Catherine Ashley Peck
Chef-owner of Trio’s Restaurant, whose grandfather ran the Sam Peck Hotel, has a family legacy in the Little Rock business world.
“Mine the diamonds in my own backyard. Somebody gave me that advice a long time ago, and that’s what I’ve done.”
Capi Peck has lived for 34 years in the house her father built on land her grandfather bought. It’s in a thickly wooded area that has now become an island of near-wilderness in a fast-growing development. Off, of course, Sam Peck Road.
“My father designed and built it,” she says. “My family owned this little piece of paradise; they bought it in the late ’50s, early ’60s. The year I was born, and the year they dug the pond out, and he named the area ‘Piedmont,’ after the Italian word for ‘foothills.’ Because he loved Italy.”
Sam Peck, Capi’s grandfather, ran the eponymous downtown hotel, which at the time was the city’s premier hostelry, on Capitol Avenue across from what is now the federal courthouse. The family sold it in 1972 to the Radisson chain. It has been the Legacy Hotel since 1984.
Capi Peck is chef-owner of Trio’s, the venerable west Little Rock restaurant, and vice chairman of the Little Rock Advertising and Promotion Commission (she’s one of two hospitality industry representatives on the panel — the other is Tim Morton from 1620 Savoy), the governing body of the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau. She says growing up in the hotel was elemental in setting her eventual career path.
“That influenced me more than anything,” she says. “I never actually lived there, but I spent most of my formative years wreaking havoc [there]. Sort of like the story of Eloise, who lived in the Plaza in New York — I always felt I was Capi of the Sam Peck. I had almost as much fun with the bellmen and switchboard operators and room service.
“My dad worked every other night shift, and ordering from a menu of really great food” every shift, she says, “was pretty great.”
“It seems like a lot of kids today, they eat chicken tenders and french fries. I grew up exercising and developing my palate — oysters Rockefeller and Caesar salad and the things that people didn’t eat much of in Little Rock in the ’50s.”
(“It was sort of an avant-garde place,” explained Capi’s dad, Bob Peck, in his mother’s 1994 Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette obituary. “We were serving espresso then and no one knew what it was. We had international cuisine in a very short-handed way. Not a lot of people were willing to try it. Little Rock was different back then.”)
It was the place to stay in Little
Rock in the late ’50s and ’60s; it was the headquarters for most of the journalists covering the desegregation of Central High School in 195758, Peck says.
“In the ’60s, there was a special on 60 Minutes, back when Harry Reasoner was one of the journalists, and they did a segment on hotels of the world; they covered small chalets in Switzerland to grand hotels in Tokyo, and at the very end of the commentary, he said, ‘I’ve mentioned so many wonderful inns and places all over the globe, but I haven’t mentioned my favorite. It’s the Sam Peck Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas.’”
Sam Peck died in 1967. Capi’s father, Bob, and grandmother, Henryette Cohn Peck, took over the still-thriving hotel, but “it’s just not what my dad wanted to do,” she says. “He wanted to be a beach bum, to be a scuba diver; he really wasn’t cut out to be in that business.”
Bob Peck subsequently moved to Hawaii and died in 2006.
“I’ve known Capi since she was 3 months old,” says Dan Phillips, former M.M. Cohn chief executive and longtime member of the Donaghey Foundation board of trustees. “She’s the fourth generation of her family that I feel like I’ve known well. I knew them when they moved down from Fayetteville in the ’30s.
“I think Capi embodies some of the best attributes of each of her predecessors. She has the hidden toughness and the business sense of her great-grandmother, she has the food flair and imagination of her grandfather, she has the charm and ‘everybody’s a friend’ of her grandmother, and she has the adventurous, I’ll-try-anything spirit of her father.”
CHANGING COLLEGES
Capi, after graduating from Hall High School in 1971, attended Boston University for a couple of years but eventually graduated from Louisiana State University. “Don’t ask me exactly how I took that route,” she says, then, a bit later, “OK, I was following a boyfriend.”
“I had a few other jobs before I got into the restaurant business. I worked for the Department of Education for a while, I worked for Mechanics Lumber. I worked for the Arts Center for a couple of years, in the exhibitions department — I loved that.”
A party she catered with her then-husband and still-business partner, Brent Peterson, proved to be the precipitant.
“People went crazy over it,” she says. A cousin told her she ought to think about going into the restaurant business. “And about a week later she called and wanted to go into business with me. Less than a year after that, in 1986, we opened Trio’s.
“It was really difficult. I really had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have any experience in the restaurant business. I grew up exposed to hospitality and food service, but loving to cook and entertain friends is a little bit different than running a restaurant and turning a profit and managing staff and being creative constantly. It took about five years to start to ‘get it.’ That’s when we bought out our partners. And it’s been going strong — it’ll be 27 years [as of] Labor Day.”
Peck has also had a couple of less successful restaurant ventures.
“We actually tried a run downtown, Trio’s River Market,” she says. “We had some employees interested in a little tiny franchise, but when they started they really wanted to do their own thing, so it was sort of pointless. It didn’t last very long.”
Five years ago, she fell under the spell of “a very persuasive friend” who convinced her to open a restaurant in Pleasant Ridge Town Center on Cantrell Road. Capi’s, which opened in 2010, featured “authentic Nuevo Latino cuisine,” which Peck described at the time as “authentic interior Mexican cuisine with coastal specialties and some favorites from New Mexico as well.”
It lasted less than a year. Peck says part of the problem may have been that she was dividing her time between her two establishments.
“I’m glad I did it; I got it out of my system,” she says. “I’ll never do another one
“One of the most enchanting stories she ever told me, when she was 10 years old, she jumped out of an upstairs window because she thought she could fly. That’s a good metaphor for the way she is now,” says Brent Peterson, longtime friend, onetime husband, extant business partner.
again; I’m too hands-on. One location, it’s like my baby, it’s my family. And I think people can tell the difference when the owner’s there, taking care of things, recognizing people, just nurturing it all the time. It was just too difficult; if I was at one restaurant, the staff at the other one would be angry, feeling like they were being treated like a stepchild. It just didn’t work.”
“We spread ourselves a little thin,” admits Peterson, adding that trying to expand to a second restaurant during a recession probably wasn’t a very good idea, either.
Peterson, who has known Peck for more than a quarter century — married 17 of those years — describes her as “a professional juggler in all that she does,” between her charitable and social activities “and the amount of things she handles at work.”
“One of the most enchanting stories she ever told me, when she was 10 years old, she jumped out of an upstairs window because she thought she could fly. That’s a good metaphor for the way she is now.”
Concentrating on Trio’s, she says, has “really infused me with so much more energy to mine the diamonds in my own backyard. Somebody gave me that advice a long time ago, and that’s what I’ve done. An independent restaurant with that kind of longevity, that’s the proudest thing I’ve ever done.”
Peck is rounding out her second four-year term on the seven-member Advertising and Promotion Commission, of which she is vice chairman and also chairman of the marketing committee.
She helped develop Savor the City, also known as Restaurant Month, a dineout campaign put on by the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Arkansas Times each August to “celebrate Little Rock’s diverse restaurant community.”
Nearly a hundred participating restaurants are offering specials and discounts.
“Savor the City helps restaurants during what is traditionally a horrible month — for everybody” in the industry in part because vacations are ending and kids are getting ready to go back to school, Peck says.
“Participating restaurants can pretty much do whatever they want; some people choose prix fixe menus, some just do half off. Last year I did a ‘dog days of summer’ [promotion], so if you came and ate on the patio, I had a freebie for the patron but I also had some dog treats.” (Find Savor the City details, including a list of participating restaurants and their offers, at DineLR.com.)
SERVICE AND ACTIVISM
Also in what she dubs “the realm of civic service,” Peck is the vice president of the Arkansas Restaurant Association, one of the three arms of the Arkansas Hospitality Association, and also sits on the Public Health Advisory Board, to which she was appointed by Gov. Mike Beebe.
She is also a certified ServSafe instructor and travels the state helping restaurateurs pass the food-handling and safety course administered through the National Restaurant Association. Sometimes she teaches the class in Spanish, in which she is fluent.
Peck has also been a social activist, and even a crusader for causes she believes in. “I have always stood up and vocalized my opinions and feelings. I was taught that at a very young age by my dad and my grandparents.
“Sometimes it gets me in trouble,” she admits. “I do mix business and politics. I’m a yellow-dog Democrat; people know that. I’m a big sponsor/ supporter of Planned Parenthood. I cheered with everybody the [Supreme Court striking down portions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act]. I’m a liberal, I’m not embarrassed to say that.”
Peck was at the forefront of the successful push to free the West Memphis Three — Jessie Misskelley, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, convicted of the slayings of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis in 1993. A so-called “Alford plea” agreement with prosecutors freed them in 2011.
Peck befriended Lorri Davis, the wife of Echols, who started dining at Trio’s most Saturday nights starting in 2006. In 2007, Peck, Peterson and Davis formed Arkansas Take Action, a grassroots group, to raise awareness about the case.
“We brought Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks to our rally in 2007. We organized vigils, spoke at events, canvassed neighborhoods, started a tip line which led to some very important information, put up billboards, wrote articles, initiated letter-writing campaigns and organized a concert [that] brought Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, Ben Harper and others to Robinson Center [Music Hall] in 2011.
“I took a hit for that. We did, Brent and the whole restaurant. But I’ve had so many people who [had] either called me down or actually told me that they were not going to eat at Trio’s anymore, who have come up to me since then — and I cannot tell you how heartwarming it is — and apologized and said, ‘Now that they’re out, I’ve seen some interviews, I’ve read the books, I’ve seen the documentaries, and you know what? You were right. I was wrong. I misjudged you and I’m sorry and I applaud you.’”
She successfully juggles her business and private lives by knowing where the “off” switch is and when to flip it.
“Even though I just turned 60, I don’t really feel like I’m having an energy drain or meltdown yet,” she says. “A lot of people ask me how I have the energy to do everything that I do, and I think it’s because when I’m not at work, I really do know how to just let it go. When it’s time to turn the Trio’s switch off, I can.
“In the restaurant, I’m on. When I’m not in the restaurant, I want to turn off — I don’t mean just veg out and watch TV. I have such a rich life and I have so many other things I love to do; it’s just finding the time. If I could only get by with one or two hours of sleep, but it doesn’t work that way.
“When I’m not working, I can tune things out. I garden, I read, I do needlepoint. I love riding my bike — I was a competitive triathlete in the late ’70s and early ’80s before I opened Trio’s,” and “I still love to ride my bike, in spite of two operator-caused recent accidents.”
She gets out “on our worldclass River Trail system every chance I get. I get a great workout. It’s like flying. I love it.”