NORTH CAROLINA

Five Years of Killing It: How Sam Hart Built Charlotte’s Boldest Dining Experiment

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By Eric Barton | Aug. 24, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

At Counter- in Charlotte, a meal isn’t just a meal. It’s a concert, an art installation, a complete challenge of notions. One season you might sit down to a tasting menu inspired by Radiohead’s OK Computer. The next, you’re staring down plates built around modern art or mental health. The only rule is that nothing repeats—no dish, no menu, no safety net.

That was the promise Sam Hart made five years ago when they opened Counter-, a restaurant unlike anything Charlotte—or really, anywhere—had seen. To pull it off required more than a little audacity, the kind of gamble that either reshapes a city’s dining scene or sends a chef scrambling back to safer ground. Hart, it turns out, never had much interest in safer ground.

This September, Counter- turns five, a milestone that feels less like an anniversary and more like a victory lap. Along the way, Hart has built more than a restaurant. Counter- has become an incubator for young chefs, a benefactor to local nonprofits, a finalist-worthy stop on the James Beard trail, and maybe the most experimental dining room in the Southeast.

Chef Sam Hart

Hart’s path to this moment wasn’t exactly plotted out. Growing up in Charlotte, they weren’t hanging around restaurant kitchens. “I didn’t find myself in the kitchen that often as a child, unless it was devouring junk food or my mom’s baked ziti,” Hart said. Cooking arrived out of necessity—lime juice and Splenda slushies, bargain pasta dinners—long before it became a calling.

Mentors helped sharpen that calling into a career. Hart credits chef Rob Marilla, who taught the basics in culinary school, and Chicago’s Rob Levitt, who pushed them into intimidating projects at Publican Quality Meats rather than keeping them sidelined.

“It is one thing to stage in a kitchen and watch what is going on while picking herbs,” Hart recalled. “It is another thing to have someone constantly put something intimidating in front of you and assist you in conquering the project.”

When Counter- opened, the concept was radical: quarterly tasting menus built around themes, with not a single dish ever repeated. It was exhilarating, but also terrifying. “I knew this was the one shot I had to create a concept never seen before,” Hart said. “Once that realization sank in, it was excitement interwoven with immense fear of future regret if I didn’t pursue this idea.”

The restaurant has grown into more than its menus. Chefs are brought in for up to three years before being encouraged to leave and launch their own ventures, carrying with them Hart’s lessons about focus and intention. “My objective is to narrow their focus,” Hart explained. “Make sure that they are thinking twice and acting once.” It’s a philosophy of deliberate creativity, the kind that keeps Counter- from calcifying into something predictable.

Counter- Restaurant Charlotte North Carolina Sam Hart

Counter- also looks outward, supporting local nonprofits like The Bulb, The Relatives, and Time Out Youth, and grounding its menus in North Carolina’s farming abundance. That, Hart believes, is Charlotte’s real “cheat code.” As Michelin’s arrival in North Carolina wakes the state up to its own potential, Hart sees more confidence in daring concepts. “More unique concepts and innovative ideas are coming to market as well, now that those who have them are more confident in this city supporting them,” they said.

As for the next five years, Counter- will shift its story to include the voices of Hart’s most tenured staff and the partners who have helped shape it. Don’t expect any slowing down; Hart doesn’t really do idle. Even days off are regimented—30 minutes of reading, working out, meditating, developing skills. “When we rest, we are restoring. When we eat, we are discovering,” Hart said. “No matter what we do… our eyes are always on the target.”

Five years in, Counter- still feels like a restaurant with something to prove, still stretching Charlotte’s idea of what dining can be. That may be the secret. Hart isn’t just serving food. They’re serving possibility—messy, ambitious, exhilarating possibility—and Charlotte, at long last, seems hungry for it.