The reason T's Seafood Restaurant has never grown to a second location has more to do with physics than economics -- Garrett Fulcher can't be in two places at once.

The co-owner of the popular southside eatery never strays far from the kitchen, where he can make sure his employees are preparing catfish, shrimp and oysters the same way his parents did when they founded the business in 1946.

Employees peel and bread each shrimp by hand. The cornmeal for T's signature hush puppies comes not from a restaurant supply wholesaler, but from a small mill in North Georgia. The restaurant makes its own tartar sauce and salad dressings.

Nothing is pre-cooked.

"Eating here is like eating at home," Garret said. "It's like eating your mother's food."

His sister, Susan, is the restaurant's other key ingredient. For nearly 30 years she has overseen most of the administrative functions, such as accounting and personnel duties for the restaurant's 35 employees, some of whom have worked there about as long.

The siblings grew up in the business started by Harry and Ostelle Fulcher and took over its management several years before the couple died in the early 1980s. Today, T's joins Luigi's and Sconyers Bar-B-Que as being among the city's oldest restaurants.

Though Augusta grew to the west and north, T's has remained a south Augusta stalwart. However, the 7,000-square-foot restaurant near the Mike Padgett Highway exit on Bobby Jones Expressway is nothing like the first fish-fry joint the Fulchers opened in Burke County after the end of World War II.

Mr. T

Harry Garrett Fulcher was named after well-known Richmond County educator T. Harry Garrett, the longtime principal of Tubman High School. His 11 brothers and sisters took to calling him "T," and the nickname stuck.

"He loved to hunt and fish; that was his passion," Susan said.

He was working as a kiln operator at the Babcock & Wilcox refractories plant (now Thermal Ceramics) when he married Ostelle in 1935. More than a decade later, they decided to open a business.

"It was my mother's idea for a restaurant," said Garrett, who is legally Harry G. Fulcher Jr. "My father wanted to open a filling station."

The couple opened the first T's at Miller's Pond near the community of McBean. They used a mill on the property to make cornmeal for their signature hush puppies, which are finger-shaped instead of the usual round.

With the beer flowing and the jukebox blasting, T's was the kind of place country folk would go for a night on the town.

"It was hoppin' back then," Susan said. "It was the only thing around this area."

In 1951, Harry and Ostelle decided to build a new version of T's on family land off Mike Padgett Highway, which then was known as Old Savannah Road.

Unlike the Miller's Pond location, the new T's was strictly a drive-in, complete with carhops and window trays.

Business was so brisk that the Fulchers built a dining room next to the kitchen, then another and another, until the business grew into a full-blown family restaurant. That's when T's became the place for seafood in Augusta.

Golden years

Garrett still lives in the family home right behind the restaurant, where his father and grandfather lived before him.

The area was countryside when he was a child. The Apple Valley subdivision to the north was woods. The Procter and Gamble detergent plant to the south was just pasture land in front of the Sancken Dairy.

The only other home in the area was the state residence for the head doctor at Gracewood Hospital located just across the highway.

The city began creeping south during the postwar housing boom. Construction of manufacturing plants along Marvin Griffin Road -- Miracle Mile as it was known -- put more vehicles on Old Savannah Road and more diners at T's tables.

"There were lines wrapped around the building," Garrett recalled.

Augusta businessman and county Commissioner Jimmy Smith has been going to T's since the Miller's Pond days, when he "went down there as a young guy." On a recent Wednesday he was at T's having lunch with two Atlanta businessmen.

"This sounds ridiculous, but this is the main draw," he said, picking up a hush puppy out of its tray and displaying it to his guests.

The golden years of the late 1960s and mid-1970s came to an end as consumers became more health conscious and shunned the fried foods that comprised the majority of T's menu. The restaurant went from serving more than 1,000 customers on a typical Saturday to about 400.

Meanwhile, the number of places for people to dine in Augusta grew rapidly.

"Mama was so upset when the first Red Lobster came to town," said Garrett, who began working full time at the restaurant after graduating from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Ga., with a degree in food management.

He introduced lighter fare to the menu, such as broiled fish and a salad bar, the latter of which has become almost as popular as the restaurant's catfish and hush puppies.

The "Boat Load Salad Bar," as it is billed on the menu, is a salad bar inside a boat. Not just any boat -- the very one "T" Harry Fulcher used for fishing in Brier Creek.

"It's a nice little touch," Garrett said.

Catering is another area Garrett branched into during the 1980s. In keeping with the restaurant's made-to-order credo, he cooks most of the food himself on-site in a special travel-trailer. The catering operation is the fastest-growing segment of T's, but Garrett is hesitant to expand it further, fearing quality at the restaurant would suffer.

"It's kind of hard to really build it up," he said of the mobile service. "It takes me away from the kitchen."

Wall of history

You've likely been to restaurants where there are antiques and other memorabilia tacked to the walls. T's is no different, except that everything on the wall has a real connection to the people cooking the food.

There's the autographed picture of country-western star Tennessee Ernie Ford.

"I remember waiting on him," said Brenda Palmer, who has been a waitress at T's off and on for 20 years. "He used to come here every year during Masters."

Inside picture frames are old T's take-out menus, where the milkshakes always cost 30 cents and five stuffed shrimp can be had for $1.75.

The cockspurs that Garrett's grandfather owned when rooster fighting was considered an acceptable sporting event are not far from the black-and-white photo of a bootleggers' camp, which also belonged to his grandfather.

"(Former) Sheriff (Charlie) Webster used to bust up my granddaddy's stills," he said with a chuckle.

The rusted and dented T's sign from the restaurant's early days was unearthed by Susan's son Spencer while he was playing in the woods behind the restaurant in 2002.

Then there's Minnie Smith's catfish pan. The dented and well-worn pan on display in the waiting area was used by the longtime employee to bread countless catfish -- more than 1 million pounds by the Fulchers' estimates.

Back then, the restaurant served catfish caught in the Santee Cooper river. All the catfish is now farm-raised in Louisiana.

"That pan has breaded many a catfish," he said.

Ms. Smith retired in the 1990s. She died last year.

Right at home

T's is a "family restaurant" in every sense of the word.

"This is not like a corporate place," said head waitress Brenda Shimel, who has worked at T's for 20 years. "It's like family life here, a laid-back family. People care about each other."

The family atmosphere created by Harry Fulcher has been continued by Garrett, who started making, or "cutting" as it's called, hush puppies when he was 9 years old.

"He's always known this is what he wanted to do," said Susan, who worked as a nurse for two years before joining T's full time in the late '70s.

She has taken on fewer duties at the restaurant since being diagnosed with lung cancer three years ago.

A once athletic woman who has never smoked, she is now too weak to come in every day.

"You can't believe how many people ask about Susan," Garrett said. "They're all keeping her in their prayers. That's how close we are to our customers. You don't have that at a regular restaurant."

All of Garrett and Susan's children have worked at T's at one time or another. The owners haven't explicitly talked about how, or if, the restaurant will make the transition to the third generation, but Garrett's 28-year-old daughter Tiffany seems the most interested in carrying on the tradition.

"We haven't really discussed it," said Tiffany, who works in the kitchen and oversees some of Susan's duties, such as payroll. "I just know they need my help right now."

At a restaurant where most of the employees have been in place since she was a child, there are still things she needs to learn, such as where her father keeps the secret hush puppy recipe.

"It's in here," Garrett said, pointing to his head.

Reach Damon Cline at (706) 823-3486 or damon.cline@augustachronicle.com.