Grandview Restaurant: Allowing People To Sleep In and Still Get Breakfast For 30 Years
Story by Sam Calhoun
It all started with coffee—or rather, the lack of coffee.
Jim Barker—the father of Debbie Cairns who, along with her husband Greg, own the Grandview Restaurant—was working as a contractor in Hound Ears in the early 1970s and complained that he couldn’t get a good cup of coffee anywhere along Highway 105. He would rectify his caffeine deprivation by helping his daughter and her new husband open the Grandview Restaurant, located across from the entrance to Seven Devils in Foscoe.
It has been more than 30 years since Barker verbalized his need for caffeine and exactly 30 years since the Cairns fulfilled that need. This year, the Grandview Restaurant enters its thirtieth year in business, and the Cairns are celebrating their thirty-third wedding anniversary.
It has been quite a journey, and it has centered around breakfast—the most important meal of the day.
The events that would lead to the Grandview started in Miami in 1969. It was the summer of love and Miami’s new International House of Pancakes was a hot spot.
Born and raised in Miami, Debbie was 15 years old in 1969 and landed a job at the IHOP just blocks away from her parents’ home. There she met Greg—an IHOP cook who was originally from Saskatchewan, Canada, but had moved to Miami at age six with his family on a bus.
“He was a cook and I was a waitress and I fell madly in love with him,” said Debbie. “He already had a girlfriend, so I chased him like crazy.”
Her persistence worked, and before long, the two moved in together in Miami.
Soon after, Debbie’s parents moved to Blowing Rock and opened Roaring River Chalets. Greg and Debbie visited her parents six times that first year and fell in love with the mountains.
The two married in Miami on July 4, 1973, and spent their honeymoon on their roof watching fireworks because they both had to work that day. But it was almost time for another change.
Within six months, they moved to Blowing Rock. It was 1974 and the couple began helping Debbie’s parents at the Chalets. Debbie got a job at Mountainhouse Restaurant and supplemented her income by working at Alpine Steakhouse at night, the business that would become Mokoto’s Japanese Steakhouse. In addition to working at the Chalets, Greg manned the Cozy Corner—a little trailer filled with retail goods where the Shoppes on the Parkway sit today.
Debbie’s father encouraged Debbie and Greg to take their restaurant knowledge to a new level in the restaurant-less area outside of Boone and, with the help of a local real estate agent, they located a reasonably priced plot of land along Highway 105.
Debbie and Greg purchased the property and worked “like crazy” to pay it off.
Debbie’s father’s neighbor was Rip Collins—a local resident with a canoe business on Highway 321. When the highway was to be widened, the state bought his land and he was forced to sell his two modular buildings. The Cairns had found their restaurant.
After buying the modular buildings, the Cairns split them both in two and shipped all four pieces in one day. Once constructed, they left a deck in the middle for future expansion.
The original layout of the Grandview Restaurant—which, by the way, was named for the picturesque view of Grandfather Mountain through the restaurant’s bay window—sat 18 people at tables with six barstools around a counter.
“We didn’t know what to expect,” added Debbie, “We were ten miles out of Boone—the middle of nowhere.”
The new restaurant also served as the Cairns’s new home—an arrangement they would keep up for 12 years until their two children got older.
It took the restaurant veterans one year to renovate, from 1976 to 1977, and they opened the restaurant on July 2, 1977—two days before their fourth wedding anniversary and just in time for the High Country’s bustling summer season.
Their first two customers were the two workers who put up their sign.
“I still remember waiting on them,” remembered Debbie.
“But it wasn’t long after that it took off and we had to expand,” she said. “There was nothing on 105 in the old days. Boone had the closest restaurant ten miles away and I don’t know where the closest was in Banner Elk.”
Originally, the Grandview was open for all three shifts—breakfast, lunch and dinner—and until 8:00 p.m. Debbie remembers mowing the lawn and taking care of banking into the wee hours of the night.
“And the family would come, my mom and dad, and eat dinner every night, purposely right before closing so that they’d be here to help us clean up at night because they knew we were so exhausted,” said Debbie. “They have a lot to do with us having a restaurant because they helped in so many ways throughout the years.”
In 1981, the Grandview switched to breakfast and lunch only—the arrangement that holds today. And then the years started to roll by.
Debbie and Greg pride themselves on serving breakfast all day long, and Debbie loves to tell customers “you can sleep in and still get it.”
Their list of regulars is long—from ASU professors who used to be dishwashers, to former college students who drive from Atlanta just to get some eggs cooked by Greg.
“We’ve been very consistent and that’s what we get complimented on. [Customers] get what they expect when they come in as far as the service, the meal. Greg’s a great cook; he’s just a great cook. He can cook an egg any way you want it, and it will be the way you want it. And he’s fast. That’s how we get our turnover. It’s amazing how many people we can fit in there in eight hours,” said Debbie, who, along with her husband, broke their own record this past Fourth of July by serving 500 people in eight hours. Their restaurant now has the capacity to seat 70 people at one time.
But behind the scenes, the equation is the same: Greg cooks and Debbie acts as a floater, waiting tables, cleaning up, training employees, helping around the kitchen and even landscaping. Throughout the years, most of their family has worked there—brothers, sisters and their two children: Charles, 25 and Leigh Ann, 23.
And not only have they survived 30 years in the restaurant world, but they’ve also survived 33 years of marriage while working together.
When asked about their secret, Debbie replied, “Because he goes to Watauga Lake and I don’t.” Greg has a camper on the lake and escapes to go out on his boat and fish. “Watauga Lake has saved us, but we’ve had our moments.”
So what about the next 30 years?
“We’re going to do this until it kills us,” said Debbie. “It’s all we know. It’s all we’ve ever done. There’s been once or twice when we’ve put it on the market, but then what would we do? For 30 years, it’s all we’ve known. I don’t know where the time has gone. It’s like it was yesterday in a way, until I look at old pictures and then it’s strange.”
Grandview Restaurant, owned by Greg and Debbie Cairns, is located at 10751 Highway 105 South in Foscoe across from the entrance to Seven Devils. It is open seven days a week—from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Breakfast and lunch are served all day. For more information, call Grandview Restaurant at 828-963-4573.
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