Hap Alexander reflects on old Topsail Island and the making and the success of Sears Landing.
Pelicans skimmed the Intracoastal while shrimp boats idled in the channel. Cars lined up along the road waiting their turn as the old swing bridge slowly opened. Back then the bridge was more than infrastructure. It was a gate. A pause. A ritual of access.
Before Topsail became a place you simply drove to, before the new causeway made the island feel permanently plugged into the mainland, you had to earn your way across the water.
You would roll up with salt already in the air and wait while the bridgetender turned the swing bridge and the boats slipped through the channel. The unique swingbridge did not just connect land to island. It guarded a version of Topsail that still felt young, half workingman’s fishing village, half promise. And right there on the Intracoastal, where the charts still mark the crossing as Sears Landing, the story begins long before any restaurant opened its doors.
Local tradition holds that a pirate named Sears once came ashore along this stretch of coast, setting up a trading post and ferry landing that carried travelers across to the narrow strip of sand now known as Topsail Island. The name stuck. Decades later it would appear on navigational charts, on the old pontoon bridge used by soldiers training at Camp Davis during World War II, and eventually on the swing bridge that replaced it after Hurricane Hazel.
Sears Landing had always been a place of crossing.
In the early 2000s, Hap Alexander decided it should become something more.
It is important to picture what these seawalls looked like 25 years ago. For more than a century up until then, this had been a working waterfront. Shrimp boats coming and going. Fishing traffic, thick in the channel. Industry, not just scenery, defined this corner of the ICW.
In other words, Hap did not arrive to the postcard scene it has become today. When he first walked the property around 2001, what he found looked more like the closing chapter of a fishing history. Years of storms, traffic and salt had worn everything down. Broken slabs of concrete had collapsed into the water. Old shrimping gear and clam dredges sat half buried in the mud. Boats leaned sideways along the shoreline. Behind the building, the ground had effectively become a landfill, an accidental archive of generations of fishing slowly surrendering to the grip of low tide sludge. For decades the area had served as the working backlot of a coastal seafood operation, built during a time when the rules were looser and land was made simply by pushing dirt toward the water. It was the kind of work that wears down both equipment and ground, eaten by weather, rust and salt air. But Hap did not see ruin or rot. He saw the possibility.
He began asking questions about the land, about the deeds and about the history. The property belonged to the Batts family, one of the earliest families tied to Topsail Island’s development. After a series of negotiations with the family and the fishermen who still worked those shores, Hap purchased the waterfront parcel and began planning what would become Sears Landing.
The work ahead was not small. Concrete had to be hauled away. The disintegrating seawall had to be rebuilt. Permits had to be secured. And the restaurant itself had to be imagined from scratch. What’s more, Hap had no formal construction background. What he had, he liked to say, “was imagination.”
He would sketch the plans directly onto the sun-bleached hood of his old white Chevy pickup truck with a pencil.
“Whenever I tried to explain what I saw in my head, I’d just lean there on my old truck and sketch it out. I never hammered a nail,” Hap admitted with a grin. “But I drove everybody crazy.”
One of the most critical steps was building a seawall to stabilize the waterfront. For that, Hap hired a dock builder named Dale Merritt, a legendary local character whose charter boat carried the fitting name Bad Attitude. Gruff, bearded and perpetually chewing tobacco, Merritt arrived with heavy equipment and began digging the trench for the seawall’s 14-foot sheet piles.
What came out of the ground told the real history of the place.
Scrap metal. Buried debris. And at one point the recognizable remains of a mid-1960s Mustang, half a car that had been dumped years earlier when the shoreline was still used as a landfill.
Watching the excavation widen into a crater, Hap finally walked over and asked the obvious question.
“How much is this going to cost?”
Merritt looked at the growing hole, spat tobacco juice into the dirt and answered with a single sentence.
“It’ll be what it’ll be.”
The seawall went in. The dock followed. And slowly the neglected waterfront began transforming into something inviting. By end of June of 2002, the restaurant was ready to open. Hap’s original vision was modest. He imagined a casual spot similar to Hap’s Grill in Salisbury or similar to The Beach Shop he formerly owned on the island, but with one small change. This time he wanted an open kitchen. A place where he could talk easily with guests and step naturally into the front of the house.
The food would be straightforward too. Burgers and hot dogs served on paper plates with plastic forks. Quick, easy, no fuss.
But the customers had other ideas.
Within days of opening, people were asking for shrimp and oysters served together. Paper plates sagged under the weight of real seafood.
“They stuck to the tables. The bottoms got wet and peeled away. We figured out real quickly [it was time to] become a real restaurant,” Hap said with a laugh.
That wake-up call sparked what became the heart of the Sears Landing menu.
The rest grew from Hap’s travels and curiosity. Over the years he had visited coastal kitchens from Alabama to the Caribbean, often walking straight into the back of a restaurant to ask cooks how they made a dish he loved.
“Most people will tell you,” he said. “If you’re curious enough to ask.”
Bimini Sauce. Hummingbird Sauce. Island Sauce. Cocktail sauce and seasonings. Nearly everything at Sears Landing was made from scratch. Hap built systems to make sure it could be done consistently. Hundreds of crab cakes, baskets of shrimp, day after day. Some may even remember early favorites like the Coconut Crab Cream Soup, a complex prep he eventually had down to a reliable science.
But if the food brought people in, Hap believed something else kept them coming back. The staff.
In North Carolina restaurant servers traditionally earn a base wage of just over $2 an hour before tips. Hap rejected that model. At Sears Landing, servers started at the full minimum wage of the time, $7.25 plus tips. Employees working more than 30 hours received help paying for health insurance. Paid vacations followed. End-of-season bonuses became tradition. Turnover, one of the restaurant industry’s constant problems, almost disappeared. People stayed.
Some worked summers through high school, continued while attending college and eventually returned. Others built long careers there. Hap believed the math was simple.
“If people can fix their car, go to the doctor, take care of their kids,” he said, “they’ll show up ready to work.”
To him, Sears Landing was not simply a business. It was a community.
By the time Hap reached his early sixties, he began thinking about the future. He wanted the restaurant to outlive him. Instead of selling to the highest bidder, he carefully structured a transition that would allow longtime employee Callie Paul to take over ownership, setting terms he believed would give her a chance to succeed rather than struggle under debt.
Later, ownership passed again to longtime staff members Courtney Cameron and kitchen manager Dustin Hartsfield. The menu stayed largely the same. The systems remained in place. The culture continued.
That continuity mattered deeply to Hap. “There’s been a lot of talk about taxes on tips, minimum wage and it got my mind to thinking,” Hap said. “The things that ought to be done in government, I had been doing for years…”
Hap’s philosophy was simple and proven. Sears Landing showed that the success of his small business was directly tied to the success and stability of his staff. He reflected on this in a 2024 social media post:
Line cooks, prep cooks and shift managers were compensated according to experience. Full-time employees received paid vacation, holiday pay, access to 50 percent employer paid health insurance and very generous annual bonuses. Seasonal employees received end of season bonuses.
Our results were very gratifying. Tardiness, absenteeism and turnover were nearly nonexistent. Employer participated 401Ks were available, and everyone made a living wage. Some waitstaff, bar staff and cooks logged more than 15 years with us.
Former and current employees married, had children, bought homes and became valued members of their communities. Several went on to become doctors, dentists and attorneys, while others started businesses of their own. One former waitress now serves on the Surf City Town Board. An early dishwasher is a United States Naval Academy graduate serving as an officer aboard a naval warship.
The Sears Landing real estate is now owned by a former waitress, and the restaurant business itself is owned and operated by long time employees.
As for myself, I delight in all of their successes in my retirement.
And it was as simple as that. It was the people who grew within it that made Sears Landing such a success.
We sat there on the island finishing our interview. The early spring sun was dropping behind us, setting somewhere over the water where the old swing bridge once stood. It is striking how much this place has changed. New roads. New houses. A steady flow of traffic moving on and off the island without much pause. It is hard to imagine how quiet it once was here.
Talking with Hap for this interview, though, I began to feel the distance between those two versions of Topsail collapse. The stories brought that earlier shoreline back into view. The shrimp boats. The broken concrete. The muddy banks where a restaurant had yet to be imagined. For a moment it felt like standing in both times at once.
Hap shifted uncomfortably when I raised my camera. I could tell he was not telling me this story to convince me of anything about himself. That he wanted me to understand was something much simpler. The real success was the community that grew around the place.
“If I had something to live for,” he told me, “that’s what it is … successes of the many young people over whom I have may have some influence”
Today Hap lives quietly in the mountains of Virginia, returning to the Topsail area from time to time to visit family and old friends. Much of the island has changed since those early years. The swing bridge is gone. Development has reshaped the shoreline.
But Sears Landing remains.
And like the old pirate ferry before it, the place still serves as a kind of landing. A place where people gather, share a meal and pass stories from one generation to the next.
The swing bridge may be gone, but the crossing is still there.
Come high rise or high water.
TAKE A BITE OF HISTORY
Sears Landing
806 Roland Avenue, Surf City
(910) 328-1312
searslanding.com
