What makes dining at Top of the Hill’s Restaurant and Brewery special for groups?
We’re located right in the heart of downtown Chapel Hill and you can really get a sense of our community from that. We are first and foremost a restaurant that wants to please our customers, and I think that level of service and attention to detail carries through to the way we organize and execute events.
How do you customize the experience for groups?
One of the things we like to do is to work with every group and create individual and specialized menus. We have capabilities of incorporating all local food or we can do something different, but we have a lot of flexibility and creativity. We know the needs of a group and the needs of the people coming to a restaurant can be very different.
What kind of liquor and beer has Top of the Hill Brewery and Distillery created?
From the brewery side in the last three years, our Blueberry Wheat was named the best fruit wheat beer in the world, and then our IPA and our Singleton—which is a type of strong ale—were selected as the best IPA and Singleton by the World Beer Championship in Chicago. On the distillery side, we’re the only certified organic distillery in the South, and we use only local agricultural products to make our spirits. We just recently won silver medals in both San Francisco and Chicago for our whiskey and vodka.
How would you describe the current dining scene in the Triangle?
I don’t think there’s any other region like it in the country. Chapel Hill-Carrboro—how many other towns have two James Beard award winners on the same block, right? And Durham has just been getting a lot of press recently. So there’s a lot of innovation and creativity happening in the Chapel Hill/Durham side in particular, but there’s also a lot of energy and things happening in Raleigh as well.