One of 2021’s biggest new restaurants opens this week in Clayton. Here are the details
Downtown Clayton’s newest restaurant is what happens when a big city chef takes on the blue plate special.
Crawford Cookshop, the latest concept from Raleigh chef Scott Crawford, will open this Friday on Main Street in Clayton, the quickly growing Johnston County town.
Located at 401 Main St. in Clayton and born from the pandemic, the Cookshop is Crawford’s first venture into a casual restaurant, with daily specials like once-a-week fried chicken and Friday smoked prime rib, sandwiches, snacks and a large centerpiece bar.
Crawford’s two other restaurants, Crawford & Son and the French bistro Jolie are two of Raleigh’s most acclaimed places to eat, each helping establish the Person Street corridor as one of the city’s best districts for a night out.
So it came as something of a shock when Crawford tapped Clayton for his latest venture, looking to the up-and- coming downtown in western Johnston County for a slice of urban chic.
“The community has been welcoming and kind and made us feel like they truly want us here,” Crawford said. “They’ve been bending over backwards to help us get open. ... We’ve felt the small town hospitality.”
‘Americana food that everyone loves’
Through the pandemic, the impact of COVID on the restaurant industry has been profound, shutting down dining rooms, changing the nature of dining out and shifting tastes toward dishes of comfort. Crawford said his Cookshop aims to build on that craving for comfort, with a menu offering familiar dishes with upscale twists, led by chef de cuisine Bryan Slattery.
“It’s Americana food that everyone loves, but the Crawford treatment from us,” Crawford said in March when the Crawford Cookshop was announced. “I think people will be stoked.”
The opening menu includes snacks like boiled peanut hummus and pimento cheese, small plates of grilled oysters, pork ribs with black garlic and beef tartare with potato chips. Look for Crawford Cookshop to do three different kinds of wings, with a smoked version tossed in Alabama white sauce, a familiar fried wing with fermented hot sauce and grilled duck wings topped with hot honey and peanuts.
The larger dishes include two kinds of cheeseburgers, a classic and a gussied up version with sharp cheddar and bacon-onion marmalade. The entrees read like blue plate specials, but it’s quickly clear this isn’t typical diner food. The pot pie is duck instead of chicken, with root veggies and a smoked cheddar biscuit. The meatloaf is made with venison, served with smoked potatoes and caramelized onions and grilled carrots cooked with wood fire.
Cheerwine cocktail
On the drink side, the draft beer list is all from North Carolina, including taps from Clayton’s Deep River Brewing, located just a few blocks from Crawford Cookshop. The wines by the glass top out at $10, a slight reprieve from city prices. And the drink list includes a Cheerwine cocktail.
Crawford said supply chain issues led to delays in equipment and materials, some taking as much as four times as long to arrive as expected. Still, Crawford Cookshop opens eight months after it was announced, opening faster than Jolie, which took more than a year to build, including a shutdown over possible noise concerns regarding the bistro’s rooftop patio.
Crawford said it’s been smoother sailing in Clayton. The building the Cookshop moves into is around 100 years old. Its past lives including a hardware store and an earlier restaurant.
To build the 3,000-square-foot Cookshop, Crawford hired a frequent collaborator, Raleigh architect Louis Cherry. A garage door-sized hole was made in the Cookshop wall, leading out to a 1,000 square foot patio. Crawford typically dials back his restaurant spaces to their bare bones, building the project from scratch just like any other dish.
“We believe in investing in our community; we’re caretakers of the building,” Crawford said. “We’re bring this building back. We’re not just making money, we certainly could have invested less, but we believe in doing it well and finishing with something we’re proud of.”
