Perched just off Highway 15-501 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the old-school breakfast and lunch joint Merritt’s Grill serves such comforting Southern classics as pulled pork barbecue and pimento cheese sandwiches. But truthfully, most diners are there for just one thing: the BLT.
This bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich comes in four sizes: baby, single, double, and triple. The triple, a towering behemoth that can intimidate more than entice, features a pound of bacon and four layers of lettuce and tomato. According to current co-owner John Toogood, the restaurant sells some 2,700 BLTs and goes through about 2,200 pounds of bacon each week. To alleviate the sometimes hours-long lines, he says, “we set up a second [ordering] line that just makes single and baby BLTs.”
But it’s a simple sandwich made with bacon, lettuce, and tomato. What’s the secret?
It all comes back to Robin Britt, one of the former co-owners of Merritt’s, Toogood says. Merritt’s first opened as a gas station in 1929, but it wasn’t until Robin and her husband, Robert, took over in 1991 that it fully transitioned into a restaurant. Among other menu additions came Robin’s BLT. She originally made the sandwich for her husband’s lunch, years before its debut at the restaurant, and as a result its nickname is still the “Love Sandwich.”
There’s not much room to play with a sandwich made from just three staple ingredients, but Robin’s primary innovation involved the bacon. According to John, she cooked it on a flattop grill, a little lower and slower than usual so that the meat rendered in its own bacon fat, with just the right amount of chew. She focused on ordering ripe, juicy tomatoes and fresh, crisp lettuce, then experimented with different amounts of each before landing on just the right proportions. The finishing touches are nothing more than mayo, salt, and pepper: The single BLT was born. Customers received it so happily that the double and triple soon followed.
Robin passed away in 2014, but her legacy lives on in the sandwich. Today the Toogood family—John, Paula, and their son CJ, a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill alumnus—owns and operates Merritt’s. The Toogoods played a role in the BLT’s success even before the family ran the restaurant: As the owners of a bakery in the nearby town of Pittsboro, they supplied the sandwich’s sourdough bread.
Now, as sandwich stewards, they have maintained Robin’s original BLT parameters, including working directly with produce suppliers for the freshest tomatoes and lettuce. They once experimented with a more efficient bacon method in the oven but quickly found it didn’t compare. Today, they remain “pretty strict” with the bacon, John says. “We have some really good bacon guys that have been with us for a while.” They source it locally via Smithfield.
Since its debut decades ago, the BLT at Merritt’s has taken on a cult-like status. UNC freshmen make a pilgrimage to try it for the first time, and alumni visit decades after they donned a cap and gown; Patriots quarterback and former Tar Heel star Drake Maye still visits with his family when he’s back in town. People beyond Chapel Hill have taken notice too: It was named the best sandwich in the state by People magazine. After a recent feature on the cover of Our State magazine, Merritt’s even had someone drive down from Virginia to ask for an autograph.
On football game days, the staff starts prepping early for the rush: “We have to cook bacon 24/7 for a whole week coming into game day,” John says. “We have two to three guys cooking bacon as many hours as they can.” This year, Merritt’s will be slinging BLTs inside Kenan Stadium; in the past, it’s even popped up at the U.S. Open down in Pinehurst.
One parting personal note: In my four years as a student in Chapel Hill, I only made it to Merritt’s once, during the last week of school. I’d heard so much about that BLT for so long that I knew I couldn’t leave town until I tried one—they might as well not send me my diploma. I ate a single BLT outside on a bright spring day. The bacon was crisp, the tomatoes impossibly juicy, and I knew I’d made a mistake by not coming every chance I had. Now I order that special sandwich whenever I’m back in town. I guess you could say I’m making up for lost time.
