At The Peak Taphouse and Kitchen, warm pizza, cold beer and an unpolished kind of hospitality have turned a neighborhood taproom into Surf City’s clubhouse.
The Peak smell swarm before anything else. Fresh dough, melting cheese and the faint toasted edge of a thin-crust pizza drift out from a kitchen that was never supposed to do quite this much.
The pies are personal-sized and eminently snackable, the sort of food that can accompany one beer without ceremony and then, before you realize it, become lunch. Around them is the familiar jumble of an island bar: taps and cans, old wood, T-shirts, televisions, couches and people who seem to know one another.
Somebody once described the place to co-owner Callie Paul as a “dirty hug.”
“A salty hug,” I offer, sanding down the phrase for publication.
No. Dirty, she insists.
The distinction matters. Salty is picturesque. It belongs on a souvenir sign. Dirty is affectionate without being polished, comfortable without being precious. It is a place that has worked all day and is still glad to see you.
Callie accepts the description with a laugh, perhaps because it lets her explain The Peak without having to praise it directly. Praise makes her visibly uncomfortable. It has much the same effect on another of The Peak’s three owners, Andy Chambers.
Compliment either one and the credit is quickly passed across the table, redirected toward a partner, an employee, a former boss or the community around them.
Even the table tells the story. Andy made it from old wood, a detail he offers without much ceremony. Reused things appear throughout the restaurant, not arranged to imitate an old beach bar but accumulated by people who would rather make something useful than replace it with something shiny. The resulting room has patina rather than polish. It feels discovered, lived in and slightly improvised — because it is.
“It was our hangout,” says Christine Kennedy, another of the trio of owners. “We liked being there. We wanted everybody else to feel that way in there as well.”
For a while, they called it the clubhouse. The name stuck in spirit.
The Peak began as a tap house in 2017, when original owner Mike Peoples and his business partner helped bring a growing craft-beer culture to the island. Within months, the friends who were already spending their off-hours there were invited to take it over.
They agreed on one condition: They did not want to own only a bar. If they were going to do it, they wanted food.
The kitchen arrived, followed by the pizza, and The Peak Taphouse became The Peak Taphouse & Kitchen. It was a practical evolution, but it also brought the place closer to what its new owners understood a restaurant to be.
Their shared education had begun nearby at Sears Landing, where Callie, Andy and Christine worked in different parts of the house and learned that restaurant families are formed as much by shared labor as by shared affection. Their former boss, Hap Alexander, set the standard. He made it clear that the restaurant would be run his way and run well. He also made it clear that the people inside it would be cared for.
“We’re family,” Callie recalls of the lesson. “We’re going to take care of each other.”
The Peak inherited that apparent contradiction: expectations without pretension, affection without softness about the work. During our conversation, someone gets up and begins assembling six-packs because they need to be assembled. Nobody announces it. Nobody considers the task beneath them.
“There’s no off work for these two,” one partner says of the others.
The joke lands because it is true. Restaurant ownership is often presented as vision, menus and expansion plans. At The Peak, it is also dishes, dough, stocking coolers and noticing what needs attention before anybody asks. Andy is particularly reluctant to make any of this sound heroic. Asked what he gets from the work, he reduces it to a plain statement: making good food that people can afford.
“We still make everything from scratch in there every day,” he says. “We genuinely care about what we do. It might not be for everybody, and that’s fine.”
When their pizza debuted, it cost $10 with whatever toppings a customer wanted. Years later, the price has risen only $2. Holding that line became difficult as food costs climbed during the pandemic, but affordability is not merely a pricing strategy for them. It is part of the welcome. Vacationing families return each year. Local children grow up. Regulars occupy the place often enough to become part of its daily machinery. Pricing those people out would alter the room itself.
Each owner describes the reward differently. For Andy, it is the food and the care behind it. For Callie, it is creating a happy space, hosting without making a show of being a host. Christine mentions how she quietly enjoys spotting one of her shirts out in town: evidence that someone liked the place enough to carry a piece of it away. Their roles overlap, but their instincts complement one another. Andy focuses on the food, Callie on how the room feels, and Christine on the details that give The Peak its identity. None is eager to claim any achievement as their own.
Together, they have created a place whose friendliness feels natural because it grew from the way they already treat one another.
That same spirit shapes their approach to hospitality. They are not trying to manufacture an experience for everyone. They simply want The Peak to feel generous, comfortable and unmistakably itself. Hospitality that is deliberately loose around the edges. The objective is not to control every part of the customer’s experience. It is simply to let people settle in and have a good time.
“Either you’re going to love it or it’s not going to be for you,” Callie says. “And that’s okay.”
The Peak knows what it is and does not need every person or every occasion. Pizza inspires loyalties, and the owners are comfortable with customers choosing whatever suits them that night. “Peak’s Peak,” they say. Other restaurants can be themselves, too.
That attitude extends throughout Surf City’s restaurant community, though the owners remember when the island felt more competitive. The pandemic became an unlikely turning point. In the face of uncertainty, local restaurants and bars began finding new ways to support one another. The Crab Pot organized a benefit for bartenders who were out of work, helping businesses that once regarded one another as competition begin acting more like neighbors.
“It was the first time in a long time that everybody started looking out for each other,” Callie remembers a fellow bar owner telling her.
The feeling stayed. Owners began spending time together, trading help and concentrating on their own work instead of worrying about someone else’s crowd.
“We all should love each other,” Callie says, her delivery sardonic but the sentiment sincere. “What is the big deal?”
Now The Peak is growing. Peak To Go gave the tiny original kitchen room to breathe and reached customers who wanted the food without necessarily visiting a bar. A larger mainland location is underway near the skate park, intended for the community living just across a bridge that can become a genuine boundary during summer traffic. Peak Mainland will have a larger footprint and a more traditional sit-down menu, but the owners do not imagine it replacing the original.
“Peak is still Peak,” they say.
That is the challenge ahead: expanding something whose appeal comes partly from its smallness, history and happy imperfections. But The Peak’s character was never contained solely in its old wood or crowded kitchen. It lives in a shared way of working. It is Andy making food from scratch without asking to be admired for it. Christine making sure the merchandising and branding capture the feeling. Callie creating the room she wants people to feel good inside, then dodging the compliment when they do. It is three people filling the gaps for one another, supported in turn by a community they genuinely love.
The Peak does not offer the polished embrace of a hospitality concept. It gives you warm pizza, a cold drink and room to stay awhile. It remembers you when you return and feeds you when you are hungry. The hug is dirty. That is precisely why it feels real.
TAKE A PEAK
The Peak Taphouse & Kitchen
205 Roland Avenue, Suite C, Surf City
(910) 541-0123
thepeaktaproom
