Irregardless owner Lee Robinson knows restaurants. And he knows Raleigh.
Before buying the iconic Morgan Street eatery known for its vegetarian and vegan dishes in January 2020—mere months before the COVID-19 lockdown—Robinson was a fixture of the local hospitality scene. He waited tables and cooked his way through college at NC State University and later ran such staples as the now-shuttered Frazier’s on Hillsborough Street, the Pit in the Warehouse District, and the Player’s Retreat, long loved by locals and State students alike.
After spending some time during the pandemic rethinking everything from Irregardless’s layout to its reputation—an amalgamation of fine dining meets farm-to-table meets neighborhood haunt—Robinson is gearing up to celebrate the restaurant’s 50th anniversary. A party next week will play host to such luminaries as Irregardless founder and longtime owner Arthur Gordon and his wife Anya, who opened the restaurant in 1975; Governor Josh Stein, and a whole crew of regulars and current and former employees.
Irregardless will also offer a dinner series throughout the year, celebrating famous dishes throughout the decades it’s been open.
The INDY caught up with Robinson at the tail end of a lunch shift to discuss post-pandemic dining patterns, cannabis drinks, running an iconic restaurant in the modern era, and a city that seems to be constantly changing.
INDY: Back when you bought Irregardless, you said you didn’t want to make a lot of changes and wanted to keep it how it always has been. How have you been able to do that, and why did you want to buy an iconic Raleigh restaurant?
Lee Robinson: My original idea, especially after having worked with [Greg] Hatem for so long downtown … he’s this preservationist. I really caught that vibe working for him. I actually have a list of old places in Raleigh that had the generation ahead of me as an owner. I know how to run a restaurant, but I didn’t necessarily need it to be my own creative thing, with, like, this new concept. So I thought I would put this preservational spirit into the community.
Player’s Retreat was top of the list, but [Irregardless] was on my list as well, to help keep Raleigh Raleigh. These places are going away. So what I wanted to do was find a place and figure out if we could negotiate a long lease to prevent a building from getting torn down. It will keep its soul for a little while. I found a good partner in David Meeker for that. He and I put this deal together where he bought the building and I got the business. And we have a nice long lease, so we can do this for 20 years.
How do you think about the changes this part of town has been experiencing? With the Goodnights building next door being gone, it feels like the city looks more different every day.
Every day. Yeah, I was going to Goodnights for 30 years, since college. I saw Chris Rock there. I saw Dave Chappelle there, back when Chapelle was an upstart. And a lot of other names over the years. I was looking forward to having them as a neighbor, just for that, let alone for the business they helped bring in. But it was an old building that honestly couldn’t be saved. It wasn’t about preservation; they had to find a place to go.
With Trophy slowly coming down here, opening the Bend Bar, and we have Gussie’s here, and everything beyond the [Morgan Street] traffic circle is coming up, too—this specific stretch is slowly but surely becoming more and more on people’s way.
What kind of changes have you observed in how people dine out since the pandemic?
At least for this little place, dinner and lunch are just different beasts. We held off on getting open for lunch. I was waiting for a certain percentage of offices to get reopened, but after three years, I was like, “It’s just not going to happen.” Are offices ever going to come back? I don’t know. I’m hoping in two years I sound dumb, like “Look at all the offices.” But it’s cool, it’s kinda neat, we do lunch business, but it’s not a rush like it used to be. A lot of people who are working from home come out, and it’s almost like brunch every day. It’s a different vibe.
There are enough awesome, locally owned spots around here that everyone can have their own and all of us be full, all the time.”
That being said, there are 3,000 more homes downtown than there were 10 years ago, like 15,000 people who can walk to this place in 15 minutes. I’m not talking about students. So a big part for me is the community outreach, just the people for whom this should be their neighborhood spot. There are enough awesome, locally owned spots around here that everyone can have their own and all of us be full, all the time.
How are you thinking about Irregardless’s 50th anniversary and honoring its legacy?
We have the celebration coming; that will be a nice little cocktail party just to celebrate. But then all this year we’re going to do celebration dinners, each one being decade-specific, even year-specific. The one we’re going to do in March will be a 1975 menu pulling from Arthur [Gordon’s] old recipes: there’s chicken a la king, shrimp cocktail, things that back then were brand new. And drinks to go with.
Eight weeks later we’re going to do 1985, and then eight weeks after that 1995, then 2005. Each one with very specific food and drink trends. Everything is with a wine pairing, or cocktail pairing, or THC pairing. I think the ’80s is going to be nothing but vodka drinks; that’s what we were all drinking. I mean, I wasn’t drinking, but you get the picture. Sex on the beach. The ’90s is just going to be cosmos.
It’s been fun taking it over, this place that was once this vegetarian sandwich shop and over the years, under Arthur [Gordon], turned into an omnivore restaurant. I’ve embraced the vegan side of things but really try to remind everybody, even though we put all this effort into the vegetarian/vegan side, it’s still only 30 percent of what we sell. The neighborhood comes to hang out, the visitors come to eat vegan and gluten-free. If you Google us, that’s what comes up. But the neighborhood knows we also have a great steak, a shrimp linguine pasta that is out of this world.
raleigh’s evolving restaurant scene
How will you be looking ahead to Irregardless’s next 50 years?
I’m trying to take the place back to its roots, being a neighborhood spot and not a special-occasion spot. Over the years I think it became more and more of a fine-dining spot, but I want it to become a bit more of a third-place sort of space. We’re embracing small plates … so it’s more of a shareable experience, come in and for a few different price points you can still get a great meal. But that also means changing seasonally—we still run to the farmers’ market all the time.
Then, of course, returning to its home of being a bit more of a funky spot. Embracing cannabis beverages—which, if you know anything about this place, the first 20 years they were open, they were all high. And now that the Farm Bill has created this new thing, it’s fun. We really love making our craft cocktails, making the bitters and syrups, but now to do that with cannabis-infused beverages, it’s a whole different thing.
We started doing it six, eight months ago, not knowing what would happen. One of my managers actually said to me, “Lee, we’re not a corner market, this isn’t that kind of a place.” But we should embrace it. Lo and behold, at brunch, every demographic gets that kind of beverage. Because, you know, no one is drinking like they used to. I know I’m not, and I know the generation that’s in their 20s and 30s now, they drink half of what we were drinking at that age.
But put a cannabis menu in front of them, it’s a micro dose and it’s one drink, they say, “Yes, thank you.” It doesn’t kill your day, you don’t get the Sunday scaries afterward. It’s been great, people actually come for it in the way they come for gluten-free dining and everything else. We’re becoming known for it. I think it’s fun.
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