Counter- Intuitive
Every dish tells a story at Counter-, Chef Sam Hart’s stellar Charlotte restaurant
By M. Linda Lee
It’s always fun to see someone experiencing Counter- for the first time because it’s overwhelming. It’s like a baptism of the senses, where you’re submerged.”
This is how executive chef and owner Sam Hart describes the extraordinary experience of dining at Counter- in Charlotte, North Carolina, where each multicourse tasting menu unravels as a story that connects with guests not only through food, but through an all-encompassing sensory experience that includes music and art.
Counter-’s cuisine and expertly curated wine pairings share the same goal: to tell untold stories and spotlight regions and varietals that are often overlooked.
exposition
The idea for Counter- was born during Hart’s early days working in corporate advertising, when the nascent chef would frequently cook for friends and clients. “When I was making one of these dinners, this idea popped into my head of ‘What if I paired music with food?’” Hart recalls. Like an earworm, the thought kept playing through his head, and the next day, he quit his job and enrolled in culinary school.
From there, Sam sharpened his skills in the kitchens of Michelin three-star Alinea and Japanese izakaya Momotaro, both in Chicago. Yet their favorite experience in the Windy City was teaching children how to cook at The Kids’ Table, where they were inspired by “seeing how beautifully creative [the kids’] minds are.”
Set in Charlotte’s Wesley Heights neighborhood, Counter- begins each dinner experience in the small anteroom with a series of “snacks” that set the tone for the courses to come.
Sprouted at that early client dinner, the seed for Counter- grew to be a series of pop-ups in 2019, finally blossoming into a brick-and-mortar restaurant on September 9, 2020. The name of the restaurant doesn’t only reflect the 18-seat U-shaped concrete counter where diners sit watching a story unfold in the open kitchen; more importantly, it refers to Hart’s wish to be a counterbalance to how fine dining is normally operated.
But the restaurant’s first goal, above any award, is to solve food insecurity in Charlotte. “We firmly believe that access to fresh produce is a right and not a privilege,” Hart says. In a continuing weekly effort, the staff reclaims hundreds of pounds of produce from farmers and markets that would have otherwise been thrown away, and gives it to families in West Charlotte.
At this 18-seat counter, diners watch stories unfold in the open kitchen.
PLOT
Over the course of each year, Counter-’s menus reflect four seasonal themes, with the music and art changing to match. While spring highlighted the bounty of the Carolina coast, the fall menu will spotlight Carolinas’ mountains in what Hart calls “a beautiful tribute to what is currently happening in the restaurant and . . . what we’re trying to do outside [these] four walls.” No matter the theme, Hart’s complex dishes are realized through the lens of the diverse harvest of produce and proteins from area farms, which the chef transforms into creations such as a quenelle of savory Carolina Gold rice ice cream adorned with crispy collard green furikake “sprinkles.”
Sam shoulders the task of pairing all the music for each menu, starting with sorting through 2,000 or more songs to determine 150 songs for the initial playlist, then paring those down to 30–40 tunes for any given night. “The music is paired not only in the sense of telling the story, but also by its composition with the food,” they explain. “If a dish has some funk to it, the music will have some funk to it; if it’s acidic, the music will have some twang to it. There’s a whole crazy algorithm that takes place in my head for every song we choose. It’s like I can almost taste the music, and when I’m eating food, I can hear the music that would go with it.”
In the open kitchen, Chef Sam Hart and the team meticulously prepare each course while diners savor the show.
Denouement
“Just as every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, the end of our story is September 9, 2032, when Counter- will be closing permanently for service,” Hart shares. Having just 73 seasonal menus to go instills a certain urgency on the team, but, as the chef points out, they are happily in the middle of their story for now. So, until the last page, Sam Hart and the Counter- team will continue to dazzle diners by flipping the standard blueprint for the restaurant industry on its head with their mind-bending culinary adventures. V
Learn more at counterclt.com
Photography courtesy of Unify Visual; this story appears in our Fall 2025 issue.
