W
hen Bill Moore started his career with Eat’n Park as a
teenager in 1979, he likely couldn’t have imagine that nearly
40 years later, both his career—and his personal life—would
be flourishing as a result.
Moore, a 1982 graduate of Upper St. Clair High School, started
working at the Peters Township Eat’n Park in 1979 as one of the
restaurant’s first salad bar workers; at the time, the Peters Township
location was one of the very first restaurants in the chain to offer a
salad bar.
Moore’s personal connection to the restaurant runs deep. His
grandfather is the late Larry Hatch, who founded the company in
1949. His mother, Claire Moore, invented the company’s beloved
strawberry pie in 1956 after his father, Bob Moore, basically said, “My
wife could do better.”
“They had traveled to Cincinnati to taste the pies at another chain,”
Moore explains. “After tasting several of them and saying they were
awful, my father said, ‘My wife could come up with a better recipe.’”
At her husband’s request, Claire, who was a young mother at the
time, created many recipes and distributed them to their neighbors
in Scott Township for taste testing. Based upon th