The Enduring Mystery of Cook Out

People across the South publicly and creatively show their love for a company that's remarkably private. Is it possible to get to know a fast food chain that doesn't want to talk about itself?

Cook Out after dark (Photo by Jeremy Brooks via Flickr)

Austin Gentry had always had his eye on Cook Out. He’d done work in social media before he became a seminary student. Thus, he thought he might be able to help the company out with some marketing and make a little bit of money as he wrapped up school. So he leaned on a friend who worked in Cook Out’s corporate office. That landed him a full-time job as the company’s social media manager. This was 2016. They’d never had one before then.

Soon, he started coming up with giveaways, contests, and on-site events. Eventually, he hit on a one-off idea: What if we made 20 exclusive Cook Out basketball and football jerseys, then gave them away as prizes? He knew people would want them. He just didn’t know that people would be willing to pay $300 to $400 to get one. “I was like, oh my gosh, this is a desirable artifact!” he said.

Oh, I’m aware. In 2018, when Cook Out was giving those jerseys away, I remarked that I wanted one more than any other piece of clothing I’d ever seen. I was not joking.

The rare Cook Out basketball jersey (via @CookOut on Twitter)

Finally, six years later, I’d done it. I hadn’t landed a jersey, but at least I’d found the person who gave them away. Alas, there were none left. Even so, I was happy to talk to Gentry, because I thought he might help me understand a little more about Cook Out itself. The company’s growing. It started out with a handful of locations in North Carolina, and now has more than 300 around the Southeast. It’s fast food, sure, but it’s about the best fast food you can get (according to me). The shakes are legendary. It’s open late. Even President Biden has been there. Twice. (He ordered vanilla and chocolate shakes, then mixed them together in the back of his limo—his advance team didn’t tell him that employees will do that for you.) If you want online engagement, just go to your favorite online platform and ask people which shake or tray combinations are the best (I’m guilty of this). A deep knowledge of Cook Out lore is an easy way to get modern Southern street cred.

And yet, none of that lore is created by Cook Out itself. Its billboards mostly just say “COOK OUT” on them in large, bold letters. Its social media presence (since Gentry left in 2018) has been fairly sparse and straightforward, mostly noting when new locations open. And, Cook Out almost never talks to the press. Instead, reporters mostly just follow the company’s real estate transactions for clues as to where Cook Out might open next.

(I did contact Cook Out for this story. I did not get a response.)

Hence, Cook Out is an anomaly in an oversharing world. All sorts of companies want to curate their own vibes. To brag about themselves. To let you know how cool, or progressive, or traditional they are. Restaurants are redesigning themselves to become more Instagrammable. Cook Out does none of that. And so, I wanted to know everything I could about what feels like an accidental experiment: What happens when you run a restaurant chain that chooses to stay quiet in a loud world?

Gentry said his social media job didn’t come with a lot of marching orders. Just make sure the brand and the milkshakes are front and center, the folks at corporate told him. Feature some new locations. Respond to people. “They gave me a little bit of reign to vibe with the audience, which is mostly college kids and people in their 20s and 30s,” he said. “They kind of let me do my own thing.”

Gentry loved Cook Out. He grew up going to the one in High Point next to the Putt Putt course. “Me and my buddies, that was our late night spot,” he said. “When I was a kid, there really wasn’t a whole lot to do in High Point.” But after he landed the job and started traveling to Cook Outs across the Southeast, he got an up-close look at the company’s cult following. People would see his big Cook Out van pull up to a restaurant, and soon after, the restaurant would be swarmed with people. Gentry saw a lot of Cook Out tattoos. Some on forearms. A few on lips.

Long before that, Cook Out was just a new fast-food joint in Greensboro, and its history is largely told through a smattering of old newspaper stories and public records. Morris Reaves, the founder, got his start in fast food when he was in his 20s. He and his parents had previously owned more than a dozen Wendy’s franchises in North Carolina’s Triad region before selling them back to the company in 1979. Three years later, in 1982, Reaves and his then-wife opened the Sunday House restaurant in Stone Mountain, Ga. The concept: A sit-down Southern cooking restaurant that served “Sunday dinner” seven days a week. It got relatively good reviews, but closed a few years later. After that, Reaves returned to his North Carolina fast food roots. He and his parents opened the very first Cook Out in 1989 on Randleman Road in Greensboro, right across the street from one of his old Wendy’s restaurants (although some old newspaper stories say the original opened in 1987). Reaves’s time in fast food gave him the idea for Cook Out’s now-iconic double-drive thrus. “We saw people going to more takeout, even back then,” he told the Greensboro News & Record. The milkshakes were an early hit. Some companies would order dozens of them at a time.

A Greensboro News & Record story about the rise of drive-thrus from August 9, 1993 featured a rare interview with Cook Out founder Morris Reaves.

Not long after his the first Cook Out opened, Reaves married the former Cathy Samples. She was the daughter of legendary Hee Haw performer Junior Samples, a piece of trivia that most people at their Baptist church didn’t know. In the years that followed, the Reaves’ opened more Cook Outs in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, and built the first one with a sit-down restaurant in High Point in 1996. Reaves, in an interview, was not loquacious. “Hamburgers are my background, so it was just a natural thing to do,” he told the News & Record at the time.

As the company expanded, Reaves got quieter. In 1998, the company opened its 10th location. Ten years later, there were 50. The 74th Cook Out, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was the first one outside of North Carolina.

By then, Morris’s 29-year-old son Jeremy had taken over as company president. In 2007, he shed a tiny bit of light on the company in what seemingly was a short interview with the Charlotte Observer. His father had come up with the unique building design, with mirrors where windows would normally go. His parents had moved to Florida but still helped out. His dad came up with the menu. His mom was the company controller. But there wasn’t much in the way of insight into the rest of the operation. “I look for busy roads,” he told the reporter about his process of picking new locations. “The more cars, the better.”

More cars, indeed. Recently, the family seems to have gotten into another Southern tradition: Racing. Those clues come from business filings and racing press releases. Cook Out now sponsors NASCAR events at Martinsville and Darlington Speedways (The Cook Out down the road from the latter racetrack is exquisite). In 2016, a company run by the Reaves bought Adaumont Farm in Trinity for $5.3 million. The property is a 400-acre farm and wedding venue that was previously owned by former NASCAR driver Kyle Petty. Today, Morris Reaves’s grandsons are race car drivers. Max, 14, just signed a development deal with Joe Gibbs Racing (Cook Out and Adaumont Farm are among his sponsors). His younger brother Roo, 8, is also a racer. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it might remind you of Cook Out’s short-lived spin-off restaurant, TacoRoo’s, that operated in Wilmington for a short time. A new restaurant concept, Roo’s Chicken, has been under construction in Raleigh. Its logo is a chicken driving a racecar.

The only other clues about the culture behind Cook Out are found on the side of its Styrofoam cups: References to bible verses. Once it was Proverbs 1:7: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Then came Psalm 19:14: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.” More recently, it’s been Psalm 118:24: “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Some locations with dining rooms have been known to play Christian music. "In the family there's a lot of Christian influence, and they grew up in the South,” Cook Out’s opening director Allen Brooks told the Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011, “It just kind of seemed natural.”

Because Cook Out doesn’t really talk about its own story, it’s maybe the only fast food joint with lore that reads like fan fiction (Taco Bell Quarterly notwithstanding). In an enduringly popular Reddit post, an employee talked about secret menu items, and the best shake combinations: “Banana pudding with walnuts and chocolate chips tastes exactly like banana bread!” Former colleagues of mine were so enthralled with one part of the menu that they created cookoutmilkshakereviews.com, which they billed as “The Best Website On The Internet.” They tried, and rated, every milkshake on the menu, giving Reese’s Cup the top billing with 16.5 of 17 total points. “Trying to explain Cook Out to someone who isn’t from the South is like trying to explain the sky’s infinite stars to someone who only knows the sun,” they wrote.

The restaurant usually shows up as a supporting character in other stories, including my own. In an Our State magazine article about the recovery of North Carolina’s stolen copy of the Bill of Rights, an attorney who was pivotal in the case told me about her superstition. Every night before a court argument, she and her co-counsel would go to Cook Out for a vanilla milkshake. More recently, I interviewed the NC State student who became the first American to win the Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake near Gloucestershire, England. In our talk, Cook Out came up. “So you can get a two chicken quesadilla Cook Out tray with two sides of more quesadillas,” she told me. “And then if the Cook Out people are really nice, you can trade your drink in for another quesadilla. So you can get five quesadillas for one Cook Out tray.”

Sure, Cook Out exists as many small, regional restaurants do: As a form of cultural currency for people who want to show you that they really do know a place. In-n-Out Burger is a California thing. Skyline Chili is a Cincinnati delicacy. Cook Out is a way to passively-aggressively show your modern Southern fluency. You can scoff at out-of-towners who can’t navigate the menu. You can talk about your rowdier days when you showed up in the drive-thru line at 3 a.m. Cook Out won’t talk about itself. Hence, when you talk about Cook Out, you’re really talking about yourself. Gazing at one of its window-mirrors is like staring at a fast food Picture of Dorian Gray.

So, if you’re looking for stories of Cook Out palace intrigue, or if you want secret menu items, or the inside story of what makes their food so good, you’re not going to get them. Austin Gentry doesn’t have them, either. In 2018, he left to take a social media manager job with another iconic Southern brand: Krispy Kreme. Less than a year later, he took a job that felt like a calling: As a youth minister for Second Baptist Church in Houston. Hence, he doesn’t feel like he has much more to add. The Cook Out headquarters in Thomasville looks like a normal office, he said. Not a lot of people work there. Jeremy Reaves, who’s still the CEO, would come in regularly. But he’s a private person, Gentry said. They are aware of their cult following. They know just how much some people love their food. But they don’t talk about it. They just keep doing what they’ve been doing for more than three decades now. “There’s just a lot of noise in the world,” Gentry said. “They focus on themselves, they focus on the food, and that’s about it. I think a lot of companies can take some notes from how they do things.”