New tavern on New Garden Road serves up Southern-style bar food with its drinks (2024)

Just two months after opening, Lockwood Tavern in Greensboro is gaining a loyal following for a business that gives equal attention to its bar and restaurant components.

Autumn Holmes and boyfriend Kip Crawley opened Lockwood Tavern in February at 2109 New Garden Road, in the space that housed Danny’s Restaurant for 20 years.

In fact, Holmes and Crawley initially bought Danny’s in 2022 and ran for it for about a year. But they knew all along they wanted something different than Danny’s style of classic diner, so they closed it last year and spent seven months transforming it into Lockwood Tavern.

They wanted a great bar. But they also wanted a place known just as much for its food.

“There are a lot of great restaurants around here, and there are a lot of great bars. But the combination of what we envisioned is not in this area,” Holmes said.

Originally, they weren’t even going to have a restaurant – but a food truck.

Crawley is self-taught, having grown up in a family of good cooks. “My parents both cook. My grandmother from South Carolina was an excellent cook. But to be honest, cooking is something I picked up when I was in college – it was either cook or starve,” he said with a laugh.

Still, Crawley always enjoyed cooking. He often would find himself coming home from a great restaurant meal and trying to figure out how to recreate a dish.

Like many people, he turned to cooking in his free time during the COVID pandemic. “We would cook for friends. We would do plates,” Holmes said. At one point, they essentially had a small catering business going.

“I was cooking a lot, and I got laid off for a while. So I started thinking what I could do to be make myself happy,” Crawley said.

That’s when the food-truck idea came up. “She said, ‘You love to cook. Maybe that’s something you should explore,’” Crawley said of Holmes.

With Crawley’s brother-in-law on board as an investor, they started shopping around for a truck. “But we also looked at some restaurants just out of curiosity,” Crawley said.

When the Danny’s spot became available in 2022, they grabbed it. “We jumped on it because of the location,” Holmes said. “It all happened really fast.”

As a result, they decided to just run it as Danny’s for a while. But now they finally are forging their own identity. In fact, they just got their permanent sign hung about two weeks ago. And they are still working their way through menu ideas.

But they already have a good grasp on their concept: Southern-style bar food.

One of their most popular appetizers is a collard green dip ($9.50), made from fresh, slow-cooked collards, mixed with shallots and tomatoes and topped with Jack and Parmesan cheeses.

Other appetizers include their house-made Southern caviar (black-eyed-pea dip), Southern egg rolls (pulled pork, collards, black-eyed peas), fried green tomatoes and pimento cheese. The latter is available as a cold spread or breaded and fried.

There also are such bar favorites as wings, loaded fries or tots and nachos.

“The main part of our menu is build-your-own,” Holmes said, with burgers and sandwiches starting at $9.99. Customers can choose such proteins as grilled or fried chicken breast, pulled pork, meatloaf, pork tenderloin, black-bean butter, double smash burger (two 4-ounce patties) or 8-ounce hand-shapped patty.

“I love smash burgers, and Kip loves the thick hand patties, so we do both,” Holmes said with a laugh.

The hand-patties get extra flavor from the char-broiler in the kitchen.

Customers can add a variety of condiment, vegetables and cheeses, including house-made fried onions.

Other sandwiches include a Carolina sausage dog – with a 1/3-pound smoked sausage standing in for a hot dog – and a Southern BLT with fresh fried green tomatoes and pimento cheese.

There also are a few entrees ($12.50 to $14.50), including the popular country fried chicken with milk gravy, meatloaf and grilled pork chops. Entrees come with two sides, including collards, mac ’n’ cheese, fried okra, green beans and more.

Holmes works full time in the front of the house, and she said they now have a good kitchen staff to recreate their recipes. Crawley, who works as an electronics engineer during the day, comes by after work in the evenings to help out wherever he can, and he's there on the weekends.

“When Kip’s here on the weekends, he has his specialties,” Holmes said. “He likes to do a lot Cajun food. He makes jambalaya, dirty-rice balls. People’ll buy his gumbo by the quart. We do it by the bowl in here, and you can also get it to go. The weekend is when it’s kind of his flare.”

For dessert, Lockwood has been exclusively offering sweets by Black Magnolia Southern Patisserie, owned by Venee Pawlowski. “She makes all our desserts, like banana pudding cake,” Holmes said. “She works with our Southern style. We’re also going to start doing a Southern dessert drink menu to go with them.”

co*cktails and liquor are the focus of the bar at Lockwood. The wine list is short and sweet. The beer is cans and bottles only, no draft, but the selection does include several N.C. Beers.

Holmes said that house liquors include Evan Williams Black Label bourbon, Lunazul tequila and Pinnacle vodka. “We’re kind of known for our great bourbon selection,” she said, including Buffalo Trace, Angels Envy, Eagle Rare, Basil Hayden and others.

Signature co*cktails include a Cheerwine old-fashioned and Lockwood smash – both made with Evan Williams Black label. A recent special was a salted caramel White Russian.

They said they still have more ideas for the restaurant. Holmes said they plan to add some signature sandwiches for people who’d rather not build their own, and they probably will add a couple more appetizers soon. They also are planning to hold weekly music-bingo and trivia nights.

Further down the road, they want to add seafood to the menu. “The restaurant is actually named after Lockwood Folly River in Brunswick County,” Crawley said. “So we really want to do coastal Carolina seafood. We want to bring that Calabash-style seafood to Greensboro.”

For the moment, though, they are building a reputation for bar food with a Southern twist.

“Our goal was always this,” Holmes said. “We wanted to have a good bar, we wanted to have late-night, and we wanted that kind of crave-able bar food, but we wanted it to be fresh, with that homemade feeling. We didn’t want to serve frozen mozzarella sticks.”

Customers seem to have caught on. “I’ve been amazed how well it’s done,” Holmes said. “We didn’t have money to advertise. All we had was word of mouth and Facebook.

“In just two months, we already have regulars we see sometimes three times a week. That’s been really cool.”