Dining and shopping at NC State Farmers Market and Restaurant

Not long after settling into my home in Raleigh, I began hearing good things about the North Carolina State Fair Farmers Market and State Farmers Market Restaurant. More intriguing was the fact that the grounds were just off Lake Wheeler Road, a relatively easy drive from my home here.

In most communities, farmers markets are open one, maybe two times a week, and for very limited hours -- usually three or four hours at the most. The Raleigh community has a few of those kinds of farmers markets, two of which we have visited already.

But the State Farmers Market and the restaurant are open seven days a week -- the market during regular business hours (actually, it closes at 6 p.m.), and the eatery from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day except Sunday, when it opens two hours later.

On Saturday, Lee Ann and I had an itch for a meal out, and we decided to check out the State Farmers Market Restaurant. It was chilly, and decided to wait until after the meal to see if we wanted to do further exploring at the market.

As it turned out, after our meal, we did visit a Market Imports shop just across from the restaurant. That was more about browsing then shopping. But I grabbed some photos of products we saw in that place, and those appear under the food pictures below.

The sign you see on the right greets visitors as they walk in the door, and Lee Ann would eventually choose to try the Sampler menu item described on the left. On this weekend day, the eatery was very crowded, and a line formed. We waited about 10 minutes before getting seated, but later the line eventually went outside the building by a good 15 or so people. I had read somewhere that this place was popular, but had no idea about this! Below is a photo of just one half of the open dining area, the section where we would eventually be seated.

Our server Daniel (pictured) did a great job answering all of the questions we had for first-timers. He said the Sampler was among the most popular orders, as was the friend chicken. The latter appeared on a mimeographed sheet tucked inside the menu and listed under "specials," but Daniel said it was
available all the time. Like Lee Ann, I'd had my eye on the Sampler, but Lee Ann encouraged me to get something different so we could try each other's meals.

Being a fan of fried chicken -- and still in pursuit of the best in these parts (when I asked Daniel about the restaurant's fried chicken, he said "it's legendary") -- I opted for the chicken and Belgium waffle. We were both thrilled with our selections. A basket of biscuits and hush puppies came with the order. I'm not a hush puppies fan, but I do enjoy a good biscuit. The ones at this restaurant could be the best I'd ever had -- they were tender through and through. Below are photos of the basket, biscuit, my cup of coffee, the chicken and waffle, and Lee Ann's Sample plate, which came with three small pancakes.

Above is a look at the restaurant from one side of it; below is the imports market facade. And below that, are photo samples of the sundry products inside. Most don't require much explanation ... although a couple I include because I simply enjoyed the juxtaposition. The very last photo below I photographed because it reminded Lee Ann and me of the "Bird Girl" statue, which I wrote about (and included pictures of) in one of my recent posts about our trip to Savannah.

The quick of the "Bird Girl" story: The publisher of John Berendt's book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" hired a Savannah photographer to photograph something the publisher could use as an illustration for the cover of Berendt's book, and the photographer found the statue in Bonaventure Cemetery, where it stood in a family plot of the original owners. Once the book became a best-seller, the statue -- one of only four cast by the sculptor, Sylvia Shaw Judson -- became a popular destination visit by townfolk and tourists. Fearing the visitor stampede might lead to the popular statue being damaged, the surviving members of the family that acquired the statue loaned "Bird Girl" first to the local Telfair Academy Museum before it moved permanently to the Jepson Center for the Arts.

As always, to view a larger, sharper version of an image, simply click on the photo. To see a full gallery of my shoot from this visit at my site at SmugMug.com, follow the link in this sentence.

Photo geek stuff: All of the exterior shots were taken with my Canon 6D and Tamrom 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens and bracketed for three exposures to allow me to meld the three frames into one using Photomatix high-dynamic range (HDR) software in post-processing, which I did for all the exterior shots here. The interior shots (including the food) were taken with my iPhone X.