Penguin battle: A story of change

Five months ago, Brian Rowe sat at the counter of The Diamond in Plaza Midwood, an awkward witness to a Charlotte restaurant owner’s farewell.

Jerry Pistiolis was retiring after 28 years of running the cozy diner, and the Charlotte legal crowd that came each day had come once more for a sad but warm celebration. It was an Old Charlotte moment, but also a Plaza Midwood moment.

Pistiolis was selling the joint to three other guys in the neighborhood, including two who had revived another old restaurant around the corner, The Penguin. Rowe and Jimmy King seemed out of place that day, tattooed and T-shirted amid the suits and khakis. But they were gracious to Pistiolis, and they said all the right words about how things at the Diamond wouldn’t change that much.

But now, everything else has.

On Wednesday afternoon, Rowe was again at the Diamond’s counter, texting, making phone calls, agitated. About a decade after buying the rights to operate the Penguin and turning it into one of Charlotte’s few funky treasures, he and King were out. The pair had planned on running the Diamond and Penguin as sister restaurants, but the Ballentine family, which owns The Penguin’s building and name, had decided not to renew their lease.

“We got the shaft,” Rowe said, but he didn’t want to say so publicly, because he worried that a fight might fracture Plaza Midwood’s close-knit community, which already was taking sides. By Thursday, however, Rowe and King had decided that the high road is the place you get run over. “We will do whatever is necessary to deal with this situation and be treated fairly,” they said in a news release.

In other words, the lawyers are now on the menu. Welcome, Plaza Midwood, to the other side of success.

The fight has set off a buzz both fretful and angry in Charlotte, a testament to how hungry we still are here for authenticity. The Penguin is a simple restaurant, a blue-collar joint with fine, cheap food and a let-it-ride attitude. To Charlotteans, it’s not only one of our few truly hip places, but the place we most often pointed at to show others we were capable of hipness.

And now? The Ballentines promise the new Penguin will be the same, with one small exception: The place that proudly flipped the spatula at the chain restaurant culture will be pursuing franchise opportunities.

In Plaza Midwood, the reaction has been more personal. The Penguin sparked a business renaissance there, showing others that you could be true to this rugged neighborhood – and still be successful. It spawned similar places – restaurants and shops that have developed into a dynamic, organic community, supportive of each others’ successes, different.

The businesses and customers celebrated that difference, occasionally with a sneer at Charlotte’s banking culture and Starbucks sippers. But what’s made Plaza Midwood thrive is what’s made much of Charlotte a place we want to be – entrepreneurship, big and small, a sense of wanting more, wanting better. Lulu and Zada Jane’s and Soul? They came to the neighborhood because of the lower rent and committed clientele – the opportunity to make a dollar. You can put a tattoo on it, but it’s still business.

And so comes the byproduct of that culture. A fully lawyered dispute. A family that will move on without the guys who brought its old restaurant to prominence. And now, two guys trying to get what’s theirs – most likely a bigger buyout, but at the risk of dividing a community.

Brian Rowe struggled with that this past week, at his new counter in his new restaurant.

“There’s good change,” he said, “and there’s bad change.”

And, maybe for Plaza Midwood, there’s change that’s inevitable.