Irregardless Café opened in March 1975 at 901 Morgan Street.
Archival photos courtesy of Irregardless
In 1975 three friends transformed an abandoned storefront near Raleigh’s Central Prison into the city’s first vegetarian café. The menu — featuring whatever healthy, fresh, and hopefully organic foods they could get — was handwritten on blackboard. The vibe at Irregardless Café — as you can maybe guess from the name, which flouts grammar in favor of fun — was casual and contrarian, with a small market attached to the café and crew of friends committed to doing things differently: vegetarian food, with live music nightly and no smoking.
The crew at Irregardless Café was committed to doing things differently: vegetarian food, with live music nightly and no smoking.
No tobacco and no pig in North Carolina? Even now, that’s a somewhat radical proposition.
“I was full of spit and vinegar at that point,” says Arthur Gordon, one of the founders, who served as head chef and proprietor for 45 years. “I thought I’d open a restaurant for a year or two and then go get trained as a chef to open a real one.”
“A year or two turned into 50, and I never made it to cooking school. But I learned a whole lot more about running a restaurant than just serving good food. It’s an ingredient — you have to serve good food, but you have to have a strategy, too. Ours was simple, pretty much what Grandma would say: Eat your vegetables and come see me,” Arthur says.
Some of the recipes were inspired by grandma, too — specifically Arthur’s grandmother Lena, a Ukrainian immigrant who came down from Brooklyn to cook for his family when he was growing up in Durham. “She would fill the freezer full of food and I’d watch her cook,” Arthur says.
Lena’s influence was formative on everything from the restaurant’s name — a double negative she often used — to the cheese blintzes that graced the brunch menu. Even today, Arthur says sometimes when he cooks, he feels as if his grandma takes over, using his hands to reveal a recipe from the ingredients in front of him. “I really do feel like I have this personal relationship with the divine feminine who’s watching out for me and blessing me in so many ways,” Arthur says.
Organic Growth
Over the years, the Irregardless Café transitioned from a crunchy natural foods café to a stalwart of fine dining in fitting way: organically. Whether intentionally or not, Arthur and his staff early on identified the restaurant’s DNA — serving healthy food to a diverse community in a slightly funky setting — and stuck to it, allowing the restaurant to evolve while staying true. Before farm-to-table was a recognized concept, much less in fashion, it was de rigueur at Irregardless — procuring fresh food from local purveyors was just how Arthur did business.
Irregardless has prioritized fresh, local food from day one.
As the counterculture of the 1970s gave way to the consumerism of the 1980s, the restaurant reflected larger culture through its own unique lens — and without abandoning its community. More crème sauces edged in, but the focus on fresh, healthy foods from a range of international influences continued.
A fire in 1994 caused closure of the restaurant for nearly a year, but it reopened with a huge, state-of-the-art kitchen that allowed more expansion. As a teen, it’s during this era that I made my first visit and tasted their lemon tahini salad dressing — a flavor that evoked a kind of cosmopolitanism I couldn’t get enough of.
What started with a hand-written menu board offering a couple of vegetarian entrees grew over the course of half a century to an eight-page menu, featuring something for everyone: vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, and, yes, even steak and burgers. Irregardless changed like a healthy person does, adding depth each year, creating layers of experience.
“When I finally retired, I felt that I had been pulling a sled for 45 years,” Arthur says. “You know, you just throw another thing on and keep going. … The food was as good as the culture, and we built it piece by piece.”
Arthur is the first to point out that you couldn’t open a restaurant like Irregardless today; building it from scratch would be too expensive. Indeed, the dining room is massive by today’s standards, and it’s estimated that over 50 years, they’ve spent $3.5 million on the live music alone.
Inheriting a Legacy
It might be stating the obvious, but the restaurant business is tough. No doubt, some of Irregardless’ success is due to Arthur’s skills as a visionary — his insight, ambition, and ability to connect with customers and the larger community.
Decades of weekly newspaper ads feature a photo of Arthur with a short missive detailing what he was up to as the chef, a cheery and intimate form of direct marketing long before social media. Indeed, he was — and remains — a regional celebrity chef, who, with partner Anya, is well known for civic and community engagement beyond the restaurant. Along with his longstanding relationship with the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle, the two are currently working to add affordable housing to the Well-Fed Community Garden they established in 2013. Plus, Arthur teaches cooking classes once a week to Athens Drive High School students.
Lee Robinson is the current co-owner of Irregardless.
“I would say the restaurant had a heart,” Arthur says when asked what made its long tenure possible. “Not only did we care about our customers, but we cared about the people who worked with us, and that genuine heartfelt support is what made my employees want us to succeed so much.”
That heart, and the community that has supported it for 50 years, is what attracted new owners: David Meeker, of Trophy Brewing, and Lee Robinson, a staple of Raleigh’s restaurant scene for 30 years. David owns the building, Lee the business — and as the former manager of both Players Retreat and The Pit, Lee knows firsthand the value of preserving the city’s historic restaurants amid rapid transformation and growth.
“What I really want to do is keep these old places going — I have a list of five or six places, and Irregardless was on it. I knew the owners that were a generation ahead of us were going to have to step away at some point, and you just don’t want to see the restaurant go,” Lee says. It took the three men two years of talks to iron out the sale, and Lee worked in the restaurant with Arthur to transition it before taking over on New Year’s Day 2020.
Photo by Jonathan Fredin
“I knew that I wasn’t going to change a thing for three years,” Lee says. “I wasn’t going to be the guy who came in and messed up your favorite restaurant.”
But much like Arthur’s, Lee’s plans changed: 60 days into his ownership, the pandemic shut down the dining room. He had to quickly change everything.
The regulars he was counting on couldn’t come. Live music — live anything — wasn’t an option. Thankfully, the catering end of the business could easily transition to take-out. Lee did what Arthur had done for years, but in a concentrated amount of time, adapting to the change while keeping the restaurant’s core — its heart — intact.
“Everything has changed in the restaurant business — everything,” Lee says. “The supply chain is completely different than it used to be. Things we thought were healthy 10 years ago are unhealthy now. None of us saw this coming.”
Still, Lee’s excited to take Irregardless — the Café part of the name has been cut since the restaurant hasn’t technically been a café for decades — through its next 50 years. “It’s a wonderful legacy to take a hold of — Arthur wasn’t just a restaurateur. He was extremely generous, a community guy, and I enjoy carrying that on, too.”
To steward the restaurant forward, Lee’s highlighting its role as a neighborhood spot where people of all kinds can gather. This has always been one of Irregardless’ greatest offerings — it’s an inclusive space, easily intergenerational, accommodating many different diets, and welcoming to sandaled sprout fans and suits alike.
Photo by Jonathan Fredin
He’s added more plants, making the décor more casual, and slimmed the formerly eight-page menu down to a single sheet (double sided). He’s kept some iconic dishes, added new ones, and expanded the drink menu to include a few Delta-8 offerings. Regulars still feel at home, and new audiences are finding their way in. And while it’s certain that the fantastic lemon tahini isn’t as rare as it was when I first had it, hopefully new patrons will find some similar bit of magic on the menu.
“I’m really just happy to keep it going,” Lee says. “I don’t want to be a place you come only for your anniversary. Come for your anniversary, but also I want to see you every Tuesday.”
March 1975: Irregardless Café opens at 901 Morgan Street, a street that will forever be linked to a signature chicken dish for all who have had the pleasure of eating it.
1977: Irregardless Café becomes the first restaurant in Raleigh to offer brunch.
1979: Gordon starts a second café, Irregardless of the Mall Sandwich Shop, at 206 S. Wilmington Street that serves breakfast and lunch Monday through Friday.
1980: An ad in the News and Observer attests that the “healthful foods café” offers four different entrees each evening and three complete dinners nightly — one vegetarian, one with poultry, and one with seafood.
1981: Rather than be open seven days a week, the restaurant announces it will no longer have Monday service. (Monday lunch service resumed the following year.)
1982: Gordon releases his first cookbook, The Irregardless Cooks, which includes recipes for favorites such as his lemon tahini salad dressing and carrot cake.
1984: News & Observer food writer Marilyn Spencer calls the menu board at Irregardless “an institution.” By this point there are, in fact, two menu boards “so diners don’t crowd around one spot.”
1986: An advertisement for the restaurant highlights “Hot Smokeless Jazz” late night on Saturdays. As anyone born before the 1990s knows, going to see live music in NC used to mean coming home smelling like an ashtray. Arthur was well before his time in banning smoking, which didn’t happen until 2010 in most NC music venues.
1988: Arthur begins management of the Museum Café at the North Carolina Museum of Art, an arrangement that lasts for 12 years.
1994: A fire in May destroys the kitchen and shuts down the restaurant for almost a year; when the café reopens in April 1995, it features a new, state-of-the-art kitchen.
2013: Arthur and Anya Gordon open the Well-Fed Community Garden, which supplies the restaurant with fresh produce and donates part of its harvest to the local community.
2020: At midnight on the first day of the new year, Arthur Gordon sells the building and the business to David Meeker and Lee Robinson. The restaurant opens on New Year’s Day for its annual pajama brunch under Lee’s ownership.
2025: To celebrate a half century in business, Irregardless hosts a dinner series that throws back to past decades, reimagining classics from the menu.
- Garden Adventurer: Catmint: A Purr-fect Perennial
- Celebrated Spirits: Once Upon a Lime
- Celebrated Spirits: Spicy Pineapple Margarita
- Small Business Spotlight: Asia’s Cakes
- Erica Chats: Rethinking Food
- Pay It Forward: Raleigh City Farm
- Find Something New-to-You at The Meat House
- Summer Classics with The Butcher’s Market
- When Wanderlust Strikes Try Peregrine
- Irregardless of Time
- Out & About in Wake County: July/August 2025
