by Cameron Walker | Mar 1, 2019 | Do, March 2019
The cultural phenomenon known as the Korean Wave began in the ‘90s with the rise of K-pop and Korean TV dramas. In the years since, the world has become enamored with exported South Korean entertainment, food, beauty products and more.
The Carolinas Chapter of the Global Korean Wave Federation hosts its third annual KoreaFest this month, and this year’s theme is “celebrating Korean identity.” Organizers have planned an event embracing the full spectrum of Korean culture, from the exuberance of K-pop to the gravity of Korean history. Everyone is welcome, and there is sure to be something for everyone.
Listen
Throughout the day, speakers including artist Dominic Pangborn will share their personal stories of immigration, adoption and identity, and Dr. Jung-Min “Mina” Lee will give a lecture on the American influence on K-pop. KoreaFest founder Heoak Lee, the incoming Eastern US president of the Global Korean Wave Federation, will discuss why there is a North and South Korea and will lead the tribute for the 100th anniversary of the March First Independence Movement, one of the earliest public displays of Korean resistance to Japanese rule in the early 1900s.
Watch
Go back in time with a traditional dance performance by dance troupe Youn Duck Kyung or get your adrenaline fix watching taekwondo experts from Lee Brothers and White Tiger spar. Root for your favorites as dancers vie for trophies and cash prizes in the K-pop dance contest. K-pop performers from the United States and Korea will take the stage into the evening, culminating in a performance by popular girl group H.U.B.
Learn
Try your hand at Korean games like gonggi and ttakji, learn to play a small, handheld drum, or dress up in a traditional hanbok, a special occasion dress. Take a class in the history of Korean pottery or challenge yourself to a K-pop dance class.
Eat
Come hungry to KoreaFest! Vendors including Seoul Garden, Ms. Mong and Itaewon Grill will serve a mix of traditional and fusion food, from tteok-bokki, bibimbap, kimbap and kimchi to bulgogi nachos and quesadillas. Plenty of snacks, desserts and beverages will be for sale.
There will also be celebrity meet-and-greets, a photo booth, Korean flag face painting and vendors selling K-pop merchandise, traditional souvenirs, jewelry and accessories, as well as K-beauty products.
Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Children 12 and under get in free. Celebrity meet-and-greet tickets are required for all ages. Visit nckoreafest.com for more information.
by Cameron Walker | Mar 1, 2019 | Eat, March 2019
Bodega Tapas, Wine and Rum in downtown Wake Forest is an intimate, sophisticated space, all warm wood and exposed brick, with accents of pressed tin and Prussian blue. These classic elements contrast and complement one another, and chef Nunzio Scordo’s menu follows the same philosophy—simple but not pedestrian ingredients cooked well and put together just so.
Scordo, who also owns Driftwood Southern Kitchen in Lafayette Village, opened the 60-seat Bodega last month in hopes of delivering a true tapas experience, with dishes inspired by his travels.
“I’m not looking to do the small-plate format in a sense of expensive, scaled-down versions of entrees,” Scordo says. “I want people to be able to come in for a glass of wine, get one or two little things to pick on, and then they can go home and, if they want to, they can eat dinner…It [is] food from Spain, France, Italy, South America…just really simple, flavorful things.”
Small plates range from $5-$10 and include lamb meatballs with Greek yogurt and green olive salsa, seared tuna with guajillo chile and toasted garlic, crispy yucca with a Peruvian yellow pepper sauce, empanada with sweet plantain and Cuban picadillo, and cider-braised pork belly with apple mostarda, among others. A few larger dishes are available, including a paella for two with clams, shrimp, chicken, chorizo and bomba rice in a shellfish and ham broth. Bodega’s dessert menu includes a baked whole sweet plantain, dulce de leche rice pudding and a spiced chocolate tart with hazelnuts. An extensive selection of wines by the glass, a housemade sangria and classic and inventive rum cocktails round out the menu.
Once the first Bodega is well-established, Scordo says he hopes to open more locations in similarly blossoming downtowns, including in Apex and Holly Springs. He’ll host more events at Driftwood Southern Kitchen, and will travel to Spain and Morocco for inspiration this summer.
Scordo first started cooking when he was 10, helping his Italian grandmother during the holidays. As a teenager, his first job was at a Youngstown, Ohio, fast food restaurant. After high school, he flirted with the idea of becoming an architect, but went to culinary school in Pennsylvania instead.
“When I started cooking, it was natural,” Scordo says. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is what I’m supposed to do with my life.’”
His work as a chef has taken him many places, first to a busy New Orleans-style restaurant and nightclub in Ohio, then on to Florida serving up “conch fusion” cuisine, a marriage of Asian and Latin American flavors. Scordo’s next stop was Birmingham, at the famous Hot and Hot Fish Club, and then at Highlands Bar and Grill, which recently won a James Beard Foundation Award. Back in Ohio, Scordo owned a short-lived restaurant (it closed during the 2008 economic downturn), then spent three years as executive chef for the largest privately owned catering company in the country.
A trip to Raleigh for a friend’s wedding convinced Scordo that this was the perfect spot for his next adventure. The City of Oaks felt like a place on the verge, he says, a place where good things were about to bloom. He took over Paparazzi in Lafayette Village, turning it into the neighborhood Italian restaurant Farina, which he recently sold. When a space opened in the same shopping center, Scordo opened Driftwood; it will celebrate its fifth anniversary this month.
Scordo got his passport just two years ago and has been making up for lost time. He visited Belize and Costa Rica twice, and, last summer, booked an open-ended ticket to Italy, where he spent five weeks traveling solo, visiting Rome, Assisi, Florence and Milan, and ancient villages, olive groves and oil presseries along the way.
“I went all around, up and down the coast, everywhere and anywhere I could cover in a month,” he says. “I drove 2,600 miles, literally not knowing where I was going the next day. I would [reserve] an Airbnb while I was on the road. It was amazing, unbelievable.”
During his trip, Scordo sampled hyper-local cuisines and spent hours learning about balsamic vinegar in a family-owned factory in Modena, where a barrel of 150-year-old vinegar has been passed down through generations.
“They let me taste a droplet and it was like drinking balsamic sap from a tree,” Scordo recalls. “It was thick and rich and sweet, but not overly so, with some acidity to it and smokiness from the wood.”
Learn more about Scordo’s newest venture at bodegawakeforest.com.
by Cameron Walker | Feb 4, 2019 | Eat, February 2019
There’s a distinctly “Alice in Wonderland” feel to The Atlantic Lounge, an underground speakeasy newly opened in Raleigh’s Oakwood neighborhood. Tucked into a space between Pelagic Beer and Wine bottle shop and the restaurant Crawford and Son, the nondescript entrance leads to a stairwell lit by the neon glow of a sign reading, “Don’t serious yourself to death.” A vintage Vacancy/No Vacancy sign, salvaged from an old hotel, acts as a sentry, letting patrons know if they can use their key to gain entry to the 44-seat bar.
It’s a space out of time, a subtly retro den that feels somehow both cozy and a little bit rebellious. Irreverent artwork hangs on the century-old brick walls, reflected in 6-foot tall mirrors suspended above the teal banquette curving along one wall. Candles glow on the concrete bar, which was poured and polished by owner Jason Howard, who also operates the Cardinal bar and is planning to open The Rainbow Luncheonette, a 22-seat, modern take on a diner in the old Rainbow Upholstery Building on West Street later this year.
Howard sees the lounge as fitting in seamlessly with the neighborhood while also helping to shape it, which pretty well sums up the philosophy of his hospitality career.
“I honestly think the hospitality industry drives the direction in which a city goes more than anything else,” Howard says. “It’s fun to be a part of the growth of a city, to help create the culture.”
Howard envisioned The Atlantic Lounge three years ago, when he first set foot in the space, then just a storage area with 5 feet of headroom. But that dark, cramped nook spoke to him, and he spent years getting the proper permits and doing the hard work to breathe life into the spot. He hopes that, as keyholders bring their friends into the fold, it will become a creative community gathering spot that the neighborhood will make its own—from the music that’s playing to the drinks menu, which includes craft cocktails, riffs on the classics with “flips and fizzes,” according to Howard.
“We try to stay as hyper local as possible with everything in here,” Howard says. “But ultimately, we want the customers to decide what they want. I definitely expect it to evolve, and I don’t think you’ll ever really find out what The Atlantic Lounge is—I think it’s going to be evolving forever.”
The Rules
• Keyholders can bring one guest at a time.
• Keyholders must use the key to gain entry (no knocking).
• They may not enter when the “No Vacancy” sign is on.
• The Atlantic Lounge is open Tuesday through Sunday, from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. at 62o North Person Street.
How To Get a Key
The first keys were offered to neighborhood residents. Those who purchased the $40 key also received an invitation to extend to a friend.
“That allows them to invite somebody they think would like and respect the space and enjoy the concept,” Howard says. “So they kind of get to pick the crowd by doing that—you put the power in their hands.”
There will be further open enrollment sessions. In the meantime, you can request a key by emailing [email protected] or messaging the bar through Instagram. Keyholders must be 25 years old or older.
by Cameron Walker | Nov 14, 2018 | Buzz, November 2018
Carrie Jane Knowles’ newly updated memoir chronicles a family’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease
“Last night I dreamt my mother knew my name,” begins Carrie Jane Knowles, an award-winning author and artist from Raleigh, in her recently updated memoir, “The Last Childhood: A Family Story of Alzheimer’s.”
Completed with a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, the book is an unflinching look at Knowles’ family’s experience with her mother’s disease—what the family got right and what it missed—and advice for others facing a loved one’s cognitive decline. It’s about the weight of the ordeal, its impact on relationships and the sense of self, and the relief, grief and search for meaning at the end of it all.
November is National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness month. An estimated 5.7 million Americans live with this disease, which destroys long- and short-term memory and other mental functions. In the U.S., someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s every 65 seconds, according to the Alzheimer’s Association; this pace will double by mid-century as the country’s population ages. There is no cure for this disease of erasure, and researchers do not fully understand its cause. But, in the face of this uncertainty, Knowles believes we should all strive to live a life of purpose.
“Make your mark in some way, whether it’s writing or art or making the best apple pie,” she says. “You don’t have to write best-sellers to be remembered. You can just make really good fudge or a great pot roast…anything that you love to do.”
Knowles has certainly made her mark on Raleigh since she moved here from Chicago in 1978. Though writing often can be a solitary endeavor, Knowles has become deeply intertwined with the creative community here. She helped shape the city’s art scene, serving on the boards of the Symphony Orchestra Development Association, Carolina Wren Press, Raleigh Chamber Music Guild, Burning Coal Theatre and the American Forum. She worked as a restaurant reviewer for the News and Observer and served as a judge for the Raleigh Fine Arts Society’s Annual Fiction Contest for eight years. She also founded the Boylan Heights Art Walk, the annual celebration where local artists and artisans showcase their work on the front porches and in the yards of the neighborhood’s historic homes. The Art Walk is now in its 25th year.
“Artists and writers have always served as scribes for humanity,” writes Knowles in a recent article for Psychology Today. “They put down in lines and colors, words and songs, the things they see and feel. When we write a story, draw a picture, play music, sing a song, dance, or throw a pot, we engage in an act of memory. We want to remember. We need to remember…In some very fundamental way we understand that if our memories are lost, we are lost.”
Knowles has spent much of her life making memories—and writing them down. Her first job was writing for the PR department of WXYZ radio during her freshman year at Wayne State University in Detroit. During her last two years of college, Knowles spent her weekends traveling around the state, covering speedboat, motorcycle and drag car races for a sports magazine. She wrote for an alumni magazine in Chicago and then, with a hearty dose of self confidence, took a leap of faith and dove into freelance writing.
Named Piedmont Laureate in 2014, Knowles has spent a decade traveling around the country speaking about Alzheimer’s disease. She has written hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, dozens of short stories—many of them award-winning—and three well-reviewed novels. She is currently working on a new book inspired in part by a family mystery and will publish a collection of short fiction pieces this April. Knowles has been invited to be a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books and pens a regular column for Psychology Today called “Shifting Forward: A Wanderer’s Musings.”
Knowles takes her career as storyteller seriously, commuting daily to work in her sacred space—an airy and open office in a renovated house on the edge of downtown, a liminal place between modern buildings and a historic cemetery. For her, the notion of place is central to her writing, as much a character as the people in her novels.
“Place is more than an address—it’s a culture, a feeling, a taste,” Knowles says. “Place really matters to me and to most writers, because it sets up a tone and what happens in a story. Think about ‘To Kill a Mockingbird;’ if it was set in Boston, it wouldn’t have been the same story.”
Knowles owns dozens of maps and a passport she describes as “the size of a library.” Her book, “A Garden Wall in Provence,” is set in Avignon, France, where she lived for a year when her children were small; “Lillian’s Garden” takes place in a mental hospital on the fringe of her hometown of Wayne, Michigan; “Ashoan’s Rug” is inspired by places she has visited and people she has met in her far-flung travels. Through her books, her readers travel, too, to places they may never visit, through lives unlike their own; or, in the case of “The Last Childhood,” through a tale familiar to so many, but rarely told.
“It is our job now to make memories for ourselves and our children that will last a lifetime: ones that, if they are lost, can be found again,” Knowles writes at the end of her memoir.
It’s a reminder as we enter the holiday season to make our mark on the world—and in the lives of our loved ones before it’s too late.
by Cameron Walker | Oct 31, 2018 | Eat, November 2018
Local favorite Irregardless serves Thanksgiving meals—and donates a portion of its sales to fighting world hunger.
Every year on Thanksgiving, kitchens around Raleigh are in disarray. Sinks overflow with pots and pans. Spouses are sent to the market to pick up bottles of this and cans of that. Home cooks squint to decipher handwriting on old family recipes. Kids and pets mill underfoot, squabbles break out and something inevitably breaks or catches on fire.
Meanwhile, at Irregardless Cafe, the dining room is full of contented families, live music and the holiday spirit.
For nearly two decades, Irregardless founding chef and owner Arthur Gordon and his staff have opened the restaurant for Thanksgiving. It’s the restaurant’s busiest day of the year, in fact, and the staff serves well over a thousand people, both in-house and for takeaway meals, over a nine-hour period.
“There are lots of people who are not necessarily home for the holidays,” says Gordon. “Maybe it’s just one or two people eating, or you just don’t want to do all that work to cook the meal. There are so many ingredients that go into the Thanksgiving meal and, invariably, you find yourself spending hours in the shopping line. It really can be better prepared by the professionals.”
Photograph by Jason Wolonick
The restaurant is open from 11 a.m. until 8 p.m. Thanksgiving Day, serving a farm-to-table menu that changes each year. Irregardless also offers a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for pick up that serves six to eight people and includes a whole or sliced roast turkey, house-made gravy, orange cranberry relish, sage stuffing, green beans, sweet and white mashed potatoes, whole wheat rolls and a choice of apple or pumpkin pie.
In business since 1975, Irregardless started out as a vegetarian restaurant, but incorporated different proteins over the years. And, although the turkey has a starring role on Thanksgiving, there are always vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options available.
“We like to think this is the one place where the lion and the lamb can come together,” Gordon says.
Over the years, Irregardless has become a place of truce on Thanksgiving, a neutral gathering place for families to enjoy a holiday meal with no tension: no cooking, no cleaning, no transporting dishes from one home to another.
“I remember a family telling me once that their mother was so uptight about the holiday that, when going to her home, everybody was uptight—nothing was ever going to be good enough, hot enough, taste right,”
Gordon says. “And they so enjoyed bringing her to the restaurant, introducing me and saying, ‘you know, this is Mr. Gordon, he’s a professional—he knows what he’s doing. You can just sit back and relax,’ and everybody enjoyed the meal! This is a great place to reduce the pain and suffering that comes with a dysfunctional family.”
The Rev. Bob Inskeep, a frequent guest and former employee, has spent many Thanksgiving dinners at Irregardless.
“One of my memorable Thanksgivings was when I was living alone,” he says. “There’s no need to cook a whole turkey for oneself… [so I] went to Irregardless, sat at the bar, had a nice turkey dinner, embellished by a new variety of bourbon and a friendly bartender. It was just perfect!”
This year, Inskeep and his wife are planning to celebrate the holiday at the restaurant with friends.
“In years past, we occasionally make the big dinner [at home], but if we really want to impress any guests, it’s off to Irregardless—with the caution that it’s crunch time at the restaurant and Arthur requests that you enjoy your dinner and then go home to visit further, because bunches of folks are waiting!”
Thanksgiving at Irregardless isn’t just about feeding its customers; for every person who dines in that day, the restaurant donates a dollar to Raleigh-based international hunger relief organization Rise Against Hunger, whose bold vision is to eliminate hunger worldwide by 2030. For every takeaway meal, Irregardless donates $6. The organization turns every dollar into three or four meals; Gordon figures that, on Thanksgiving Day, his restaurant feeds about 5,000 people in the city and around the world.
“We’re really all here to help God do his or her work,” he says. “We’re all just a cog in the wheel instead of the center—that’s my philosophy.”
Gordon is at the restaurant every holiday, making sure that guests have an exceptional experience.
“I walk around and chat with the customers and share my philosophy and wisdom,” he says. “There is more soul in the food when the owner is on board. So you can eat a TV turkey dinner, or you can come get one made with tender loving care.”
Irregardless is also open on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and for a Pajama Brunch on New Year’s Day.
Place your carry-out Thanksgiving dinner order by Monday, November 19, by emailing Lubana at [email protected] or give them a call.
