When Roger Meyland came to Washington in the mid-1990s, he already had a successful track record of running restaurants and bars. Add to that the talents of hometown girl Joan Cannon Meyland, and the result was a recipe for success. The couple were recently named the 2019 Washington-Beaufort County Chamber of Commerce Entrepreneurs of the Year.

The first business the Meylands built in Washington was a restaurant called the Rumor Mill, along with the Mill Café, where Grub Brothers is today. Roger Meyland bought the building in 1995 and had begun the process of adding apartments on the second and third stories of the building, one of the first in Washington to do so.

“We renovated it, put apartments upstairs and a restaurant downstairs,” Roger said. “There wasn’t any three-story building with anything above the ground floor before we did that.”

After selling that business in 2005 and leasing the building, the two moved to Wilmington for five years. When they came home to Washington in 2010, downtown had been crippled by the great recession.

“When we came back, there weren’t many shops open downtown because of the recession,” Joan Meyland recalls. “So when we came back, the people renting from us were trying to sell their business. When we walked in, I just got the bug again.”

Just like that, they were back in the Washington restaurant game. But as anyone who has worked in food service can attest to, that move required a lot of hard work. Working alongside their staff, the Meylands built Grub Brothers into the downtown hotspot for dining and drinks that it is today. With some success from that, the two heard that the owners of The Bank Bistro were considering selling or closing the restaurant.

“At the time, this was the most upscale place downtown, and we didn’t want to lose that from downtown,” Roger Meyland said.

In May 2016, they bought the second restaurant and kept it going. While consistency was the name of the game for a while, the two have recently brought on a new chef and are preparing for a major menu update in the next few weeks. Likewise, Grub Brothers recently began serving breakfast, adding some new flavor to the restaurant.

Overall, the Meylands say they are happy with their decision to build their business in Washington. At the heart of it all, Joan Meyland says a sense of cooperation between business owners is helping bring new life to the town. On her Facebook page, “Washington NC-What’s Happening,” she posts information about local events, news and other downtown businesses.

“This is the best Washington has been since I’ve been here,” Roger Meyland said. “There’s more things under development, more new things opening, more people trying to get new things started.”