Spread the love

By Cara Beth Lewis

This small, family-run business in Tar Heel serves up flavor, hospitality, and love. Since opening in October of 2015, The Log Cabin Restaurant in Tar Heel has provided the community with high-quality and delicious food, alongside friendly and familiar service.

Since opening, there have been ups and downs for the owners and management of the local restaurant. Here is how one of the owners, Amanda Murillo, describes those ups and downs:

“During the first year, business was slow and gradually picking up, then Hurricane Matthew hit in October of 2016, and people were hungry. We had the food and roads were passable to Tar Heel and our business began to grow. Hurricane Florence hit in fall 2018, we started gaining more customers from the Robeson County area because roads into their eating areas were closed. Then in 2020, COVID-19 shut our dining room down for a couple of months, and we were scared, but that didn’t stop us. We continued to cook and served take out meals with curbside pick up. Take-out orders tripled and the people kept coming. We have since re-opened our dinning room for customers to dine in, but the take out business hasn’t slowed down a bit. With all of those experiences, sometimes it takes disaster and disbelief for positive opportunities and outcomes.”

Now, The Log Cabin has a booming take-out business and a fast-paced dine-in area. It is small, quaint, and located off Highway 87 in the middle of Tar Heel with a variety of menu items. With only six tables inside to dine in, The Log Cabin family and staff turn tables as quickly as possible while still managing the booming take-out business. Now open six days a week, The Log Cabin is offering lunch specials and a lunch menu differing slightly from the dinner menu Monday through Saturday.

Co-owners, Andy and Amanda Murillo, had a goal when they first opened the restaurant: they wanted to give the local community a place to gather and fellowship while enjoying delicious food, and they also wanted to have something to pass on to their own children and their niece one day.

The Murillos, alongside Amanda’s parents, Joe and Lisa Abbott, serve a variety of menu items that are well-loved by customers. Amanda shared, “At The Log Cabin, we offer a variety of menu items from beef, pork, chicken, and seafood. Our most popular items on our lunch menu are burgers, fried chicken, and Philly cheesesteaks. The dinner menu offers a wide variety of entrees such as hand-cut ribeyes, sirloins, beef tips, hamburger steak, pork chops, shrimp, oysters, flounder and catfish, Philly cheesesteak subs, salads and SO much more. Don’t forget about Joe’s specialty — the sweet tea, and Lisa’s homemade pound cake and homemade pecan pie!”

The Log Cabin offers a personable experience filled with friendly faces. If you have been a time or two, Amanda probably already knows your drink order by heart. Amanda added, “If you’re lucky enough, the man behind the scenes doing all the cooking, Andy, will walkout from the kitchen to greet you and your family!”

As of now, the restaurant is not hiring. When an opportunity becomes available, it will be listed on the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/thelogcabintarheelnc.

In the future, Joe and Lisa Abbott will retire, and Andy and Amanda hope to continue to grow the business and expand to something bigger and better.

“On behalf of the owner’s Andy & Amanda Murillo and Joe and Lisa Abbott, we want to thank the Tar Heel and surrounding communities for supporting our business. When you support a small, local business such as ours, you are supporting a dream.”

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