Above: Chip Hearn is a known for his creative entrepreneurial spirit — and a willingness to pull off stunts to gain his business attention, not to mention entertain customers. Photo courtesy RehobothFoodie.com.
By Pam George
You could say that entrepreneurship is in Luther “Chip” Hearn’s blood. His grandfather and great-uncle started Hearn Brothers food markets on March 17, 1919. By 1948, there were three locations. Hearn’s father, Luther Jr., was a serial entrepreneur. “He was a workaholic. He worked every day, all the hours,” his son recalls.
At one point, the Hearn family had up to eight Dairy Queen and Tastee-Freez locations throughout the state. With his father and sister, Randi, Hearn co-owned the Country Squire in Rehoboth Beach and The Starboard Restaurant in Dewey Beach. Today, he owns Lewes-based Peppers.com, which sells hot sauces, and The Ice Cream Store in Rehoboth Beach. He’s also an investor in Somewhere, the Rehoboth Beach restaurant that his daughter, Aileen Hearn, owns with partner Kyle Ten Eyck.
The natural-born business owner is also a savvy marketer. When Hearn owned The Starboard, he ran hermit crab races, which he emceed with a microphone, recalls the restaurant’s current owner, Steve “Monty” Montgomery, who was an employee at the time.
“People would crowd around him, cheering on their hermit crab,” Montgomery says. “As you can imagine, those little guys don’t move too fast, so it was hilarious that customers were laughing, screaming and watching these things take 30 minutes to move a whopping 8 feet.”
The Starboard’s popular Bloody Mary bar helped launch Hearn’s hot sauce business, which Hearn promoted at industry events. At The Ice Cream Store, the flavor names read like marketing copy — they’re playful, memorable and built for word-of-mouth. Consider Booger, Garlic Amaretto Chip and Lick Me, I’m Delicious.
Although raised in North Wilmington, the Brandywine High School graduate is a coastal Delawarean through and through.
An Early Start
The Hearn family began vacationing in Rehoboth Beach long before Hearn was born, he says. They spent their summers at the house they owned on Olive Avenue, where there was a vacant lot after the March 1962 storm consumed an apartment building.
Hearn and his friends saw the space as an opportunity. The teenagers, including Butch Emmert, made water ice in the Dinner Bell’s kitchen, owned by Emmert’s grandmother, Ruth Cowgill Emmert. (Today, it’s the Bellmoor Inn.) They sold the water ice from a table on the lot.
Hearns’ award-winning Georgia Peach and Vidalia Onion Hot Sauce.
“It was the greatest concept, because it meant that we got to be at the beach all summer instead of having to work somewhere else,” Hearn says. The homespun business didn’t raise an eyebrow at a time when milk trucks and fish or meat vendors would deliver to residences.
Hearn and his family purchased the Dairy Queen on Lewes Beach, and Hearn lived nearby. “In those days, everything closed down at the end of September,” he says. “Then it opened just before Easter. So, you basically led a double life. You worked doing other stuff in the winter, and then you worked at the beach in the summer.”
He added a Dairy Queen on Rehoboth Avenue. Another space became available. Hearn was ready to move from soft serve to scoopable ice cream. His marketing plan came from a University of Virginia commerce-school assignment: Hearn and his classmates were supposed to create a business from scratch, and he asked whether they could build the project around a real Rehoboth Avenue shop.
The name also came from that exercise. Hearn admits “The Ice Cream Store” sounded almost too obvious, but that was the point. “What a silly name, but the professor loved it,” he says. At time, they were not serving homemade ice cream. That came later.
From Dessert to Full Service
Around 1980, the Hearns purchased The Country Squire, and Randi moved to the beach to help run it. Their father, who’d retired, got involved. “We said, ‘OK, now it’s time to do the thing,” Hearn says. “That was a totally different ballgame.” The Country Squire had just under 120 seats, a bar area and a “minuscule” kitchen, he says. They ordered supplies from Butch McQuay’s store down the street. (It’s now Egg.)
In the mid-1980s, The Starboard was up for sale. The Dewey Beach landmark began around 1960 as Duke Duggan’s Last Resort Bar, a small tavern that served spaghetti and meatballs and hosted late-night winter singalongs with locals. Over time, additions expanded the building and the business. The Hearns bought the business and the building.
Hearn’s father opened the restaurant at 6 a.m. Ever the grocery store owner, he taught the staff how to open a can of tomato juice on the Bloody Mary bar in such a way that customers couldn’t help but place it back on the shelf with the label facing outward, recalls Montgomery, who started working at the restaurant when he was 18.
Randi and Hearn came in later, often staying until 2 a.m., seven days a week in summer. Hearn let his imagination go wild. “He was not only a great marketing professional, but he was also incredibly creative in finding ways to keep customers engaged and talking about the place,” Montgomery says.
Hearn, he adds, had a great rule: “You don’t ever steal any ideas from anyone locally, but when you travel out of town, it’s fair game to steal any cool, fun idea you see! I love that myself.”
Hearn would bet customers double or nothing on their bar tab to consumer half a bottle of Parmesan cheese. “They all fell for it, and three to four bites into the Parmesan, they would beg for mercy,” Montgomery says.
Stunts were only one layer to The Starboard’s success. Montgomery says Hearn’s customer service was “insane.” If a guest wanted Hearn to stand on a table and sing “Happy Birthday,” he would do it. “Nothing was out of the question,” Montgomery says. “I love that style and have done my best to maintain it.”
Fire & Ice
The DIY Bloody Mary bar’s hot sauce collection continued to grow, and Randi and Hearn opened Peppers, a small shop adjacent to The Starboard. Hearn had long been fascinated by how hot sauce was sold in New Orleans, where his sister Tracy lived. He was ahead of his time. This was long before “Hot Ones,” a YouTube interview show from First We Feast, hosted by Sean Evans. Celebrities answer thought-provoking questions while eating progressively hotter wings.
Hearn wanted a proprietary label, but in those days, co-packing was not the accessible industry it later became. The first sauce with his label was made by Crystal, the Louisiana brand. It was not a custom recipe, he says, but it was a start. Dewey Beach Fire, one of the early products, was designed for regular use rather than punishment. “It was not designed to be superhot,” Hearn says. “It was designed just to enjoy regularly, like we did in those days.”
Hearns saved his creativity at The Ice Cream Store for the flavors, not the name.
In 1999, the Hearns sold The Starboard to a group that included Montgomery. It’s gratifying to see the next owner succeed, Hearn says. Too often, the opposite result is true. Country Squire, for instance, only lasted a few years after the Hearns sold it.
Peppers is now a store, a catalog and an online business. In the early days, promoting Peppers took time; Hearn often attended shows and competitions. His Georgia Peach and Vidalia Onion Hot Sauce won a first prize in the fruit category at Chili Pepper magazine’s National Fiery Food Show. You Can’t Handle This Hot Sauce won third overall.
Hearn, however, considers the heat. He has watched the industry move from vinegar-based pepper sauces to ghost peppers, Carolina Reapers and Pepper X. He respects the innovators, including South Carolina grower Ed Currie, but he does not view heat as the whole point. When Hearn eats a good piece of meat or seafood, he does not want to bury it. “I want a sauce that matches what I’m eating,” says Hearn, who was inducted into the Hot Sauce Hall of Fame.
Today, Somewhere has a wall filled with shelves of hot sauces, and customers can select one to complement their meal. Hearn is an investor in his daughter’s business — and a proud father — but he is clear about the roles. “It’s their restaurant,” he says. “They do all the work.” Hearn’s son, Sean, bartends at the restaurant.
Randi died in 2011; her father in 2017. Judging by the way Hearn talks about them, he still feels the loss of his family members and partners. At 73, he still works seven days a week, though not with the same punishing schedule as before. He travels less for Peppers and says he has no desire to start another major venture. But he is not retired, he adds.
And he has left a coastal legacy, evident in the lines of customers who want to try Booger or Better Than Sex ice cream, now made by Woodside Farm Creamery in Hockessin. It’s also apparent in the employees he’s trained who are now successful.
“I know that I learned so much from Chip and even 26 years later, I still go to him to tell him when I find something really cool to bring to The Starboard,” Montgomery says. “I honestly think he still loves to hear about those kinds of zany things.”
Hearn’s coastal career proves that the best ideas do more than sell. They make customers laugh, linger and remember. Hearn made his mark one scoop, one sauce and one stunt at a time.
