Hilton Head’s Serial Entrepreneur: An Interview with Dave Peck
Dave Peck has been on Hilton Head Island as long as he can remember. Anyone who has come in contact with running a restaurant on the island knows who he is. Serial entrepreneur? If you pinned him down, he’d probably agree. Why else would someone take on a new food venture simply because he was a little bored? Dave did and we all might just be the beneficiaries of his new island collaboration at the Jarvis Creek General Store. Here’s a portion of my chat with Dave on how this all came to be.
JB: So you’re an island guy. Were you born and raised here?
Dave Peck: Not born here, but I’ve been here 51 years now.
JB: Oh wow! How did you end up doing food?
Dave: The long short story is I was in advertising for many years. I worked with Island Communications. Then I was with the Anderson Group on Hilton Head, and I met the owner of Salty Dog and started working with him on some advertising. He simply said, “Hey, do you want to come work in the restaurant business?” I had no experience, but I thought it might be kind of fun. And he felt like I could do it based on some good marketing experience I had. And that’s what happened.
My first job with them was actually bar backing at Salty Dog, and then I progressed quickly into running the restaurant. He just kind of wanted to get my feet wet with a couple other things.
JB: What year was that? It sounds like you jumped into the deep end fairly quickly.
Dave: Oh gosh. You’re going to tell everybody how old I am. I don’t even know the year. I can tell you it’s been about 25 years, maybe 29 years actually. Yeah, it was a really deep, quick jump.
JB: So what was the first time you opened a place on your own, just you?
Dave: First time that I opened one was when we opened Low Country Backyard. That was when I opened my own place and it was just me
JB: So you started that place and then is that where you jumped from there to Bad Biscuit?
Dave: Yes, we opened that. We still had Low Country Backyard while we opened Bad Biscuit.
JB: Wow, okay. So Bad Biscuit is doing its thing. How did the whole Pool Bar Jim’s thing come along?
Dave: I worked for Jim. I’m dating myself again. I worked at Jim’s Paradise. I was his DJ back in the day. So I’ve known Jim for many years, and when he was in the process of leaving Marriott, he came and hung out with us. We already had the bar at the Seacrest and he came over and had a couple beers after work one day. We were talking and he told me he was getting out of Marriott, and I said, “well, why don’t you come over here?” And he said, “well, it’s been 35 years I think I’m just going to retire. I think I’m done.” And I said, “all right, well, if you to change your mind. Let me know.”
About a week later, he showed up for another beer and I said, “Jim, why don’t we just do this? Why don’t you run the bar? I’ll do the food, we’ll work it out.” And he said, “all right, let’s do it.” And I think we’re on year number five with him right now, six actually.
JB: Six years. So this stuff isn’t easy, and I know you’re not cooking in all these places, but what possessed you to take on one more with the Jarvis Creek General Store?
Dave: To be honest with you, I sold Low Country Backyard because it was getting difficult to find help. That was the main reason. And I wanted to slow down because, since we couldn’t find help, it was putting me back to work more. And I was cooking and spending a lot more time in the kitchen, which is fine. I loved it, but I just didn’t want to be full-time back in the business. So that’s the biggest reason why I sold it.
And then, well, I’m still young, I would say I’m in my early fifties and I didn’t see any real reason to slow down. I was getting bored and I think my wife was tired of me pacing around the garage, so I just decided and these guys called me. They said, “Hey, we’ve got this spot. We feel like it’s missing something. Do you have any advice?” I gave them my advice. I told ’em, I thought it might be better with a local dining experience attached to it because it’s such a cool little spot. I felt like if we added that missing element, we might be able to draw more of a crowd down there. So I said, let’s do it. And it was mostly out of wanting to do something. And I like seeing other places succeed. I like contributing to their success. I like a challenge. And here we are.
JB: So now it’s food out of a trailer six days a week, but you guys are actively pursuing a permanent kitchen?
Dave: Sort of, we’re actually working with the town right now. We’re not quite ready to build on a kitchen in the back. I don’t have any ownership there. I’m still running the food trailer. It is part of the Bad Biscuit operation, and what we’re planning to do in the meantime is to incorporate the food trailer on the backside of the restaurant and treat it more like an attachment to the building per se, and have waiters and waitresses. So it’ll be functioning as a commercial full kitchen. It just won’t be attached to the building.
JB: Tell me about the food there. What are your plans?
Dave: We’re going to keep it Low Country, Low Country and Southern. That’s what I know how to do, and what I’m comfortable doing, and what I’ve been successful doing. We’ve got some cool stuff on the menu like a low country boil parfait. I like to twist it, make it my own, and do something original. So it’s not a traditional low country boil like you would dump on the table. It’s actually a parfait with red rice, rosemary, potatoes. We add the corn in there as well. Then we finish it off with a Daufuskie double crab cake, which I learned how to make the right way from an actual guy on Daufuskie, some garlic shrimp, and drizzle some hurricane sauce on it, which is our own creation as well.
We’re doing a salad as well and a burger. Everybody wants a burger. The kids want chicken fingers, so we’re giving ’em what they want there. We’re doing a homemade mac and cheese, which we do with an incredible five cheese mac and cheese sauce that we make in-house, and we put that with some nice pasta and barbecue shrimp on top. So that’s our barbecue mac.
JB: Sounds good. How would you describe the scene there at the general store? The fact that you’re sitting practically on top of 278, you kind of forget it’s there?
Dave: I would call it very low key, laid back, low country style dining. You’re under this huge oak tree outside. You’ve got the big screen TVs out there if you want to watch football or see what’s going on. And you can sit in an Adirondack, at a table, at a picnic table, and at a bistro table under an awning. It’s kind of like a laid back, low country outdoor atmosphere at your house. I’m not going to lie and say when you pull up, you don’t hear the traffic, but once you’ve got the live entertainment going or you’re watching something on the TV with the volume turned up, you forget about all that.