Friendships forged in restaurants have their own kind of chemistry.
When former employees get together, at, say, a party celebrating the transfer of a large work of art from one beloved Raleigh institution to another, that chemistry is evident: Stories and hugs are exchanged, drinks and barbs are made, and old dramas and current troubles are transformed into shared jokes.
“Old Raleigh, it’s like Granny’s blanket,” quipped one guest last Friday night surveying the crowd of around 40 gathered at McConnell Studios.
While artist Matt McConnell was co-hosting the event, his art—wonderful towering sculptures of light and twisting forms—was not the focus. Instead, the spotlight was literally on one work: Traci Lorraine Farmer’s “Casa,” a large oil painting that served, for two decades, as the bar centerpiece at longtime Raleigh restaurant Humble Pie, which closed late last year.
The painting isn’t technically a mural—murals are applied directly to a wall, “Casa” is a framed painting—but its sprawling 18 x 7.5’ size makes it feel much like one. Its familiarity to many makes it more akin to a piece of public art. Mural or not, it certainly is a piece of Raleigh restaurant history.
Just to be clear: there’s no objectivity here. Like everyone else who knows Traci Lorraine Farmer and her husband Joe, who co-owned Humble Pie for 20 years of its 33-year run, I’m a friend of the couple—they’ve been in my life for almost three decades in a friendship that’s spanned both coasts.
For locals, and folks like me who moved away but frequently visited, Humble Pie long served as a home away from home. “Casa” set the tone visually, not just for the bar but for the whole restaurant—its warm tones and pueblo-style homes suggests a place where people live in close proximity, sharing walls, a winding street, a church, a garden.
And of course, plates of good food.
“They wanted to do communal eating—tapas and small plates—and it was a new thing to our area,” Traci Lorraine Farmer says of her inspiration for the work, which was created in 2003, the same year Joe and business partner Jim Beriau bought out the original owner of the restaurant. “I thought about a shared plate and home—I wanted it bright and festive.”
“They needed to build a big wall and to put something on it,” Farmer continues. “We had recently moved back from LA, I was pregnant and had just started my hair salon—there was a lot going on. They had these old café chairs from the Electric Company Mall at Humble Pie that were wobbly and falling apart. I said, spend that money on the chairs, I can do this.”
Farmer studied art at the Atlantic College of Art (now SCAD). Alongside ownership of Humble Pie and a full-time job as a salon owner at Crazy Combs, she’s maintained her practice for decades, mostly by painting late at night.
“I had no idea at the time that the restaurant would be a home in our community for so many people—the servers that came through, the chefs that came through that went on to open their own restaurants,” says Farmer.
When Humble Pie closed last year, the search for a new home for “Casa” began. Maybe morphic resonance is real because two individuals reached out with offers for the work almost at the same time—one was chef Carolina Morrison, a longtime patron of Humble Pie’s and owner of a Fiction Kitchen. The second offer was from an anonymous benefactor who had an idea of where they wanted the painting to go: Fiction Kitchen.
The incredible coincidence panned out: When Fiction Kitchen moves to its new space in Gateway Plaza, next January, “Casa” will be part of the décor.
“I’m so glad it’s moving on to people who loved Humble Pie, who loved us, and are doing the same thing, creating their own community here,” says Farmer. “I love how we all support one another—the business owners, the artists—we all hit a place where the city was growing and real estate values increasing and the mom-and-pops we were getting pushed out. And the pandemic didn’t help…some survived and some did not. We want to help the survivors live on and thrive.”
“They are moving with us,” adds Morrison, who founded Fiction Kitchen, the popular vegetarian and vegan restaurant with her wife Siobhan Southern more than a decade ago.
After 10 years on Dawson Street as neighbors to Humble Pie, Fiction Kitchen is in a temporary space until its move to Gatewood Plaza.
“Casa” evokes a sense of community and togetherness…there’s a garden depicted in it too,” says Morrison.. ”I thought that was beautiful and not just because we’re plant-based. One of our taglines is ‘Local Food Revolution’—we’ve always tried to buy from local producers as well as to highlight the work of local artists, from pottery to paintings to different producers in food. There’s a producer in Pittsboro who makes our tempeh now—I want to hold these people up, lifting them up as our guests have enabled us to do what we love. That’s what the homes beside each other in the painting represent to me—everyone lifting each other up.”
Restaurants come and restaurants go—the hospitality business is hard; change is certain. The story of “Casa” changing hands, though, reminds us that when something is lost, a piece of it can be preserved and treasured—and that restaurant legacies and sharing food continue to matter, especially amid uncertainty. Friends look out for each other, and good neighbors share resources and expertise and even fix walls by creating beautiful artwork together.
The Friday night revelry was a reminder, for at least this attendee, that art and community are balms for anxiety.
“My employees are coming to work every day saying, ‘How are we going to get through these next four years?’” Morrison says. “We’re going to get through these four years together—with this community, we can get through it.”
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