The Peddler is dark, lit mostly by candles and dim sconces. Black tablecloths, wood-paneled walls, and a carpeted floor that absorbs light add to the shrouded feeling inside, so much so that I didn’t notice a massive, brass-colored cattle head on the back wall above the salad bar until I looked at photos I’d taken.
A black awning over the front door proclaims the Raleigh restaurant’s name “The Peddler STEAK HOUSE,” with the all-caps lettering seeming to trumpet the business’s primary appeal. Yet the interior tells a different story. Step into the compact dining room and you face the salad bar, erected where the stage would go were this a music venue. The namesake “peddler”—often a 20-something kid and sometimes sporting a backwards black hat—only visits your table to show off the evening’s selection if you request it, further obscuring that this is indeed a steakhouse.
To be clear, the charcoal grill-cooked steak here is among the best—if not the best, according to many fans—in the region. It’s just that for many, the salad bar is equally good. Or better.
Show up any day of the week that The Peddler operates, and you’ll find dozens of people waiting for the doors to open. The line grows longer on the weekends, with typically more than 100 people in this back corner of a shopping center on Glenwood Avenue, regularly causing a wait as long as two hours. And many of them are here just for the salad bar.
Dan Turner is one of them.
Every Tuesday, most Thursdays, and occasionally on Saturdays, the semi-retired educational consultant and Raleigh native can be found here, at his usual table. Turner comes so reliably that he’ll call to let them know if he’s running late. “Don’t worry, but a meeting ran over, and could you please hold my table?” he’ll say. And the answer is always yes.
“I call him ‘The Peddler Danbassador,’” owner Emily Barefoot jokes because he befriends everyone waiting in line and is such a proponent of the restaurant. But most people in Turner’s life don’t know he’s here.
“I don’t tell people about it, no way. I don’t want any competition,” he says, having apparently calculated that he can hold his own against the current crowd. “I’ll take people there from out of town, but I know they won’t be back any time soon.”
Defiantly Unchanged
Turner occasionally orders a steak, but “I don’t eat a lot of red meat,” he admits. Instead, he generally orders the salmon, the restaurant’s second-best seller. Other times, especially on a hot day, he’ll opt for only the salad, possibly accompanied by a baked potato or onion rings.
Of course, the choose-your-own-adventure of ingredients is always fresh, constantly replenished throughout dinner service. It’s one employee’s full-time job to prep the salad bar daily, from the two most popular ingredients (cucumbers and tomatoes) to the chopped hard-boiled eggs and top-ranked dressing—the perfectly gloopy house ranch.
It’s a genuine cornucopia with a dizzying array of options as you work your way around the two-sided buffet, an arrow pointing you from the chilled plates on the left hand side around the back, moving clockwise from base ingredients towards toppings. Some are predictable, like broccoli crowns or shredded carrots. Others, like smoked oysters and crunchy fried onions, feel fabulously gluttonous.
It’s nearly impossible not to over-serve yourself on a first visit, with bits of cheese and a stray tomato falling off your plate. Consider a lap around the buffet first to strategize whether you want to walk away with deep purple beets, glistening cottage cheese, or what you may want to save for a second plate.
Yet the allure runs deeper.
Since opening in 1969 in the same location, the world has continued to evolve around The Peddler; there’s an anime shop facing the steakhouse. Yet The Peddler has remained stubbornly, defiantly, heartwarmingly unchanged, a stasis symbolized by the salad bar.
Chris Powers—who owns Trophy Brewing, State of Beer, and Young Hearts Distilling in Raleigh—describes the salad bar as if recalling a hallucinogenic dream, like there’s nirvana to be attained somewhere between the cubed turkey and ham and the Italian dressing he always adds to his salad.
“It’s like the salad bar of your dreams,” Powers says. “Everything is always fresh. It’s like the salad bar you remember from going to restaurants as a kid. You almost need to bring two plates up.”
‘Where Tony Soprano Eats’
As much as he loves it, Powers has never ordered the standalone $17 salad bar. Considering the restaurant makes his favorite steak in the city and comes with complimentary salad bar access, that’s understandable. But Barefoot says many people do, and when she answers my cold call to the steakhouse, she isn’t surprised I want to talk about the salad bar. She’s aware of its cult following.
At 42, Barefoot has spent much of her life here. Her father Gale Barefoot helped open the restaurant the year Nixon was sworn in as president, and within a few years, he bought it.
Back then, The Peddler operated as a small franchise in six states, but that corporate structure fell apart long ago, says Barefoot’s husband and co-owner Ernie Hain. Barefoot’s family sold two locations in South Carolina (though the three still share a website), and all remaining Peddlers are independently owned and operated.
“I tried so hard to find something else to do, and I just kept coming back here,” Barefoot says.
As a kid, she’d nap on bar benches with a tablecloth as a blanket. At 12, her early-onset teenage rebellion kicked in and she went vegetarian. Later Barefoot worked in commercial photography and moved to the coast with Hain—who she met in middle school and started dating right after high school—but they moved back to help her dad with the restaurant after her mother died in 2013.
Even since then, the city has changed. But Barefoot is adamant that The Peddler won’t.
“The wood paneling is never coming down, ever,” she says, likely speaking indirectly to restaurant fans who threatened revolt when the idea of minor improvements was floated during quieter COVID days. “It’s not because I think it’s beautiful, it’s because it’s so who we are. There’s not a lot of stuck-in-time locations in Raleigh.”
Liz Grandchamp, the owner of Grandchamp Hospitality who was on the opening team for iconic restaurants like Crawford & Sons, agrees. The first time she walked in, the dark dining room “brought back every memory of going out to eat with my family during Christmas break in Rhode Island.”
“No one has carpeted floors anymore, the wine glasses are from the ’80s and the dim lights make you feel like you’re in a classic, private New York joint,” Grandchamp says. “And I think there is a familiarity there that a lot of people can relate to. Whether growing up in Raleigh or elsewhere, it allows you to be transported to another time.”
Turner, the gregarious regular, compares it to “a movie set.” Barefoot is particularly fond of one online review that proclaims, “This is where Tony Soprano eats.”
Stepping Back in Time
Nostalgia isn’t bound up in the décor alone. With steakhouses aplenty in the city, including Angus Barn a few miles up the street, the salad bar is a key component of The Peddler’s sentimental appeal.
“Where do you even see a salad bar that’s not a fast-casual pizza chain?” Grandchamp asks emphatically. “The fact that The Peddler continues the steakhouse tradition of a salad bar with chilled plates?! It’s fantastic.”
The salad bar craze swept America in the late ’60s, primarily thanks to luxe chains such as Steak and Ale. The trendsetters were followed by “almost all mid-range steakhouses,” as Food Service News put it, “to keep customers happy and busy while waiting for their entrées.” Among them, The Peddler. The difference is that 55 years on, it’s still here.
There have been some small evolutions over time, Barefoot concedes. Mixed greens were added about 15 years ago, and though iceberg lettuce remained, a few older patrons protested the inclusion of “rabbit food.” Also, the bar is now in a refrigerated unit instead of ingredients filling big bowls on top of ice.
But mostly, standing before the salad bar does feel like stepping back in time. When much of the country has long since adopted kale as a so-called superfood, Powers points out, The Peddler still uses the green as a garnish ringing the bar like a protective flank from the seepage of time. Filling up a salad plate here is like drinking from the fountain of youth.
You’ll find cottage cheese and baby corn, among other hallmarks of the past. The ’90s diet craze didn’t kill the steakhouse, and the pandemic didn’t kill the salad bar, though Barefoot says she still fields panicked calls about its survival. Artichoke hearts didn’t come back given their declining popularity here, but the rest were restored when self-service returned.
Turner would prefer that, like him, I didn’t tell anyone about what he calls “my kitchen.” But his affection for the steakhouse has the upper hand, and Turner waxes about how Barefoot and her husband deserve every accolade for their hard work, ability to retain staff, deft culinary precision, and unflagging hospitality.
“The key to the whole thing is the family’s always there,” Turner says, adding quickly, “and the other thing is they don’t change.”
Eric Ginsburg is a Raleigh-based food writer. He previously worked as an editor at several alternative weekly newspapers and has written for Bon Appétit, Serious Eats, Wine Enthusiast, VICE, Southern Living, and many other publications.
