Where Do You Want to Eat? Food Ephemera and Restaurant Guides of North Carolina
Written by Kayla Cavenaugh
This chapter is a meditation on a pressing question that constantly pervaded my household growing up: “Where do you want to eat?” The North Carolina Collection at Wilson Library and Digital NC are full of restaurant guides, tourist brochures, photographs, and postcards, all evidence of North Carolinians of the past who sought to provide a speedy, reliable, and filling answer to this question. But before we go out to eat, building on topics covered in other chapters in this digital book, it is worth casting a light on some of the economic and transportation changes of the early-twentieth century: the transition away from railway transport to the influx of personal automobiles and shopping centers.
Evidence of some of these changes can be found in the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives. The Bayard Morgan Wootten Photographic Collection, circa 1870-1988, holds thousands of photographs and fragile glass negatives made by white female photographer and studio operator Bayard Morgan Wootten (1875-1959) of New Bern and Chapel Hill, according to the finding aid, and whose photographic vision brings a romanticized, Jim Crow-era North Carolina into gauzy focus, during a time of white anxieties over the end of enslavement and shifting agricultural industries.
Many photographs in the Wootten Photographic Collection offer polished glimpses of white and Black rural food traditions and carefully posed agricultural labor; viewers of these materials are jolted by scenes of quiet work depicted alongside Wootten’s at times racist descriptions and image naming conventions. Her commercialized images, particularly those depicting the strawberry industry in Chadbourn, leave us to ponder an idealized vision of labor [1] she sought to illuminate, holding fast to a picture of a racially stratified agricultural society amid a rapidly changing Southern economy.
In addition to increased railway transport of exported North Carolina crops, thanks to the advent of refrigerated railcars, railway passengers themselves could also enjoy foods associated with North Carolina without needing to disembark. As this 1924 Seaboard Air Line Railway menu indicates, white travelers passing through Durham had the option of Smithfield ham, lima and string beans, and shrimp, as well as Pin Money pickles, a Virginia export (Seaboard Air Line Railway, 1924; Werks, 2019).
The mid-twentieth century witnessed a supplanting of rail travel with the personal automobile; railway stations, which used to provide access to transportation for many North Carolina communities, were sidelined by the growing ubiquity of cars, which likely heavily influenced what, where, and how North Carolinians decided to eat. By the 1960s, drive-ins and other stand-alone destinations for a night out began to compete with convenience stores and the shopping center, a seemingly permanent fixture of North Carolina architecture, often featuring a supermarket or large store anchoring a strip mall filled with hole-in-the-wall restaurants and businesses (Gwynn, 2025).
Visual evidence encompassing photography and advertising is, by nature, fragmentary: there will always be food stories left unspoken by strawberry-pickers and walnut-hullers, and likewise by the restauranteurs unable to afford, or barred from purchasing to begin with, ad space in city directories, brochures, and tourism pamphlets. The Negro Motorist Green Book was an alternative listing of information for mid-century Black travelers who embraced the rise of the automobile and needed a place to safely stay the night or grab a meal while on the road—travel activities that required extra foresight and planning for those who needed a tavern, garage, beauty shop, tourist home, hotel, tailor, drug store, night club, or restaurant that would host and welcome the patronage of Black customers (Stinson, 2022).
Wilson Library holds three facsimiles of Green Books published in 1947, 1959, and 1963, which list a variety of North Carolina businesses; these and many more can be explored using the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission’s Green Book Project. Travelers in 1947, for instance, found listings for the Black Beauty Tea Room in Mt. Olive and Ollie’s Restaurant in Wilmington, both owned and operated by Black women—Louise Powell and Ollie Bynum Higgins, respectively—as well as a night club by the name of Club 709 in Winston-Salem (Ragghianti, 2019, 2022; Stinson, 2022).
When I set out on my archival search, I had planned to look for depictions of North Carolina food on the move and visual evidence of restaurant fare. And having called North Carolina home for most of my life, I knew I might surface materials reflective of my own foodways, including postcards for familiar BBQ restaurants and a digitized slide of a plate of food conjured from my own memory, as a kid from eastern North Carolina. During this process, I found myself spending the most time poring over restaurant guides, menus, and tourist brochures in the North Carolina City, County, and Regional Ephemera Collection, circa 1880-2023, visiting places and towns and cities of my childhood and ones I later came to know.
Most of the ephemera in this collection dates from the 1980s onwards and is browsable by North Carolina city, county, and region, filling dozens of manuscript boxes; my discussion will skim only the barest surface of what is present. A smattering includes a 1924 bright-ochre bulletin summarizing agricultural statistics reported by The Asheville Citizen Times covering western North Carolina, with a map depicting the spread of apple production; a spiral-bound menu from the Durham location of The Cheesecake Factory franchise, donated to Wilson Library by a UNC Chapel Hill geography student in 2013, plastic pages still sticky with…something; and an advertisement for Brew Thru, an Outer Banks franchise of drive-thru beverage stores started in 1977 by Dana and Becky Lawrentz and which multiplied up and down the coast by the late 1990s (Holian, n.d.).
Several folders contain ephemera from Winston-Salem, offering a narrow glimpse of the city’s restaurant scene from the 1950s into the 1980s. The Winston-Salem Crosstown, first published in 1955, was a bi-weekly free publication showcasing advertisers belonging to the Winston-Salem Merchants’ Association and the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce and catered to white readers. In their first issue, editors Gloria Robbins and Joann Baker write of their attempt to “round up news of everything that is going on across town […] Call it an almanac, a calendar, a guide book.” A centerfold hand-drawn map depicts the city as a growing community. By 1955, Winston-Salem was already well into several highway revisions agreed to by state and local politicians at the expense of entire swaths of the city’s historically Black neighborhoods; the result of this sprawling expansion is evident in a 1971 issue of Winston-Salem Today, showcasing dining and entertainment options found in shopping centers and along busy thoroughfares.
Other materials from Winston-Salem showcase restaurants and food suppliers no longer extant, as well as traces of a few of the people who loved and frequented them. A program for the 1984-85 season of the Carolina Thunderbirds hockey team includes an advertisement for Forsyth Coffee Service, Inc., with a to-the-point declaration and a possible photograph of Thunderbirds office workers enjoying their coffee. The program also contains an ad for the K&W Cafeteria location on Knollwood Street—mere years before it was completely leveled by a gas explosion in 1988 (Drabble, 2018), due to gross negligence by Piedmont Natural Gas in failing to repair corroded pipelines, injuring four people (Kolstad, 1988).
A brochure issued in October 1983 by the Fifth Street branch of the Forsyth County Public Library, Grub in Winston-Salem, depicts a vibrant restaurant scene, listing many Winston-Salem staples now gone, such as Rose n’ Thistle (and, of course, a fateful nod to the K&W—“a very good breakfast”), as well as a few relics still operating, like Westend Café. Interspersed are snippets of commentary and allusions to memories made by the community of librarians who frequented these establishments. (Did you know Shober’s was “the official watering hole of the Forsyth County Library Association?”) The authors of this brochure, Dave G. Fergusson and Robert E. Burgin, “put little faith in its accuracy and suggest you do the same.”
Three publications showcasing Winston-Salem restaurants. Click the title pages to explore contents.
My brief survey ends with an item in Box 1, File Folder 13, interleaved among ephemera from Cary: a December 2010 newsletter written for Japanese-language readers by members of the Japanese community of the Triangle, titled さんかく横丁, or Sankaku Yokochō. The title translates loosely to “Triangle Backstreet,” with yokochō referring to the term for an alleyway off the main street of a Japanese urban center, bustling with shops and restaurants [2]. According to the editorial byline on the cover, this was the seventeenth edition of Sankaku Yokochō and was published by a group of writers seeking to share Japanese-language information about living in North Carolina and welcome readers to a metaphorical cozy neighborhood, tucked among businesses and restaurants within our own Triangle community. Their newsletter continues to be published as of early 2025, and back issues are posted on their website (Sankaku Yokochō editorial department, 2025).
The illustrations on the cover are credited to Yuko Nogami Taylor, and several other authors are credited by their first names throughout the publication, as well. The newsletter contains reviews of local restaurants and common household products, including a discussion by the Delicious Things Detective Club about supermarket milks that distinguishes between Japanese and American methods of pasteurization (p. 15). (The club is unanimous: Food Lion’s Organic Whole Milk is the closest flavor to Japanese milk.) The publishers also provide space for local groups to share about events held within the community; the Triangle Fujinkai, or Women’s Association, announce their next meeting scheduled after the winter holidays in January 2011 (p. 21).
The newsletter blends Japanese and English language, reflecting the cultural interplay that so extensively permeates the foodways of North Carolina, and features interpretations from home cooks and restaurant enthusiasts who bring their own insight to mainstays of Southern cooking. I leave you with a translation (C. Cantaluppi, personal communication, April 10, 2025) of a recipe for collard greens, a dish that carries deep cultural meanings for Black and white communities in North Carolina, contributed by a community member named Kurumi, who is credited in the zine by her first name and her role as a homemaker living in Cary (p. 14).
Collard Green recipe, by Kurumi, a homemaker who lives in Cary, NC.
"Around early November each year, these vegetables hit the produce section of the supermarket. Sold in big bundles, they’re known as Collard Greens and are classified as something between a cabbage and a kale. Their thick and hearty leaves go well in a stir-fry, but the tradition here in the South is to use a simple seasoning of salt and stew them long and slow. This is a traditional way of preparing them since old times, and is sure to appear on many a Thanksgiving menu.
Ingredients (serves 4)
- Collard Greens (1 bundle)
- Country Ham (2 slices) (bacon can be substituted)
How to Make:
- Carefully clean the Collard Greens
- Remove the thick stems from the leaves. Chop the stems into ~1 cm pieces
- Put the Country Ham into a large pot, and add water until covered
- Add one teaspoon of salt, and simmer ham for 30 minutes
- Add one handful of leaves, bring to a boil, then add the remaining leaves and stems
- Simmer for 45 minutes, then check to see if the stems are soft. If still hard, simmer until soft
- Once tender, strain from directly from pot into serving bowls, adding extra broth if desired
- Adjust the flavor with extra salt
After stewing, they should look something like pickled mustard greens. It’s typically served alongside cornbread, but it's also delicious served with barbecue and topped with vinegar."
Selections from the December 2010 edition of さんかく横丁 (Sankaku Yokochō). Click title page to explore contents.
End notes
[1] Shifts in agricultural industries and idealized visions of labor are also evident in the Carolina Trucking Development Company Photographic Collection, 1913-1914. The Carolina Trucking Development Company, based in Wilmington and chaired by white supremacist Hugh MacRae, sought to attract white European immigrants to settle in rural North Carolina. This group of photographs is promotional in nature, seeking to sell farmland and a racial ideology. Images of workers with their families, including children, in Columbus, New Hanover, and Pender counties depict a mostly white agricultural labor force, in line with MacRae’s vision for North Carolina.
[2] Many thanks to Corey Cantaluppi for translating selections from Sankaku Yokochō.
References
Drabble, J. (2018, January 22). 30 years after K&W explosion, residents remember harrowing incident. Winston-Salem Journal. https://journalnow.com/news/local/article_3559e7e6-b500-510d-8eb1-8f637c2efe09.html
Gwynn, D. (2025, April 30). A quick history of the supermarket. Groceteria. https://www.groceteria.com/about/a-quick-history-of-the-supermarket/#gsc.tab=0
Holian, L. (n.d.) Our story. Brew Thru. https://brewthru.com/brew-thru-experience/
Kolstad, J. L. (1988, November 21). Safety recommendation [P-88-13]. National Transportation Safety Board. https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-recs/recletters/P88_13.pdf
Ragghianti, B. K. (2022). Black beauty tea room. North Carolina African American Heritage Commission. https://aahc.nc.gov/green-book/black-beauty-tea-room
Ragghianti, B. K. (2019). Ollie's restaurant. North Carolina African American Heritage Commission. https://aahc.nc.gov/green-book/ollies-restaurant
Sankaku Yokochō editorial department. (2025). 三角横丁. http://sankakuyokochoncusa.web.fc2.com/
Seaboard Air Line Railway. (1924). Seaboard Air Line Railway dining car service. University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://archive.org/details/seaboardairliner00seab_0/page/n3/mode/2up
Stinson, T. (2022, February 16). Finding a safe space: Green Book listings in Forsyth County. The Chronicle. https://wschronicle.com/finding-a-safe-space-green-book-listings-in-forsyth-county/
Werks, R. (2019, March 4). RVA Legends— "pin money" pickles. RVA Hub. https://rvahub.com/2019/03/04/rva-legends-pin-money-pickles/
