In 1976, he and his then-wife, Kreis, bought an old inn, Blackberry Farm. Beall remained at the helm until he left the company in 2012. In 1972, Beall, then just a college sophomore, opened the first Ruby Tuesday, which eventually grew to a global chain of nearly 900 restaurants. The owner sold his franchise and awarded Sandy a sum to invest in his own restaurant. Now 70 years old, he got his start in business at 18 while waiting tables at Pizza Hut in college, quickly winning a promotion to store manager. The son of a nuclear engineer on the Manhattan Project, Beall and his four siblings grew up in Knoxville, Tenn.
Don’t confuse habits with wisdom, and just never stop improving. So I always had a love and affection for the property.”īeall dictates business mantras with a staccato delivery, his commitment to incremental improvements unrelenting: “We have this saying: ‘Good, better, best, never let it rest.’ But it’s a process. “We inquired about buying it again in, I think, the early ’90s. “I’d had homes up here since the early ’80s,” he says over coffee in one of the inn’s many well-upholstered nooks. Back then, he recalls, the owners were not ready to sell. “I play a long game,” he says, repeatedly. Roosevelt in the 1930s, though with a basting of rich Blackberry sauce.īeall himself, spry and softly spoken, first tried to buy High Hampton nearly 40 years ago. A more accurate comparison in terms of philosophy and style would be the National Park lodges created by President Franklin D. Its new owners take authenticity extremely seriously.
High Hampton fits into this tradition of bucolic retreat but stops short of full Marie-Antoinette-as-shepherdess cosplay. The idea of a high-end camp is not new, but the genre has faded from fashionable view since the decline of the faux-rustic summer palaces of Gilded Age industrialists, known as the Adirondack Great Camps.