Death and Taxes

The Restaurant

Death and Taxes opened in 2015 in a beautifully restored early-twentieth-century building at 105 West Hargett Street in downtown Raleigh, a structure that has served, in turn, as a funeral parlor and as a bank, and whose name supplies the restaurant's wry editorial framing. Chef-owner Ashley Christensen runs the kitchen as the more formal sibling to her flagship Poole's Diner three blocks away. The dining room seats about ninety across a main space anchored by the wood-burning oven and grill, with banquettes along the walls, polished hardwood tables, an open kitchen pass at the back, and a small private dining room tucked into the original bank vault. The acoustics, the spacing of the tables, and the unhurried service grammar are all deliberately calibrated for the kind of evening where the conversation matters as much as the cooking.

The menu rotates with the season and is built almost entirely around the wood fire. Christensen's deliberate technical project has been to demonstrate the discipline and range of live-fire cooking applied to the modern Southern vocabulary. The opening lineup runs through grilled North Carolina oysters with chili butter, the steak tartare prepared at the wood-fire bench, fried Carolina shrimp with house pickles, and a seasonal vegetable from the embered grill that has anchored every iteration of the menu since opening. Recent versions: grilled asparagus with plum and Fresno, English peas with embered green beans. The headline courses circle around a Carolina fish with Meyer lemon hollandaise, a grilled half-chicken with seasonal market sides, the kitchen's tagliatelle with crab and bottarga in season, and a wood-grilled rib-eye for two finished with herb butter. The kitchen's house-baked sourdough, brought to the table warm with cultured butter, is the room's quiet signature.

The wine list runs to approximately three hundred references with serious depth in Champagne, Burgundy, the Loire, California Pinot Noir, and a careful selection of small Southern winemakers from Virginia and the Yadkin Valley. The cocktail program at the marble bar at the front of the dining room is the city's most considered, built around classical pre-Prohibition technique with a contemporary low-ABV section that has earned the bar national recognition. Christensen herself is at the kitchen most services and remains the senior James Beard figure in North Carolina cooking, Best Chef Southeast in 2014 and Outstanding Chef in 2019. For a Raleigh dinner that needs to register as locally consequential and quietly national, Death and Taxes is the answer the city's longtime regulars choose first.