The Mojo Hash comes with coffee braised steak, sweet potatoes, roasted mushrooms and an egg over easy. That is a breakfast dish, and it is the kind of thing a kitchen builds when it has decided the first meal of the day deserves the same attention as dinner.
That decision is the whole story of Uptown Yolk. Greg and Subrina Collier have opened restaurants across the region, earned four James Beard nominations between them and been named Charlotteans of the Year, and the thing they started with, and keep returning to, is breakfast.
It started in Rock Hill
The Colliers did not meet in Charlotte. They met in Memphis, where Subrina was waiting tables and Greg was a cook at a wing spot, according to an interview the couple gave Travel Noire. Subrina had been working in restaurants since she was 15. Greg went to culinary school in Arizona, where he says he learned the what and the why of food.
They moved to the Carolinas in 2012 and opened The Yolk in Rock Hill that spring, a breakfast and brunch restaurant that took the most overlooked meal of the day and gave it new flavors and techniques. In 2016 they tried a second concept, @Dawn in Ayrsley, which ran for a year before they closed it and went back to The Yolk, according to WCCB.
The Rock Hill diner closed in 2019 and the couple moved the concept to the 7th Street Public Market in Uptown, rebranded as Uptown Yolk. The market stall introduced the Colliers to a new set of customers, Subrina told the Charlotte Post, and it ran a chef residency program that let up and coming cooks lease the space for a couple of months to test their own ideas. Greg took over as executive chef at Loft & Cellar in the same period and earned his first James Beard nomination there.
The people behind it
Greg Collier was a James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast in 2019 and 2020 and a finalist in 2022, the first Charlotte chef to reach the final in that category, according to a Creative Mornings profile. Subrina was named a James Beard Foundation Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership fellow in 2020. Charlotte Magazine named the couple Charlotteans of the Year in 2018.
Their second restaurant, Leah & Louise at Camp North End, is named for Greg’s late sister and grandmother, a Memphis style juke joint that Esquire named one of the best new restaurants in America in 2020. The couple created the BayHaven Food and Wine Festival, which celebrates Black food and culture and builds opportunities for people of color in hospitality, and both have served on a federal small business advisory council.
The restaurant group is called BayHaven, and the Colliers describe their food as shaped by the Mississippi River Valley and the Memphis restaurant scene they came from.
What you actually order
Uptown Yolk left the 7th Street market in March 2021 and reopened in a 3,200 square foot space at Vantage South End in 2022, at the corner of Catherine and Winnifred streets, as a full service restaurant for the first time. The room seats more than a hundred inside and out, with a full bar led by Leah & Louise’s bar manager, a coffee program and pastries, according to WSOC.
The Mojo Hash is the dish people name first. The sweet potato waffle and the fried chicken and waffles are close behind, and the shrimp and grits, the Tennessee Fries with their savory sweet seasoning, and a dish called WWIII, three wings on a cornmeal Belgian waffle with whipped butter, cover the rest of a table. The Benny Baja is a seasonal vegetable Benedict for anyone who came for eggs.
The restaurant runs from 8 a.m. through the afternoon, with free garage parking validated for ninety minutes, which in South End is not nothing. Reservations help at weekends, and the wait on a Sunday is the honest measure of how the city feels about the place.
The 7th Street years also produced the residency program that became a quiet part of the Colliers’ legacy. Because the restaurant closed by three each afternoon, the couple offered the kitchen to chefs and food truck owners on 60 to 90 day leases to test a concept without the capital to open one. Subrina told Axios at the time that up and coming cooks could use the space for a month or so, and several Charlotte restaurants that exist today began as pop ups in that room.
The couple has kept expanding. A third restaurant, 3rd & Fernwood, was announced for the Metropolitan in Midtown with a focus on African inspired Southern food, and the Colliers have said they would like to return to South Carolina and to their native Tennessee eventually. Uptown Yolk remains the anchor, and the kitchen in South End is led by Greg alongside chef Brandon Staton, a Johnson & Wales graduate.
Why it matters
Greg Collier has said the goal is to create the best restaurant in the city and use breakfast as the canvas. That is a strange ambition in a restaurant scene that measures itself by dinner, and the Colliers have pursued it for fourteen years across three cities and two states, closing what did not work and returning, every time, to the meal they started with.
Charlotte has a great many brunch spots. The reason this one draws a line on Sunday is that the people behind the counter are the most decorated restaurateurs in the city, and they chose to spend that reputation on eggs.