‘Look what he created:’ Hilton Head restaurant group celebrates late co-founder

When diners head to a restaurant under the SERG Restaurant Group umbrella, they will be hard-pressed to find a detail that wasn’t first scrutinized by the company’s co-founder, Steve Carb.

It’s the littlest of things — having the right lighting, checking and re-checking spelling and “having something for everyone” on menus — that led to the group’s success, said Carb’s friend and business partner, Rob Jordan.

“Steve was always thinking; he didn’t relax much,” Jordan said. “He was unique, as entrepreneurs often are.”

Carb, 63, died around 11 p.m. Saturday, said Ryan Larson, a marketing director for SERG.

He was known for the tenacity and zeal that sparked Hilton Head Island favorites like Giuseppi’s Pizza & Pasta House, Frankie Bones and the Skull Creek Boathouse. Hospitality and restaurants were “his life” and his passion, Jordan said.

“When he believed in something, it was hard to change his mind,” he said. “At the end of the day, look what he created. He left a legacy in the restaurant business on Hilton Head, no doubt.”

The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, native first found himself on Hilton Head while visiting a fraternity brother on the island in the early ‘80s after getting his start in the industry as a dishwasher.

While he took a serious outlook on his work and was relentless in his endeavors, “he was playful too,” said Tony Arcuri, Carb’s business partner and friend of more than five decades.

“Steve was an extremely good businessman,” Arcuri said. “He demanded the best out of us (business partners) and made everybody rise. He’s made me a better person.”

He ‘was very unselfish’

Carb and Arcuri grew up together in Pennsylvania but weren’t friends until college.

“Once you get out of your elements, in other words, out of Pittsburgh, you start looking for familiarity to your hometown,” Arcuri said.

The two had pledged the same fraternity and became best friends who knew they “could rely on each other.” Arcuri used to have Carb boost him into the second-story kitchen window of nearby sorority apartments when they wanted extra snacks. One of the first business endeavors the two partnered on was selling lapel lights to men heading into night clubs while they were in college. Arcuri was the salesman and, because the lights only lasted about 15 minutes, Carb was the designated get-away driver.

“We fought like cats and dogs,” Arcuri said, “like brothers would fight.”

When Carb and Arcuri got into the restaurant business, there was no searching the internet to find menu items that were worth replicating. Instead, they traveled all over the country combing over menus for the best pizza recipes.

“We’ve probably eaten more pizza than anyone else in the United States,” Arcuri said.

The hard part, according to Arcuri, was getting out of the restaurants with the menus.

“Some of these menus are like huge and made out of wood,” he said. “We would challenge each other — hide it under a jacket. But I don’t think we were ever caught.”

When he wasn’t out on menu-snatching missions, Carb could be seen on the beach jotting down notes and to-do lists on his yellow legal pad. He was always working and even invented a synthetic dough in the ‘90s meant to help people practice tossing pizza, said SERG President, Alan Wolf.

“He never golfed because he could never get away from work for four hours,” Wolf joked.

Carb was like a mentor to Wolf who stepped into his shoes as company president about three years ago. Wolf said he will remember Carb’s willingness to help others “get over the hump” when they are first attempting to get into the restaurant business.

“A bank looks at someone in their 20s and says, ‘you having nothing to use as collateral,’” he said. “Steve would step in ... and that was very unselfish of him. It was a risk that didn’t have to be taken on his part.”

As of Sunday, no official funeral or memorial details have been announced.