For chef Jake Wood and his Granny Helen, cooking is a family affair.
Photographs by f8 Photo Studios
It’s a cold, drizzly day at Helen Lawrence’s home in Apex, but she and her grandson, chef Jake Wood, are hanging out on the side porch of the historic white bungalow. In a Faberware electric fryer, pork chops, pre-inspected for crispness and coated in flour seasoning, crackle and pop as they sizzle in oil.
“I usually fry outside because it smells up my kitchen,” Lawrence, or Granny Helen as Wood calls her, explains while Wood, clad in an apron, turns the chops. “My husband was a great one for fish and it really smells up the house, so we just do it outside.”
For Wood—a fixture in the kitchens of some of Raleigh’s top restaurants, including 42nd Street Oyster Bar, Raleigh Raw, Cowfish and 18 Seaboard before, in January, he started as executive chef at Plates Neighborhood Kitchen—
Granny Helen’s influence on his career path, and in his dishes, is pervasive.
“My grandfather and her had a massive garden and I enjoyed shelling peas, and learning how to break down fish and clean blue crab and all that good stuff,” Wood says. “Looking back, those memories are what I try to bring and incorporate into what I do everyday. I take a lot of pride in that.”
Inside, in the home’s cozy kitchen, there’s a spread of Southern-style dishes—“soul food,” Granny Helen calls them—that the pair have been working on together all afternoon: there’s oysters on the half shell, a creamy parsnip and sweet potato casserole, shredded cabbage, flat, cornmeal Johnnycakes, an almost smoky-tasting pea dish topped with bacon, plus pecan pie made using nuts from a tree in Granny Helen’s front yard. The pork chops are a favorite of Wood’s, he says, as he plates one expertly, stacking it on a bed of peas and topping it with garnish, pickled veggies and cabbage. (Granny Helen forgoes the fancy plating, preferring to keep her sides separate; she’s a “plain old country girl,” she explains.)
For Granny Helen, who grew up in Chatham County, country cooking is what she knows best. Her grandfather milled sorghum and cane syrup and her family grew their own vegetables and canned them. With her husband of 64 years, Allen Lee Lawrence, who passed away in 2017, Granny Helen continued her family’s tradition of cooking with food they had grown themselves.
“I have a rose bed out there and we planted some collards last year, so we gathered garnish,” Granny Helen tells me as we take a tour of her garden. After Allen died, she didn’t cook for a year because she felt like she didn’t have a reason to. But now, she’s back in the kitchen, and the garden, again. “We used to have corn, butter beans, tomatoes. My son built raised beds and I just plant tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers.”
We step into a spacious shed in the backyard, Allen’s old woodworking shop, where he built benches for the town’s parks. The shed looks different now than it did when Granny Helen’s husband was living—“he was a pack rat,” she explains—but she still uses the shed for storage. There are mason jars of green peas—Uncle George’s peas, they’re called, which, named for a mysterious Uncle George, Granny Helen and Allen picked from a friend’s garden years ago. There’s Allen’s old apple presser, which Jake spruces up each fall so he and Granny Helen can use it to mill cider with second-run apples hauled in from the mountains. And there are jars of home-brewed wine, made from heirloom muscadine grapes that grow on several vines in the yard.
“This is where my grandfather used to make all his wine, back here,” Wood explains. “But it might as well be moonshine.”
“Nobody liked it but him,” Granny Helen adds with a laugh.
“It’s pretty potent,” Wood continues. “We picked a ton of grapes off the vine and he just started experimenting.”
Back in the cozy kitchen, we sit down at a round table to eat. Wood says when he took over at Plates, he was given free rein to revise the menu, and so he incorporated several dishes inspired by his grandmother, including Granny Helen’s Fried Chicken, served with crystal cane syrup, creamed collards and brown butter hominy, one her favorite things to eat. Her jams, creamed corn, cabbages and other pickled vegetables also feature heavily, and, for the spring menu, Wood is planning to incorporate oysters and crawfish, one of his grandfather’s favorites, including brûléed oysters with pimento goat cheese topped with bacon.
“His ambition is to have his own restaurant and call it Olinger’s,” Granny Helen says, just as her daughter, Wood’s mother Nancy, and her great-granddaughter, Wood’s daughter Breanna, appear in the kitchen. Olinger is Granny Helen’s maiden name.
But first, Wood wants to make a solid run at Plates. In addition to the menu revamp, Wood and sous chef Eddie Forbis remodeled the restaurant’s dining room, painting, adding shiplap, chicken coops, farmhouse furniture and Edison light bulbs for a rustic, country feel. On the patio, Wood plans to grow herbs and edible flowers and patrons will be able to enjoy pig pickins and dining al fresco in the warm months with a glass of frosé—frozen rosé, that is.
When Olinger’s does makes its debut, Wood says, it will be a celebration of family, of Granny Helen’s cooking and of her life.
“It will be her name, her recipes attached to it,” Wood says. “There will be dishes like Uncle George’s peas, oysters Olinger, her pork chops. It’s her legacy that I want it to reconnect with and give as much life to as possible. That is a big goal of mine.”
Four years ago, Nikki Cline of Pilot Mountain received a phone call. Her son, Christian “Gage” Edwards, hadn’t shown up to his girlfriend’s house to pick her up, so Cline went out looking for him.
“I stumbled upon his wreck,” Cline recalls. “His car was mangled. He ran off the road, overcorrected and hit two trees.”
Gage, 17, passed away two days later. Cline learned that her son was speeding before he wrecked but that he had also been texting.
“We looked at the phone and his last text was to me,” Cline says. “He was just a few miles from our home. He was a three-sport athlete, loving and outgoing, a force to be reckoned with. His death affected more than just our family. It affected our entire community.”
Cline is working with parents and advocates across the state who have lost family members to accidents involving cell phone use while driving. They support a bill, H 144 or the Hands Free NC Act, that would make it illegal to hold your cell phone in your hands for any purpose—talking, texting, using social media, watching videos or playing games—while driving. Though you could still use your phone for navigation, phone calls or listening to music, under the bill, the phone would have to be mounted to or installed in your car. Violators of the law, which could go into effect next year, would face increasingly severe penalties, including fines and insurance points.
“The Hands Free Act goes at a major distraction, mobile devices, in a way that’s sensible and enforceable,” says Rep. Kevin Corbin, a Republican from Franklin, NC, who owns an insurance agency and is one of the primary sponsors of the bill. “We’ve crafted this legislation to create a consequence to discourage this type of behavior. Our goal is not thousands of tickets written, but thousands of crashes, injuries and deaths to be prevented.”
Distracted driving fatalities are on the rise according to crash statistics from North Carolina’s Department of Transportation. In 2016, 177 fatalities were reported across the state, in addition to thousands of injuries. A large, bipartisan group of lawmakers supports H 144, as does the majority of the public; polling from the Institute for Transportation Research and Education found 77 percent of North Carolinians support a hands-free law, and 95.5 percent agree using a mobile phone while driving is just as bad as drunk driving, according to a poll from the Independent Insurance Agents of North Carolina.
Proponents of the bill point to a hands-free law Georgia passed last July. Traffic fatalities came down in that state by 3.4 percent from 2017 to 2018, the largest decrease in 10 years according to Georgia DOT statistics. Phone use while driving was reported to have dropped in Georgia by 22 percent in the first month that the law was in effect.
But some people don’t feel that North Carolina’s hands-free bill goes far enough.
“Cell phone companies can stop [distracted driving] in a second,” says Ben Levitan, a telecommunications expert who holds a patent in a technical method he says could be introduced into cell phone networks to prevent people from sending or receiving text messages while driving. “You have to mandate that cell phone companies add this feature. It’s a very easy technical change you could put into a cell phone.”
Jennifer Smith, the CEO of nonprofit StopDistractions.Org, says getting people to put their phones down while driving is a much more achievable short-term solution. Indeed, North Carolina already has a law on the books making texting while driving illegal, but the law is written so narrowly that it’s functionally unenforceable.
“[Hands-free NC] is not the perfect solution,” Smith says. “Getting drivers off the phone altogether would be, but we live in America and people like to be free and not told what to do, so this is a step-by-step process.”
As of late last month, H 144 is winding its way through various House committees and is expected to pass in the House. It could potentially face opposition from conservative Republicans with libertarian leanings in the state Senate; similar bills introduced in past legislative sessions have failed. But families like Cline’s who have lost loved ones to distracted driving say they will continue to lobby lawmakers to vote for the bill.
“[Texting while driving] is a selfish choice,” Cline says. “[People] don’t think that someone has to go and tell their family [their loved one] is no longer here, about families sitting beside a hospital bed praying for a miracle. I’m sure there are millions of people out there who text and drive and get away with it but they don’t understand they are not invincible. This can happen to anybody and it will destroy your life.”
To contact your state Senator or Representative regarding H 144, or to follow the bill’s progress, visit ncleg.gov
As the United Methodist Church grapples with its stance on LGBTQ members and clergy, churches in Raleigh are mounting a “sacred resistance.”
Eddie McDaniel was raised Baptist in Winston-Salem.
“I grew up in the church, I loved music and loved God,” McDaniel says. “But I always struggled with my sexuality and was told that, pretty much, I would go to hell for being gay. So, I never spoke the words but I always knew inside who I was.”
Decades later, McDaniel and his partner of 27 years, Derrick, found a diverse, welcoming, fully accepting congregation at Open Table United Methodist Church close to downtown. McDaniel now serves on the the council of the nearly two year-old church that operates in what used to be Trinity UMC on Bloodworth Street.
“I tell all my friends to come by and see the wonderful things that are happening here,” McDaniel says. “This church is very open and inclusive. I’ve never felt excluded in any way. I feel and have been told that I’m a vital part of the church, that it wouldn’t be the same without me because we all play a part there.”
Pastor Jason Butler
Though UMC bylaws don’t allow for same-gender marriage or for the ordination of openly gay members as clergy, the UMC in the U.S. had, since May, been building consensus around a “One Church Plan,” meaning individual churches that comprise the third largest faith group in the nation could do whatever they saw fit in regards to the LGBTQ community—pastors could marry gay couples and anyone could serve in church leadership positions if that was what a church like Open Table, and dozens of other United Methodist churches in Raleigh, so desired, without fear of punishment.
But, at a February meeting in St. Louis, UMC leaders from around the world narrowly voted to uphold the church’s tradition of opposition to gay marriage and LGBTQ clergy and to punish those who broke the church’s rules. Methodist leaders from Russia and countries in Africa supported the move but it left progressive Methodists in the U.S. deeply disappointed.
“This was, in our opinion, like an attempt at a hostile takeover by more conservative members of our denomination,” says Open Table’s Pastor Jason Butler. “We reject that vote in full and will not live under an authority that oppresses our friends, or anyone.”
“The reality of all of this is the damage we’re doing to the Church with the big “c,” not just the United Methodist Church, and to LGBT people in our world and community,” says the Rev. Elizabeth Roberts who leads Fairmont UMC on Clark Avenue. “When we talk about the outcome of this, that is first and foremost.”
Rev. Elizabeth Roberts
The outcome Roberts refers to will be determined when the UMC’s Judicial Council meets in April, and could go into effect in 2020. Now, she, Butler and other Methodist leaders in Raleigh are “making sure our community knows we remain a church open to all people,” in Roberts’ words.
“We have this season of transition, of unclarity,” Butler says. “Our stance will be to offer a sacred resistance to this because what happened in St. Louis is not indicative of the American church.”
This reckoning could culminate in a schism, an outcome many American Methodist leaders are desperate to avoid. If the UMC abandons the One Church Plan and doubles down on its stance on LGBTQ issues, pastors who defy the rules could open themselves, and their churches, to punishment.
“I do believe the church will split on this but the phoenix out of the ashes will arise another movement,” says Judson Fraley, an openly gay member at Open Table who is also a licensed minister in the African Episcopal Church of Zion. And, as Roberts notes, the Methodist church has been divided before, such as on the topic of slavery.
“It’s not an equitable [analogy] all the time, but in many towns in North Carolina, you would see Methodist Episcopal Church South and Methodist Episcopal Church and the designation there was, one allowed for slavery and the other didn’t,” Roberts explains. “Now, they are all the United Methodist Church. That is what I love about being Methodist. We always had this big tent under which we all live, but I guess some people decided we can’t all live under it anymore.
Regardless of the direction in which the UMC at large decides to go, Roberts and Butler are emphatic that their churches, at least, will always welcome members from the LGBTQ community.
“Christianity has a long line of people who stood up for what was right and were punished,” says Butler. “We have a calling to do what is right, to follow love and proclaim God’s love. If there is punishment or consequences for that, that is part of following Jesus.”
“I pray that we continue to focus on what God teaches us about loving your neighbor,” says McDaniel, the Open Table council member and congregant. “It doesn’t mean deciding which ones, what your sexual orientation is, your race, how much money you make. Loving your neighbor means loving your neighbor.” ■
Raleigh’s been a little slow on the uptake with this one—cities like Durham, Wilmington, Asheville and others have had mobile parking apps for a while now—but, as of last month, you can pay to park on the streets in the greater downtown area from the convenience of your smartphone. Download the Passport Parking App and pay for parking without ever feeding money into a parking meter. Never worry again about running out to the street in time to re-up before the meter expires (the app will even send you a reminder!) Keep track of your parking history, receive emailed receipts and get other updates and alerts. The app is free to download from the iPhone app store and Android’s Google Play.
RDU Airport Parking
Be prepared to pay more to park at Raleigh-Durham International Airport soon. RDU’s 2019-2020 budget made public last month calls for parking fee increases. The daily maximum for Premier spots will jump from $18 to $22. Central parking spots will increase from $14 to $15. The daily maximum for parking in the airport’s Lot 2 will be $12. The daily maximum for the Economy 3 lot will jump from $7 to $8 and the Economy 4 lot will go up from $6 to $7. If pricier parking isn’t a good reason to get dropped off at your terminal—or better yet, to catch a Go Triangle bus out to RDU—we don’t know what is.
Citrix Cycle
After more than three years of planning, the long-awaited Citrix Cycle bikes hit Raleigh’s streets last month! When the bike share program is fully operational, 300 bikes will be docked at 30 stations across the city, around downtown, in southeast Raleigh, along Hillsborough Street and at the NC Museum of Art. The public can rent the bikes for short trips using a membership card or the Citrix Cycle Mobile App for their smartphones. Around 70 percent of the bikes in the fleet come equipped with Pedelec electric-assist motors—you’ll know them by their bolt of lightning decals on the bikes’ back wheels—which give riders a boost as they’re pedaling, while 100 bikes come with the traditional eight gears. For information on station locations, membership, pricing and more, check out citrixcycle.com.
Raleigh Downtown Transit Plan
Last month, the City of Raleigh unveiled its plans for multimodal transit downtown with recommendations for bus rapid transit, bike facilities and streetscape improvements for pedestrians, with an overall goal of making it easier for people to move around downtown by bus, bike or on foot. By 2027, the city hopes to have a network of BRT corridors flowing into and out of downtown. In the near term, by 2023, the plan is to have a BRT service installed along New Bern Avenue, to and from downtown and out to Wake Med. BRT includes dedicated lanes for buses so they don’t get caught up in traffic and city planners were careful not to put new bus and bike lanes on the same streets. New bike facilities will include bike lanes on some streets with vertical and horizontal separations between bikes and car traffic. These bike lanes could be multi-use paths and urban trails, bike lanes separated from the street by on-street parking and two-way cycle tracks. (Speaking of cycle tracks, the city will test its first one ever on Harrington Street during a three-day pop-up event starting April 5.) Other bike facilities included in the transit plan are buffered bike lanes and bikeways that are not vertically separated from car traffic, one-way separated bike lanes around bus stops and buffered bike lanes and BRT at intersections. In conjunction with the transit plan, there is a framework for redeveloping downtown’s streetscape, identifying sub-districts with unique characteristics and classifying streets downtown as residential, connector streets, transit streets or special streets with distinct character, such as Fayetteville Street, Hillsborough Street and Glenwood Avenue. Planners hope to explore desired amenities within the different street designations and plan accordingly; for instance, on streets heavy with restaurants and shops, such as Hargett Street, planners want to maintain on-street parking and loading zones. You can see the plan and submit comments at goraleigh.org/downtownplan; learn more about the Harrington pop-up cycle track on the city’s website.
In the weeks since Mayor Nancy McFarlane announced she wouldn’t seek a fifth term—and Charles Francis, her 2017 opponent confirmed he would run for the top seat again this year—all eyes were on Mary Ann Baldwin. She didn’t disappoint.
The five-term Councilor stepped away from her at-large seat in 2017, citing a desire to make a difference outside the system and work to cultivate future leaders. But those close to her know that Baldwin has considered running for mayor in the past and also know that, at a time when the council is deeply divided on issues of growth, Baldwin feels a sense of urgency in repositioning the city on what she believes is the right path for its future. And for many of McFarlane’s (many) proponents, sad to see the mayor go, “the notorious MAB” looks like a good replacement.
Baldwin, the executive director for the Holt Brothers Foundation, is unapologetically pro-development in contrast to members of the current council majority who favor “slow” or “smart” growth. Baldwin has been at odds with recent council decisions and non-decisions, including its reluctance to move on allowing accessory dwelling units, its seeming wariness of allowing for density and its perceived over-regulation of new industries and technology, including short term rentals like Airbnb and electric scooters. Baldwin will likely align herself with a group of young, progressive candidates running for district and at large seats who share her frustrations with the current council—a smart strategy as the city’s population, and voting majority, is skewing ever younger and more diverse.
But there are those who feel the council is in need of a “reset” and—given Baldwin’s past council experience and less than warm relationships with some current members who could hang on to their seats this fall—make the argument that the city needs someone new at its helm.
It’s a matter of game theory. Baldwin knows she has a lot of support in Raleigh but her path to the mayor’s seat won’t be easy, or pretty. She has thick skin but this municipal election likely won’t look like anything Raleigh’s seen for a while. “Safe” seats will be credibly contested. Mud will be slung. The one certainty is that, come 2020, the city will have a new mayor in place.
Let the games begin.
We’re very far away from knowing who Raleigh’s next mayor will be but that’s never stopped us from speculating before! With three confirmed candidates and a bunch of would-be candidates on the record as not running, the field is still wide open in this horse race. Here are the jockeys whose names have been thrown around and their odds based on what we know so far. The frontrunners are clear, the dark horses here for a reason. The best way for your horse to win? Take it to the polls in October.
Charles Francis 3/2
Francis, an attorney, announced first and therefore starts out head and shoulders above everyone else. His message of change and platform focused on aggressively addressing the city’s systemic problems brought him within about 6,000 votes against McFarlane in 2017 (though he lost by a wider margin in the runoff). We’re willing to bet Francis will hang on to most of his supporters from last time. Plus, there’s no popular Mayor McFarlane to contend with this year…
Mary Ann Baldwin 2/1
Which brings us to MAB. Like the mayor, Baldwin has her share of ardent supporters who could tip a race in her favor and her platform aligns with McFarlane’s. If it comes down to Baldwin vs. Francis, it will hinge on what kind of change voters want: if they want the city to go in a whole new direction, they’ll vote for Francis. If they want a more forceful version of McFarlane, they’ll vote for Baldwin. What if they’re happy with the way things are going but want to see a council reset?
Caroline Sullivan 3/1
Then, they’ll vote for Caroline Sullivan. Said to be McFarlane’s pick, the former Wake Commissioner was drawn out of her district in 2016 and now works in Gov. Cooper’s office. She would bring a fresh but still progressive perspective, relevant experience and the distance needed to help minimize the infighting that has hamstrung the council recently. How will the race between Sullivan and Baldwin shake out? How will their supporters split? And where will that leave Francis?
Sig Hutchinson 8/1
He hasn’t said no, and he may feel he can effect more change in key areas like parks and affordable housing as mayor rather than as a Wake Commissioner. But Hutchinson won re-election in the fall and the timing just doesn’t seem right somehow. Maybe we’ll see him run for mayor in 2021?
Bonner Gaylord 12/1
Before losing his District E seat to Stef Mendell in 2017, many believed Bonner Gaylord would succeed McFarlane. But since he’s been off the council, the North Hills operations director has shown little interest in returning. Though well-funded and well connected, few think Gaylord has the appetite to return to a council that could continue to be bitterly divided. Honestly, who can blame him?
Paul Fitts 16/1
Paul Fitts here is actually just a stand-in for whichever Republican the local GOP persuades to run in the ostensibly nonpartisan race—because, well, there’s always someone. Your run-of-the-mill Raleigh voter cares more about transit and affordable housing over curbing city spending these days, so Fitts, or whoever the candidate will be, is very much the underdog. But, as we all know, crazier things have happened.
A different version of this story appears in Raleigh Magazine’s April issue. It has been updated online to reflect recent campaign announcements.
