Saltbox Seafood Joint: 'Hyperlocal, Dude'

So crazy it just might work.

And business is good.

“When you’re new, you’re fresh, everybody wants to participate with you,” Ricky says of his hot start. “But then the winter months came in, and still people came to this window and ordered fish, man – ‘Can I have this, this, this and this? – and they run back to the car. That’s how I knew I was onto something.”

The Army veteran and North Carolina native bounced around top-flight kitchens for about 15 years before coming back to the Tar Heel State seven years ago to work at Glasshalfull in Carrboro. He went from there to help open Giorgios in Cary, then found himself hopping up and down the eastern seaboard as a consultant for other opening restaurants. He decided, “Let me stay put a little while and see if I can find my own thing. I’m the operator, chef, dishwasher, everything. It’s refreshing for me. Now I am the be all end all.”

He says he’s more or less worked out the kinks of the business model and hopes to duplicate it in towns and cities all over the state. But he wants to make sure his roots are firmly planted in Durham first.

“I want Saltbox to be a fixture of the community, and it’s going in that direction,” he says. “I see the same faces at that window.”

Asked if he uses local ingredients, Ricky just pointed across the street at Sweet Beet City Farm, a thriving urban garden.

“Boom,” Ricky says. “I am hyper-local, dude.”

He gets kale, swiss chard, spring onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, new potatoes and more.

“It’s almost like my personal garden, but I don’t have to do all the tending,” Ricky says. “But I don’t see [using local ingredients] as extraordinary anymore. That’s standard operating procedure.”

season.

proceeds will benefit the Durham Branch of the Food Bank of Central & Eastern N.C