Augusta Eats: 'Southern inspired' restaurant pulls eager customers to Pollards Corner

Some new restaurants have to wait for customers. At Pollards Corner, customers were waiting for a new restaurant.

Now they have one – Grandaddy's Kitchen, at 6008 Clarks Hill Rd. near Thurmond Lake.

And co-owner Melissa Hoard cannot be clearer: The “Southern-inspired” restaurant is hiring, and they need more workers.

"We’ve got big plans,” she said. “We just need bodies.”

Even with a small staff, since holding a soft opening Aug. 28, Grandaddy’s already has served hundreds of customers. When it opened its doors Wednesday, 10 customers arrived just in the first 15 minutes.

"It’s a huge, huge need,” Hoard said. “Everybody's been excited.”

The restaurant sits at one of Columbia County’s best-known landmark locations. Pollards Corner began getting busier in the 1950s when the Pollard family founded the lumber company that’s still operating today near the intersection.

The family still owns the northeast corner of the intersection, which holds sentimental attachment to the Pollards. A small white building there is a general store founded by Bert Pollard’s grandfather in 1952, according to Hoard.

“Bert has just been amazing, from the time last spring when he called me up and said, ‘How’d you like to run a restaurant?’” she recalled. “I was actually at a restaurant eating, and I went outside and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

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The “Grandaddy” in the restaurant’s name is Hoard’s husband, Bill. The Hoards are enthusiastic “home cooks,” she said, and steadily gained a reputation for feeding friends and neighbors on holidays and at get-togethers.

The Hoards had owned and operated Appaloosa Moving and Storage for several years but enthusiastically accepted Pollard’s offer to start a restaurant inside the old store, which in later years had operated as different restaurants such as T.J. Outriggers and, most recently, a Maryland Fried Chicken.

Grandaddy’s features a renovated décor – using Pollard lumber – and a menu that shows variety and familiarity. Hoard said she wanted to serve food that everybody could enjoy. That includes hamburgers, hot dogs, fried chicken, salads, made-to-order oven-fired pizzas and a selection of sandwiches that includes a pulled pork sandwich Hoard said is “drop the mic” delicious.

In time, Hoard wants to introduce dishes that spotlight her and her husband’s specialties. For Bill, it’s steaks and Asian fare such as shrimp fried rice and orange chicken. For Melissa, it’s seafood, including a dish she created called Carl’s Cuban Shrimp, a spicy homage to Cuban celebrity chef Carl Ruiz, who died in 2019.

Hoard is looking forward to more workdays such as last Monday’s.

“We were all having a great time and just having people enjoy our food to eat. We're just servants, I guess,” she said. “We just want to make people happy, especially in times when there’s such non-happiness in the world. We want to bring it home and make people feel good.”

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Food, friendliness give Southern comfort at Pollards Corner restaurant