bakeshop.
A branch of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences marks a smaller version of the Raleigh flagship museum, with interactive programs and nature exhibits. Downtown also has a boutique clothing store, a gym, a dance studio, a yoga studio and apartments. Pat Edwards is a lifelong Whiteville resident who lives in one of the 10 apartments inside a former department store. She’s outside the building, walking her tiny dog Dollie.
“This building here, it was in bad shape,” she says. But now? “It’s absolutely nice on the inside.” Family and the small-town way of life have kept her attached to Whiteville, but she would like to see more recreational opportunities and enticements for visitors. “That’s the biggest problem with Whiteville,” she says. “We need people wanting to stay when they come.”
Traffic Flow
Whiteville is within an hour or so of both Wilmington and South Carolina’s Grand Strand, making for heavy tourist traffic along U.S. 74-76 and U.S. 701. Mayor Mann says Whiteville and Columbus County are on the right path for growth — though not too much growth like its fast-growing neighboring county. “There are a lot of people from Brunswick County who moved from up north 15 years ago, and now it’s like where they left — crowded and congested,” he says. Columbus is a quieter alternative. “I know three or four couples here that this is their second move since they retired. They just don’t want the hustle and bustle when you can be there in 35 or 40 minutes.”
The meeting at the depot included Stephen Bryan, whose long, silver hair is tied in a ponytail. He grew up in the area and left in 1967 to become a fighter pilot in the Air Force, swearing he would never return. “And here I am,” he says, returning eight years ago, lured by family and a longing for a less high-octane lifestyle. Bryan owns a 100-acre farm where he grows row crops and pecan trees. “It’s a place that has solitude while, at the same time, you have community around you. It’s as good as it gets.”
He traveled globally, met world leaders, lived in different countries, but missed the small town and big fields. His speech has lost its Southern-ness, though his Southern sensibilities are intact. Whether you’re from Sicily or Paris or you’re a wanderlust native son, the local color of Whiteville has a way of calling you home. ■
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