The TableSection 2
The BLT at Merritt's Store and Grill
Merritt's Store and Grill sits on Airport Road in Chapel Hill, a stretch that runs north from the edge of the UNC campus through a part of town that has changed considerably around it.
A sandwich that does not need explaining
The store has not changed considerably. It occupies a modest white building that looks, accurately, like it has been selling things to people in this neighborhood for a long time — which it has, since the 1930s.
The BLT is what people come for. Not the only thing on the menu, but the thing that has accumulated the kind of word-of-mouth that eventually crosses into print, into food journalism, into the category of sandwiches that are discussed in terms usually reserved for more elaborate preparations. The reason is not complicated. Merritt's uses thick-cut bacon, cooked until the fat renders without turning brittle, stacked with enough volume that the sandwich requires a deliberate grip. The tomatoes — local when the season allows — are sliced thick. The lettuce is iceberg, cold and crisp, the right choice for structural reasons that anyone who has eaten a BLT will understand immediately. White bread, toasted. Duke's mayonnaise, which in North Carolina is not a brand preference so much as a regional conviction.
What the sandwich does is execute a known form without shortcuts. There is no version here that updates it, complicates it, or frames it differently. The counter is a counter; you order, you wait a short time, you eat. The room is small. The parking is a few spaces. The line, on a weekday morning or at lunch, is real.
That specificity — a fixed thing done the same way in the same building for decades — is increasingly uncommon on Airport Road, where the commercial landscape has shifted steadily. Merritt's sits in that landscape as a named, located fact. The sandwich is the reason most people know the name.