You get a sense of how long Big Ed’s Restaurant has been in business as soon as you walk in: at the cash register near the front door, there’s a rotary phone and a Paymaster check writer.
The first Big Ed’s opened in Wake County in 1958, though that location no longer exists. There are now three locations in the area—one downtown, one in North Raleigh, and one in Garner. I’m at the latter.
The restaurant is pretty full at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday. Most of the lunch crowd, spread among red vinyl booths and wooden four-tops, is silver-haired. There are clearly some regulars in the mix—when a woman in front of us gets seated, the server asks “sweet tea and a water?” before she’s even settled in her chair.
We get the next table by the window. Our tabletop comes equipped with maple syrup, whipped butter, half and half, ketchup, sugar, salt and pepper, and strawberry and concord grape jams.
The menu is a laminated booklet with old black-and-white photos on the front. Breakfast is served all day—giant hot cakes, French toast, omelets, egg and meat plates—as well as heartier Southern specialties like country ham with red eye gravy and fried catfish. Breakfast dishes come with sides like grits or home fries, and Southern specialties come with sides of breakfast dishes. Most meals run between $8 and $15.
A printed sheet of handwritten specials is clipped to the inside of the laminated menu. There’s one main deal at the top: chicken and pastry for $12. Below that are pricier options like grilled salmon cakes with coleslaw ($13.75) and fried chicken livers with rice and onion gravy ($13.25). All specials come with two sides, a choice of bread, and a dessert.
When the server comes by to get our drink orders (water), we ask if she can tell us about the chicken and pastry.
“What do you want to know?” she says, in a way that indicates no one has ever asked this before.
“Well, what is it?” we ask. She still looks confused.
“Is it like chicken and dumplings?” my boyfriend suggests.
“Yeah,” she says, “but the pastry is flat.”
I’m about to order it when I notice a note on the menu that says you win a free T-shirt if you can finish three hot cakes in under 45 minutes.
“Do you also get the hot cakes for free if you eat all three?” I ask our server. This could be the cheapest Lunch Money ever. She says no.
I go with the chicken and pastry. I get mac and cheese and butter beans as my sides, cornbread as my bread, and peach cobbler for dessert.
While we wait for our food, I take in the surroundings. The décor has no singular theme; in fact, you could say the theme is themes. Lines of baseball caps are glued to one wall. Wicker baskets form another line. Seashells and rolling pins are stuck up elsewhere. Coca-Cola memorabilia crowds the top of a cabinet. A significant portion of the dining room is dedicated to NASCAR. Then there’s a Bahamas corner with a flag, flip-flops, and a license plate. When I look for the bathroom, I discover a whole other room filled with taxidermy.
On my way back to the table, I spot a deck of cards resting on a framed photo of vintage NASCAR vehicles. My boyfriend and I play gin rummy until the first course arrives, which turns out to be both the starter and the dessert—cornbread and cobbler—delivered simultaneously.
Ten minutes later, our server returns with our entrées, the receipt, and a bottle of Texas Pete.
The chicken and pastry is essentially chicken pot pie filling—chunks of chicken in thick gravy—but instead of a crust or vegetables, there are large squares of flat, chewy pastry mixed in. It’s tasty, if plainer than I expected.
The cornbread, served in two neat squares, is more savory than sweet, so I add grape jam. The mac and cheese has a beautifully caramelized top but could use more flavor underneath; I stir in Texas Pete and some of the gravy from my chicken and pastry to liven it up. The butter beans take well to the same doctoring.
The cobbler is delicious and heavy on the nutmeg, but it’s more like a slice of cake with peaches than any cobbler I’ve known.
Is chicken and pastry supposed to be this stripped-down? Is peach cobbler supposed to be so solid? I look both up on my phone. Turns out these are perfectly authentic old-school Southern renditions. I’m used to restaurants riffing on the classics. But this is just the thing itself.
My total comes to $12.59 with tax. I pay in cash to avoid the credit card surcharge (they have a sign posted, which is nice). With a $2.40 tip, my grand total is $14.99.
I’d planned to ask our server about who Big Ed was, but forgot amid our menu questions. On the way out, though, I get my answer via framed newspaper clippings. A 1997 News & Observer article characterizes Ed as “a good man, an imposing man, a Big Man” who “packs a .38 in the pocket of his overalls.” The same article notes that the restaurant’s recipes are based on Ed’s mom’s cooking.
Another clipping features a Charlotte Observer article about grits. The photo used is from Big Ed’s, with a caption that reads: “Grits stand up to all kinds of flavoring. The ones served at Big Ed’s take just a little pat of butter.”
That about sums it up, give or take a bit of hot sauce. At Big Ed’s, tradition doesn’t come with embellishment.
Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on Bluesky or email [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].