Augusta Eats: For downtown restaurant's epic desserts, an empty stomach is not optional

If you’re not full after leaving the Boll Weevil Café, you might be one of the very few customers who didn’t order dessert.

The Boll Weevil, located at 10 Ninth St. in downtown Augusta, offers a casual American menu designed to appeal to practically everyone. But the restaurant’s outsized cakes, baked on-premises, help keep drawing diners back.

The Boll Weevil occupies a former cotton warehouse. When cotton was king, the river-end of Augusta’s Ninth Street bustled with activity among its many warehouses where cotton bales were stored, weighed, priced and transported.

Fred Harrison Sr., a young clerk with the Charleston & Western Carolina Railroad, started his own business, Reliable Transport Co., around World War I. He hauled freight in mule-drawn drays from the warehouses and the C&WC terminal that stood about where the Augusta Marriott at the Convention Center stands today, across from the present Boll Weevil.

His son, Fred Harrison Jr., returned from his service in the U.S. Army during World War II and took over the reins of another family business, T.R. Maxwell Furniture, partly owned by Fred Jr.’s mother. By then the family had been using their riverside warehouse space to store inventory.

In the late 1980s, Heilig-Meyer Furniture bought the chain of stores that included Maxwell's, and in a few years Fred Jr. and his son George had completely sold off the family business.

Looking for another opportunity in the 1990s while he managed his family’s real estate holdings, George – who had a lot of furniture experience but no restaurant experience – decided to open a restaurant.

“He said he opened it up because he wanted a place to hang out with his friends and drink beer,” said William Harrison, George’s son, who operates the Boll Weevil today. “It was just a little tiny bar. It wasn’t really a full restaurant back then.”

The establishment's name, which George Harrison started as an inside joke, plays off of the cotton-rich history of that section of downtown and other onetime neighboring business' names, such as the former Cotton Patch restaurant and the now-closed Cotton Exchange, most recently used as a bank.

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George’s business partner, Laurie Hudson Blalock, tended to more food-related matters, and helped build the Boll Weevil’s first menu. Some items have changed over the years, but the spirit of the menu has not.

“We try to keep it casual, eclectic, a little bit of everything, so if you bring somebody in here, everybody can find something to eat, and it’s not so beaded on one cuisine that could turn some people away,” William Harrison said.

Amid the sandwiches, soups, salads and appetizers that comprise the menu, favorites emerge. The Curious George sandwich, for example, contains turkey topped with spinach dip and provolone cheese on freshly baked honey wheat bread.

The Boll Weevil’s epic cakes, divided into mammoth slices, came about by accident.

“They weren’t always the giant slices,” William Harrison said. Originally the restaurant ordered cakes prepared by food service providers, but one day George Harrison let the kitchen try baking its own red velvet cake. That sold quickly, and so did the other red velvet, carrot and chocolate cakes that followed.

“One day the head baker had to go out of town and she had her apprentice doing cakes for her,” William Harrison recalled. “I don’t know how it happened, but he accidentally put an extra layer in the cakes. We put them in the case, people saw them and everybody talked about them and it became a thing.”

The dessert menu includes 11 cakes, eight cheesecakes and three pies. One of the cakes, Seventh Heaven, combines rich layers of dark chocolate cake with buttercream icing and a layer of white chocolate cheesecake topped with chocolate ganache. Another cake, the Hummingbird, stacks layers of spice cake with bananas, pineapples and cinnamon with homemade cream cheese icing.

Word-of-mouth brought Augusta visitor Merge Jones to the Boll Weevil recently with his date.

“This is our first time,” he said. “I had some friends who came up here who recommended it to us, more so because of the sweets.”

The Boll Weevil property has a smaller footprint than a lot of restaurants, but further growth isn’t out of the question. The Harrison family owns all the property fronting Ninth Street across from the Marriott.

“Our kitchen is only big enough for so much expansion,” William Harrison said. “We are talking about at least putting a deck on the back of it so we can have some outside dining. We’ve also thought about how we could expand the parking lot, which wouldn’t be simple, but there’s some room around us to grow.”

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Augusta Eats: Epic desserts keep café customers in high cotton