Durham Food Culture

The Clarion Content and many of our local readers know this already, but Durham's food culture is amazing. Now the New York Times knows too. In a write-up published today, The Times interviews, among others, friend of the Clarion Content, Matt Beason about the restaurant he manages, Six Plates. Matt notes the veritable explosion of good restaurants in Durham in the last few years. The Times writer also talked to Amy Tornquist the owner of Watts Grocery. Note too that there was no mention of the wildly overrated and overpriced newcomer to downtown, Revolution.

An excerpt from the article follows.

"There are still plenty of good places for a barbecue plate, excellent French bistros like Vin Rouge and Rue Cler, and some white-tablecloth dining rooms, both traditional and modern.

But the most intriguing cooks here have a few things in common: an understanding of how to give a menu a sense of place; a true love of pork and greens in all their forms; and a lack of interest in linens and glassware...

The vast brick buildings still roll through the city center, emblazoned with ads for Lucky Strike and Bull Durham cigarettes. They are being repurposed as art studios, biotechnology laboratories and radio stations.

More important for food lovers, hundreds of outlying acres of rich Piedmont soil have “transitioned” from tobacco, and now sprout peas, strawberries, fennel, artichokes and lettuce. Animals also thrive in the gentle climate, giving chefs access to local milk, cheese, eggs, pigs, chickens, quail, lambs and rabbits."

The New York Times is not the first place to recognize the Durham food culture for the gem it is. In 2007 Gourmet magazine wrote up our area as one of the best in the country for Mexican food.