Edward Garriett
Fry cook, Price’s Chicken Coop
A thirty-five-year veteran of the Price family’s walk-up, Garriett is the man on whom hungry folk of all races and classes rely. Five days a week, he stands tall amid the greasy haze, pulling basket after basket of deep-fried poultry parts from a bank of vats roiling with oil. He doesn’t boast. He doesn’t brag. He just fries birds, lashes them with salt, and accepts the kind words of a deeply devoted clientele. “I cook and dump, cook and dump,” he says. But Charlotte knows better. Garriett’s work, and that of his compatriots, sustains the city.

Alice Chang
Proprietor, Grand Asia Market
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania whose parents emigrated from Taiwan, Alice Chang worked a Wall Street job before returning to her home state of North Carolina. Now, wearing ballet flats and flower-print sweaters instead of power suits, she runs the family’s multinational grocery, set in a retrofitted Winn-Dixie, where she’s building bridges between China and the American South by selling pork belly bao as barbecue and lo mein as Chinese spaghetti. “Southern food and Chinese food have a lot in common,” Chang says. If Southerners eat meat-and-threes, “Chinese eat rice-and-threes.”

Kathleen Purvis
Food editor, The Charlotte Observer
Charlotte has been her beat for a quarter century. She has covered every story that’s fit to eat, from the aesthetics of bake sales to the lack of grocery stores in impoverished areas. Her recipes empty grocery store shelves, and she can really turn a phrase. Of hash, a pork offal stew, she once wrote, “On the family tree of barbecue…hash is a strange little stump indeed.”
 
More on Charlotte:
> Read the G&G City Portrait
> Learn where to eat in Charlotte
> See a photo gallery of the Charlote food scene