The Story Behind Letty’s on Shamrock

If you’re a first-timer at Letty’s on Shamrock, it might take you a minute to read the menu. It isn’t because the menu is complicated or fancy. Owner Letty Ketner wanted her restaurant’s food to be simple in case she had to step into the kitchen and cook it herself. 

It can be hard to decide what you want while you’re taking in the decor. A “Love Is Love” banner and a sparkly Christmas garland of cocktail shakers, martini glasses, and glass cheeseburgers hangs over the bar all year. The fading cardboard replica of “Custer’s Last Fight” is a mid-1960s Budweiser advertisement that’s been in Letty’s family since she was a kid. A statue of Godzilla gobbling garden gnomes sits on the bar. 

The walls are covered with local art that’s mostly for sale. The dining room is like your craziest aunt’s attic, with vintage lamps, old kitchen gear, dishes, and cookbooks that crowd the shelves. A tall pink flamingo lords over mismatched tables and chairs. Letty is a self-avowed hoarder, and all that stuff is hers. (Except for the flamingo—that’s on loan from a friend.)

Vintage treasures crowd the shelves.

By the time you get around to ordering dinner (just get the Honey-Pecan Fried Chicken—everybody does), you’ll understand why so many regulars consider Letty’s on Shamrock a second home. As one longtime fan says, “If my sketchy friends are welcome there, anyone is welcome.”

Letty Ketner and her husband and co-owner, Ron, have bounced around Charlotte’s food and beverage scene for years. Letty, 68, was born in Ohio, but her parents moved to Greenwood, South Carolina, when she was young. Letty started out at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where she planned to be a nurse. But she couldn’t pass chemistry, so she transferred to Auburn University in Alabama and switched to teaching. One miserable semester as a student teacher convinced her that was a terrible idea. “Jiminy Crickets,” she says. “What was I thinking?”

She’d waitressed through college, and it finally occurred to her: “Wait—here is where I need to be.” She really loves two things, she says. “Talking a blue streak” and taking care of people. 

Letty came to Charlotte in 1985 to be near her sister, Susan, who was working at Charlie’s in Cotswold Mall. She landed at Nickleby’s, where she met Ron, a bartender. They got married in 1992, and Letty ran the catering program at Hotel Charlotte until 2009. 

After the economic crash of 2008, she went to the retirement community Aldersgate as food and beverage manager. She loved it, but in 2012, a change in management prompted her to leave. At the same time, a restaurant space on Shamrock Drive became available, and she couldn’t resist the opportunity to open her own restaurant. 

At 11 years old, Letty’s doesn’t qualify as one of Charlotte’s oldest restaurants. But  in a town where old places close so fast that the oldest might soon be a 1990 Bojangles franchise, Letty’s is a culinary “old soul,” a place that feels like it was always there. 

Honey-Pecan Fried Chicken with smashed red jacket potatoes and broccoli casserole.

The building, in a strip of shops anchored by Pike’s Pharmacy, has led several lives. It was a print shop and a platemaking business until Elizabeth Keller, who owns Pike’s with husband Jesse Pike, turned the narrow space into an old-fashioned soda shop in 1994. After the Pikes moved the soda shop to South End in 1999, Walter Rushton from Pewter Rose turned the space into Foskoskies and expanded next door to create a dining room. 

Shamrock Drive was “sketchy” in those days, stretching between Eastway Drive, Plaza Midwood, and NoDa. But it was beginning to change as the owners of the 1950s houses gave way to younger people looking for affordable real estate.

When the Ketners first opened, business was slow. But soon those families in Plaza-Shamrock, Country Club Estates, and Plaza Midwood started to find her. Then another community did.

Letty was open to anything and anyone. Kevin Gavagan, who lives in Durham, was once a NoDa denizen and cocktail nut who dreamed of opening his own bar. He once went to Ketner with an idea to do a few cocktail pop-ups. 

“She was like, ‘That’s a really dumb idea—let’s do it.’” 

That willingness to embrace people is how Letty’s evolved, Gavagan says. “She’s like a people connector. If you’re there at the bar, and she knows somebody she thinks you have something in common with, she’ll just walk you over and introduce you.”

Along the way, Letty’s became an unofficial center of Charlotte’s LGBTQ community. One of her first waiters was gay, and his friends started coming, particularly for the weekend brunches. These days, you’ll see every hair color from gray to purple, while Letty herself holds down a corner table, talking “a blue streak” to anyone who happens by. 

Letty embraces it all and helps sponsor benefits for the Regional AIDS Interfaith Network and Time Out Youth. Drag brunches and trivia nights happen here. Even her neon “open” sign is rainbow-colored. “It just kind of happened,” she says. “We don’t judge. We’re seen as a place to feel comfortable. It’s an intangible thing.”

She and Ron are getting older, though. The thought of retiring is starting to cross her mind, but she can’t bring herself to consider it yet. Letty has been approached about opening more locations, but she’s not interested. She’s a control freak, she says, and she couldn’t imagine not being there every night. Besides, she says, “a Letty’s somewhere else wouldn’t be Letty’s.”

KATHLEEN PURVIS is a longtime Charlotte writer who covers Southern food and culture.