10 minute read
Johnny Rogers: Serving up Great Food and Good Will
Barrett and Sarah Dabbs serve up food to make the customers feel like family.
Photo: Jason huddle
Johnny Rogers: Serving Up Great Food and Good Will
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By: Jason Huddle
Like many small business owners across the country, Barrett and Sarah Dabbs, of Johnny Roger’s BBQ & Burgers had no idea what would become of their restaurant after Governor Roy Cooper issued the stay-at-home order in late March. On the cusp of their two-year anniversary, they were staring at the possibility of losing everything they had dreamed and hoped for. To add insult to injury, they had just led a campaign to help the school children of Cabarrus County in paying off their unpaid school lunch debts. Now, they were the ones who needed assistance.
Barrett, who grew up in Cabarrus County and has a hospitality and culinary degree from East Carolina University, had spent his entire professional life in the restaurant business. Sarah, also worked in the industry, along with being a teacher at different schools in Cabarrus County. A few years ago, Barrett found himself out of a job, while Sarah was entering the corporate world. It was a trying time for both of them, as Barrett considered leaving the restaurant business altogether.
Photo: Jason Huddle
—Barrett Dabbs
Photo: Jason Huddle
There was one thing he had yet to accomplish, however, and that was owning his own restaurant. “I knew between The Smoke Pit (in Concord) and University Place (in Charlotte), there were no barbeque joints (on the Concord Parkway),” Barrett explained. He also knew his family’s barbeque recipe, that had been passed down for generations, was exceptional. “We had been providing barbeque for family and friends out of our own house for years,” he recalled. “People always told us, if we ever got a brick and mortar (store), they would love to support us.”
In this region, barbeque is almost a religion for some people. As a result, the already competitive restaurant business becomes exponentially harder with that cuisine. However, knowing the people who had pledged support for a future restaurant were barbeque fanatics, the Dabbs felt they may have a legitimate shot of making a name for themselves, if they could get an eatery up and running. It wasn’t long before they found a location where a Subway had just vacated their lease at the intersection of Concord Parkway and Pitts School Road. They already had chosen a name, after their two sons, John and Roger. The plan was set in motion.
Along with the help of some investors, Barrett and Sarah began to make their dream a reality. They took on the task of building out the space themselves, even enlisting the help of their two young sons. Sarah would leave her corporate job and come over to the restaurant and help prepare for opening, while Barret was working to the same end full-time. Utilizing homemade signs and repurposed, century-old wood from Barrett’s sister-in-law’s great-great grandfather’s barn, the space began to transform from a chain sub shop to a barbeque joint with a down-home, country vibe. Taking influence in their food from area restaurants of years past, such as Herlocker’s Drive-in, as well as the eastern Carolina “laid-back feel” Barrett had appreciated in college, Johnny Rogers was styled to be unique in an industry where it is extremely difficult to accomplish that goal.
After a rough start, Johnny Rogers has consistently won the heart of customers and awards to boot!
Photos: Jason Huddle
There was another aspect to their business the Dabbs wanted to get right from the start. “We didn’t just want to have a restaurant. We wanted to make an impact on our community,” Barrett told CM. As Barrett and had grown up and worked almost all his life in Cabarrus, and Sarah had also taught inside the county, there was no question their restaurant would also serve as an avenue to give back to the community that had given them so much.
However, even the best laid plans have to take a back seat sometimes. “The first year and a half was really trying,” Barrett recalled. They were constantly being reminded how no businesses had survived in their current location because of inconvenient access to the store. The stress was so much for Barrett, he found himself in the hospital with anxiety attacks a few times during that period. “It was tough,” he recalled. “This was the dream and are we going to fail at it?”, was the question he was asking himself.
It was at this point the Dabbs decided they were going to win every customer over with their food and service. They had already seen the industry, as a whole, had seemed to forget how to extend acts of simple courtesy over time. In contrast, they committed to make sure their customers received a higher level of service than they may be used to. “We want you to feel like you’re at home,” Sarah chimed in. “We want you to feel like you’re family, even if it’s your first time eating here, we want you to have an experience that makes you feel like you know us and we know you… Feeding people and making them feel at home goes hand in hand.”
—Sarah Dabbs
It was also at this point, Sarah decided to take a risk and begin to work full-time for their struggling restaurant. “It was either be miserable or take the biggest pay cut of your life and try and chase the American dream and be happy,” the Dabbs explained. Fortunately, at the same time, business was beginning to pick up. Barrett needed help with marketing, catering and working the phones, as he was in the kitchen making sure the food was coming out on time and to his standards. When the business began to hit its stride, the focus then turned back their original goal of helping the community.
The Dabbs knew they wanted to begin to give back in some way, but they were struggling to figure out what the best way to help would be. “We knew we wanted it to involve food, because that’s our passion,” Sarah reasoned. “But we just didn’t know what to do.”
As a former teacher, Sarah was aware any unpaid school lunch debts at the end of the school year came out of the school’s budget. “I sat in school improvement meetings where a grade level needs a copier, and you’re sitting there looking at the budget going, well, we have to pay this lunch debt off so, I’m sorry fifth grade, you’re not going to get the books you need this year, because we’ve got to pay off this several thousand-dollar debt,” Sarah explained.
In addition, she had witnessed many children receive alternate lunches because of non-payment to their school lunch accounts over the years. In this instance a child arrives at their register with a standard lunch, but when their student ID is scanned, and it is discovered they have more than eight dollars in unpaid fees, that standard lunch is taken away, disposed of, and they are given an alternate lunch.
This practice has been a source of controversy for many years. Advocates reason that the pain and possible embarrassment of receiving an alternate lunch will be enough for the student to go home and remind their parents to pay into their lunch account. Opponents explain it doesn’t take long for other children to learn who is receiving an alternate lunch and use that knowledge to bully that child. They also question the logic of throwing away a perfectly good lunch in favor of the alternate lunch just to make a point. “Sometimes it would work, but a lot of times it didn’t,” Sarah recalled.
During an event at their son’s school, Barret overheard a mother talking with the cafeteria manager about her daughter receiving an alternate lunch recently and the strife it had caused. “I knew then what we needed to do,” Barrett said.
After some discussions with the school, they discovered there was $600 in unpaid lunch debt for the year for the entire student body. “The next Monday morning, we went in and wrote a check,” remembered Barrett, knowing that was not the end of the mission to give back.
“So, then we started thinking,” Sarah added. “If they have a balance…what are these other schools’ balances?”
—Barrett Dabbs
Regardless of the actual number, the Dabbs knew the need was great and they would need to enlist the community’s help.
It wasn’t long before they had launched a social media campaign to pay off the entire unpaid school lunch debt for Cabarrus County schools without knowing the actual number they needed to reach. “If we had known the full amount, we may have been too scared to do it,” Sarah laughed. The amount would end up being just north of $20,000.
It took very little time for the social media challenge to gain steam. After tagging only a few businesses in a post to get the call rolling, the Dabbs had raised over $7,000 in just the first week. After two weeks, that number had more than doubled. Lastly, the corporate community came on board with enough contributions to put the campaign over the top. “We ended up writing a check to Cabarrus County Schools for about $21,500,” Barrett said proudly. This campaign established Johnny Rogers as both a good steward and a valuable member of the community. However, only a week later, the whole world began to screech to a halt.
Almost immediately, another social media campaign was launched. This time, it was to make sure Johnny Rogers stayed afloat through the COVID-19 crisis. “I would get chill bumps to come home and read those posts,” Barrett recalled fondly.
“We just had to rally our staff and remind them that we can’t control what’s going on in the world, but we can control what happens inside these four walls,” Barret remembered of the day they found out they would have to do carry-out only service. In addition to the in-house dining, they also lost catering revenue, as well as delivery business to schools. “We were feeding two to three schools per week,” explained Barrett.
As to how they have managed to survive, Sarah explained their simple plan. simply. “We could panic, or we could pivot. We chose to pivot.” They looked for opportunities wherever they presented themselves, while maintaining the same level of service their customers had already become accustomed to.
The COVID crisis has not stopped the Dabbs from planning for the future. They still have aspirations of opening up future Johnny Rogers locations, but are being conservative in their approach.
“We won’t do it if we can’t do it the right way,” Barrett said emphatically, referring to treating everyone right — from their vendors and employees to their customers. Until that happens, customers can enjoy entrees like their popular BBQ sandwich or All-the-Way Burger at Johnny Rogers’ sole location. Knowing what they have done to give back to Cabarrus County, it’s certainly worth the drive through an inconvenient parking lot.
For more information about Johnny Roger’s BBQ & Burgers’ menu items and operating hours, visit johnnyrogersbbq.com, or call (704) 721-2271.
