NATIVE Magazine, August 2013.

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There are many ingredients behind the longstanding success of Bobbie’s Dairy Dip. The most important, the owner says, goes beyond what’s found in the kitchen.

By Scott Latta

Somewhere outside Seoul, South Korea, there’s an older Korean couple enjoying their retirement. This couple may be out, one average day, perhaps at the market, perhaps on the train. They’ve lived in South Korea their whole life, this couple, and on this average day, somewhere between Incheon and Anyang, perhaps they run into an old acquaintance. They’ll exchange pleasantries, offer a familiar Anyong Haseyo to one another, maybe they’ll hug, and at some point in the encounter the inevitable question will come up. The acquaintance will feel a lull in the conversation, and out of innocent curiosity will ask. The acquaintances always ask.

“So how’s Sam?”

The couple will pause. They might purse their lips. They might scratch their chins. They might need some time, this couple, to figure out the right way to say it.

They won’t find that right way. So eventually they’ll spit it out.

“Well,” they’ll say, “Sam’s serving chili fries and Chubby Checker milkshakes in a retro Americana ice cream shop in Nashville, Tennessee. And he’s doing great.”

Sam is not the owner

Bobbie’s Dairy Dip is a long way from Seoul, South Korea. What it is not a long way from is what it looked like on opening day in 1951, when Thelma Harper cut the ribbon on Charlotte Avenue’s shiniest new dive, named it after herself, and unknowingly birthed a Music City mainstay known as Harper’s Dairy Dip. A few years later she’d hand it off to a woman named Bobbie who named it after herself, and when she got ready to hand it off a few years after that, it mercifully stopped changing names. Which is a good thing, because Bobbie’s Dairy Dip sounds a whole lot better than Sam Huh’s Dairy Dip.

Sam Huh is a 50-year-old South Korean man with a Ph.D in economics, an extensive banking and teaching background, and a surprisingly deft hand at a soft-serve machine. He has owned Bobbie’s for six years, and he is the first clue you get that makes you think not everything at Bobbie’s may be what it seems. It’s only natural, one supposes, that in 62 years the keys to Bobbie’s may have changed hands a few times. But Sam—modest, unassuming, proper and polite Sam—is not the guy you see on 8th Avenue and think, That must be the force behind Nashville’s favorite all-American ice cream shop. Well, that’s on you. Because Sam Huh is very clear about one thing: Not everything at Bobbie’s is what it seems. And it starts with him.

“I am not the owner.”

“You’re not the owner.”

“No. God is the owner. I am the general manager.”

OK, we’ll call Sam the general manager. Sam Huh is the general manager of Bobbie’s, and he’s been general managing the hell out of it for six years now. It isn’t the only Nashville landmark he general manages. You might have seen him general managing J&J’s Market and Cafe on Broadway. He knows as much about J&J’s coffee as he does Bobbie’s ice cream, which is to say that he knew nothing about them when he took the two over (“I didn’t know ice cream, I just ate ice cream,” he says), and so part of the responsibility of ownership meant researching mocha beans and butterfat percentages and the right beef that makes the best chili. You know, the things South Korean boys who go into finance always tend to fall into.

What Sam did know was economics, and what healthy business looks like, and that’s why it took him a full year to be talked into buying Bobbie’s six years ago: At the time, it looked like a bad business move. Nashville loved Bobbie’s and its open-mouthed blonde bombshell that overlooked Charlotte Ave, but not enough to keep it from losing money year over year. And so he looked at the financials and realized for the first time this secret about the cheerful and carefree walk-up, this hidden mystery that the reality of it was not always how it seemed. Nashville’s favorite all-American ice cream shop was bleeding.

“You have three years,” he told the owner, “and you’re going to lose your business.”

Sam is going to kick your ass

Sam Huh bought Bobbie’s and fired everyone. Sam Huh has only fired three people in his life. The statement you choose to believe depends on your perspective (as well as, I suppose, whether or not you are one of the people he has fired in the past). Sam chooses to believe them both, and when he tells you what happened when he took Bobbie’s over, he has this disarming honesty that makes you sort of start to believe they can both be true.

Bobbie’s wasn’t making its own ice cream, then, or its burgers or its chili, or anything, really. It also wasn’t making much money, which is why Sam walked in, took one look at the ingredients and the people who were handling them, and said the five words that would have knocked Bobbie McWright on her back if she had heard them.

“We’re going to change everything.”

Restaurants that have been in the same location for 50 years, and have had the same plywood sign over the window for 50 years, and have watched the road around them ebb and flow with the economics of a growing city for 50 years, do not simply “change everything.” But when Sam looked at Bobbie’s, he saw more than just a responsibility to his own wallet; he now owned—between J&J’s and Bobbie’s—almost 100 combined years of Nashville history. He was beholden to those legacies, and that meant…well, I’ll let him say it.

“I tell my employees,” he says, “I’m going to kick your ass. Are you ready?”

So that meant kicking some ass. In restaurant terms, it meant making his own burgers, sourcing better dairy, making the chili in-house, generally just stepping up the ingredient game.

It also meant shaking up the roster. Sam Huh gives off the air of a smart, calm, measured, friendly man. When you say his name around his employees, they smile, which in food service is more rare than a restaurant with no website. (Relevant side note: neither of Sam’s restaurants has a website. “I took them down to increase word of mouth,” he says.) When he hires you, Sam’s mission is to instill three things in you: integrity, consistency and confidence. But the one impression you get from Sam Huh is that he does not suffer fools.

“I love my employees,” he says. “I have wonderful employees. We are a family.” But even families get their ass kicked sometimes, and so when Sam bought Bobbie’s the place got some new blood. The staff turned over, as it does with any restaurant, and eventually it settled into a consistent, effective rhythm that began to restore the legacy Bobbie’s had earned over five decades. Whether you choose to believe he fired them depends on your perspective.

Either way, three years in to Sam’s ownership, the restaurant turned profitable. Media took notice. Families started coming back. And now, six years on, this man who came to Nashville in 1995 to research at Vanderbilt and found it was “really slow, really Southern, the people were very friendly and I loved it,” this man whose retired parents still walk the markets of Seoul, may have found the system that fits Bobbie’s. Last year he opened a second Bobbie’s location on 4th Avenue that focuses on the downtown business lunch crowd, a place where even Bill Haslam himself has been known to pop by for a Chubby Checker, and now Nashville has a place to get its own peanut butter-chocolate milkshake fix when the Charlotte store closes down for three winter months. “Working in an office, you know, sometimes it’s kind of boring,” he says, not necessarily about Bill Haslam. “We’re responsible as their neighbor to add some seasoning to their boring life.”

The suits who come by for burgers may think the joint’s only been around since last October. But Sam and the regulars know the secret. They know the thing about it that isn’t what it seems. They know the plywood sign hanging on the wall, the one with the open-mouthed blonde bombshell, used to hang somewhere else. And so really this place downtown isn’t new at all. It’s been in Nashville’s heart for 62 years.

Sam is not a good businessman

Sam changed a lot about Bobbie’s without really changing much at all. The grandparents who mosey by on muggy summer nights, who point at the glass and tell their grandkids how they used to come on their own muggy summer nights, certainly can’t tell the difference. The memories embedded in the cinder-block walls and chip-painted picnic tables are still there. In many ways the formula is still the same.

But now Sam is talking about Reader’s Digest, and he’s trying to pinpoint what makes Bobbie’s so different when the burger-fry formula is so well trod in American restaurants. Why do people come back with three generations of family? Why do they go to Bobbie’s instead of a drive-thru? Why do they say it’s hands-down the best ice cream they’ve ever had?

“I read a Reader’s Digest in college, about a science experiment,” Sam says. Here it’s important to recall that Sam has a Ph.D in economics, and he’s about to break Bobbie’s down into a system of controls and variables. In the experiment, scientists grew two plants under the exact same conditions, with one exception: the scientists poured the water for one of the plants with “love.” And that plant flourished well beyond the other.

Whether this story is true or not is not the point. The point is that here Sam views these things about Bobbie’s—the meat, the potatoes, the dairy—as the control; in essence, the things lots of restaurants do. The variable, as it was with the plant, is something much more emotional.

“I’m not a good coffeemaker,” he says to me at J&Js. “I’m not a good business man. We are only great at one thing. My employees—my kids over there and over here—they try to put their love in the products they sell. That’s it. Our answer is, our food is alive. It’s living food. We sell hope, not merchandise. We have to put our hope in the ice cream, in the burger, in whatever we do.”

And that takes us to the day Sam Huh received a piece of mail. A few years back a small envelope was left specifically for Sam at the restaurant. When he opened it, Sam saw it was a funeral notice, for a man named Mike Brodbine. Mike Brodbine loved Bobbie’s Dairy Dip, and came there twice a week for as long as Sam could remember, with his wife, Anne. Mike had a special medical condition, and his favorite thing to get at Bobbie’s was the Chocolate Ice Cream Soda, made in a special way so that he could drink it, and twice a week Anne would walk to the window and order two of them. Mike would drink one in the car on the way home, and Anne would put the other in the fridge for later.

Scribbled on the back of the funeral notice was a message. “Thank you to Mike’s friends at Bobbie’s,” the note said. “You all made him very happy. Love, Anne B.” And tucked away behind that was a folded 50-dollar bill.

Sam thought a while about what to do with that 50 dollars. But he knew Bobbie’s needed a fence. And so he budgeted the donation into the fence fund, and later that year a nice wooden fence went up on the side of the property, the type of harmless stained fence that blends directly into your peripheral completely out of notice. Bobbie’s has thousands of customers, and to all of them it is simply a benign, wooden fence. But to the family working inside the window, it became something very special—something that makes the plain wooden fence very different from what it seems.

“We call it Mike Brodbine’s Garden,” Sam says.

J&J’s Market is nothing. Bobbie’s Dairy Dip is nothing. Sam is telling me this—that these businesses he manages, which mean so much to so many people, are not what they seem, and the more he denies their existence the more excited he gets about what they stand for. “It’s an illusion,” he says.

“It’s an illusion. So what’s real? Humans. The people in J&J’s Market and Bobbie’s Dairy Dip. They’re real.”

And then it starts to make sense. So you go there and you eat an ice cream cone and you see the garden and you are filled with this connection to Thelma Harper and to Mike Brodbine and even to Sam Huh and his Korean parents, and then it becomes clear. These grandparents at the window, holding their grandkids’ hands and ordering the same milkshake they’ve ordered for 50 years? They make manifest these things that Sam believes. And then you realize you were dead wrong. Bobbie’s Dairy Dip is exactly what it seems.

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