Matt & Sheila Neal
Neal’s Deli
100 East Main Street
Carrboro, NC 27510
919-967-2185
www.nealsdeli.com

 

[The Carrboro Farmers' Market] has cultivated a whole community and culture of folks who care about what they eat, care about the people who grow it, care about their environment, and care about their bodies and what they’re eating, and then the byproduct of that is what we’ve done as a restaurant, and other restaurants in our area. – Sheila Neal


I think of Sheila as a gateway manager [of the Carrboro Farmers’ Market]. She was willing to take on the job and deal with the changes that needed to be made in order for the Market to be able to get ready to make a lot of big new steps.
– Matt Neal

Since 2008, Matt and Sheila Neal have operated Neal’s Deli in downtown Carrboro, just a stone’s throw from the Carrboro Farmers’ Market. They serve breakfast and lunch six days a week and are known for their house-made pastrami, which is even available on a breakfast biscuit. In the three and a half years since it opened, Neal’s has become a favorite daytime dining option for students, professionals, families, and other members of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro community, who flock there for the biscuits, sandwiches, hot dogs, and farmers’ market sides. Though Neal’s offers coleslaw and potato salad year-round, other side-dish options change frequently based on what’s available at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market. This could include anything from marinated okra and tomatoes in the summer to butternut squash in the chillier months. And their connection to the Market runs deep: Sheila was the Market’s first full-time manager from 2004 to 2007, and Matt’s father, the late chef Bill Neal, was a celebrated proponent of local and seasonal Southern flavors and often stocked the pantry at Crook’s corner with Market-sourced ingredients.

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Matt and Sheila Neal, Neal’s Deli, Carrboro, NC
Date: September 15, 2011
Location: Neal home, Carrboro, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Sara Camp Arnold

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Sara Camp Arnold:  Okay; so this is Sara Camp Arnold for the Southern Foodways Alliance on September 15, 2011. And if you two could introduce yourselves and tell me who you are?

Sheila Neal:  I’m Sheila Neal, and I was born in High Point, North Carolina, on January 24, 1971.

Matt Neal:  Hey, I’m Matt Neal, and I was born in Durham, North Carolina, in July 1971.

Okay, and what is your business?

MN:  We own Neal’s Deli in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Okay. And then Sheila you were also—?

SN:  The manager of the Carrboro Farmers’ Market for several years.

Can you tell me the dates of that?

SN:  Yeah, from April 2004 until December of 2007.

We’ll come back to that later. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your relationship with food growing up? Did your parents cook or anything like that?

SN:  My parents did cook. We had a good balance of my mom cooking at home and going out to eat. I would say that we went out to eat at least once a week and we didn’t do fast food. Not that we never did fast food, but when we went out to eat, we went out to like a family restaurant in High Point or Greensboro or even Winston. And I feel like my parents really taught me how to go out and eat, or dine—that’s always been important to our family.

My grandmothers are the ones who really influenced me with food. One grandmother who lived right up the street from me always had a garden, and she was more of a homey Southern cooking—chicken-fried steak with fried zucchini and squash. We always had long, cooked green beans. And she cooked out of her garden.

My other grandmother, ironically enough, lived on a farm, but lo and behold, she did not garden. People brought her vegetables and fruit and hogs—or, I should say, hams—all year long. And her style of cooking was more of what I call “Southern lady” style of cooking—chicken salad, country ham biscuits, but they weren't really biscuits. They were what she called “angel rolls.” I never remember big pieces of meat at her table. It was casseroles, lots of fruit, homemade jams, with the yeast rolls—which are the angel rolls—on the table, sugar cake from Dewey’s in Winston-Salem—it was a big thing, and creamed corn at Christmas. She had two deep freezers where she always prepped corn and froze it, and then we would have creamed corn on Christmas.

So those were my food influences growing up.

All right, thanks; and Matt, what about you?

MN:  Well, I grew up in the restaurant business, because my parents [Editor’s note: Moreton Neal and the late Bill Neal] started a French restaurant when I was about five years old, and we lived upstairs, and that was called Restaurant La Residence. And that was in Chatham County. It’s still around—although it’s not in my parents’ hands anymore—in Chapel Hill. So it’s been around forever. It was successful enough to stay alive. [Laughs]

And so, but my dad was from the Gaffney/Blacksburg/Grover area, and his family were farmers who became mill workers. And then my mother was from a family of lawyers and engineers and in Brookhaven, Mississippi—Southwest Mississippi. [Editor’s note: Gaffney, SC, Blacksburg, SC, and Grover, NC, are three small towns right around the North Carolina-South Carolina border between Spartanburg, SC, and Gastonia, NC, along what is now interstate 85.]

So between my father’s kind of country-cooking family background and then my mother’s a little bit more aristocratic, New Orleans­–influenced, you know, Southern Mississippi eating styles, down there when we visited, and the restaurant that I grew up in, there was a lot of food around—it’s just one big blur of food. I feel like my life is and has been for a long time. I’ve always been a big eater. I’m slowing down a little bit now.

But and then my dad took over Crook’s Corner in the early ’80s, and he was the chef there and wrote a book called Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking in the ’80s, and so that was a big thing. For a long time I ate at Crook’s every night when I lived with my dad when I was a teenager and he was chefing all day and all night every day. So that was the food that I consumed a lot of.

What might he fix for you? Like, would you sit up at the bar and he would fix it for you?

MN:  Yeah, I usually got burgers. They don’t do this anymore, but they used to do a big bowl of collards that had little—they call them Indian cornmeal dumplings, in collards. And so that was really good, and I would often get a bowl of that and I usually got a burger. But yeah, I would eat anything you’d put in front of me. But yeah, the collards were really good, and gosh, I don’t know. Everything was really good at that restaurant, and I ate at the bar all the time. But you know, I was a teenager, so I ate a lot of burgers.

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So at this point in your teenage years, did you see yourself going into the restaurant business?

MN:  No, I always thought it was something that I could do if I needed work. I could probably get some hours here and there, but I always thought I would do something else. And I looked into and tried out a million things, but all those things just never really captured my attention for very long.

And then Sheila, did you know that you wanted to be in the restaurant business?

SN:  Uh, well, no, not as a child, not as a teenager. By my junior year of college I had gotten a job at Lex Alexander’s Wellspring Grocery, which got purchased by Whole Foods right at the time I was coming on. So I liked food a lot, but also just really needed a job that summer. And I guess that was kind of providential. And I stayed on there when I graduated from college, because at that point I just wanted to open a coffee house, because that was like so cool in 1992, ’93. But I quickly realized that that probably was a fad—although it really ended up not being, because they’re still around today [Laughs] around here. But I wanted to open a restaurant at that point and so I stayed on at Whole Foods and I managed the café, which was called Penguins.

And I remember distinctly asking Mary Rocap, who managed the kitchen there and she had cooked for a long time, I was like, “What’s American food?” And I was really perplexed by that; I was like, “What is American food? Because there’s French food and Italian food and German food and Polish food—it goes on and on and on?” And it made her pause for a bit. So anyway, Mary Rocap, my former boss, was really stumped by that. She was like, “Well, I guess, you know, there’s like regional food in America.” So remember this is 1996—and it hadn’t—you know, [Bill Neal’s] Southern Cooking had been out, and Alice Waters was going strong at Chez Panisse, but there really wasn’t this, you know—and Alfred Portale had done Gotham Bar and Grill—I mean like there was this push for American food, but it hadn’t really been defined yet. And I think it’s very interesting how it seems like American food now is really being defined by farmers. That’s really where America has like taken hold, is by, like, what these farmers have been growing, the whole farm-to-fork, farm-to-table movement; that seems to really be defining American cooking. And maybe, you know, it always has in Europe, because they’ve always cooked with the seasons. But it seems like in the U.S. it’s way more focused on the farmers.

And I mean, Carlo Petrini, when he came here came to the Triangle in 1997, I mean he was impressed by our Farmers’ Markets. I mean, he really thought that that was something America was doing really well. I mean, they have open-air markets in Europe, but the farmers’ markets in particular—I remember him saying that he was really impressed by it, and I think that has played a big role in food. [Editor’s note: Carlo Petrini is the founder of Slow Food International.] But I digressed; you were asking me how did I get into food.

I just decided that I wanted to open a restaurant at that point, and then I started working in the front of house. And then I traveled to Europe, because I was like, “Everybody, you know, who knows about food goes to Europe,” so I traveled by myself for three months. And I ended up baking for six months, and then I got into culinary school, and then I deferred. I was like, “You know, I really should cook in a kitchen before I go to culinary school, right?” So I worked with Silvia Pahola, who is a sous chef at Lantern now. I worked for her at Acme, and that’s where I met Andrea [Reusing] and her brother Brendan. And I did that for a year and then I went to culinary school, because I really felt like I should be a chef-owner of a restaurant. I didn't just want to be a chef of somebody else’s restaurant. I really wanted to chef-own.

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Well, Sheila, tell me how you became the manager of the Carrboro Farmers’ Market. We’re fast-forwarding a little bit.

SN:  Yeah, well, I was working at Lantern Restaurant, and I went and purchased produce. I went and purchased produce on Saturday mornings at the Farmers’ Market. And that was one of my jobs. I was a prep manager in the kitchen during the day, and on the weekends I actually managed the floor when Andrea had her first child.

But so on Saturday mornings before I came in for the actual floor shift, I would run to the Market. And I got to know a lot of farmers that way: like, I would just go get everything they needed and they wanted from the Market. I loved that. And so a woman that I was friends with was a Saturday manager at the Market, and she recommended that I apply for their mid-week Market position.

And I was kind of feeling like I wanted a change in pace, and so I applied, and I got it. And at that point, the Market was in transition. They knew that they needed some very directed growth and they knew—as farmers—“they” being the board of directors—the farmers knew that they had a limited amount of time to do their business growth as a Market. So they were looking for a permanent Market manager or full-time Market manager. And that year that I came on, they hired a mid-week Market manager because they were doing a Wednesday Market, and a Thursday Market at Southern Village. And that was kind of an experiment. And they’re still doing it, but I think it’s not as much part of the Carrboro Market—kind of its own thing now.

Anyway, that’s how I got to know those farmers, by doing the shopping for the restaurant; and, you know, obviously got to know the farmers and got to know a lot about the produce, and I had a lot of customer service experience, you know, working the front of the house, and that’s how I got the job.

So the Market at that point had been going twenty-five years with no full-time manager?

SN:  Yeah. And in fact, when it started, one of the farmers used to go around and manage it. Like, they would collect the daily fees. I mean it was very basic, like basically collect the fees and make the deposit and that was pretty much what it was. But now there’s like so much communication with customers; there’s signage, and now there’s e-mail and Twitter and blah, blah, blah, you know, and Facebook, and keeping everything up.

So tell me some things that happened at the Market, maybe some structural things while you were the manager.

SN:  On a real financial end of things, I ended up learning QuickBooks of all things, and I put all their books in QuickBooks; that never happened before. Some other structural things, we had been doing recipes at the Market, and that kept going. Special events, we kind of expanded those. We did a fundraiser for the Crescent City Farmers’ Market after Katrina, and so we had all these different chefs from restaurants make gumbo, and we sold it and folks took it home and, you know, froze it. I mean, people bought tons. That was really fun. So structurally we started to make some connections with other Markets around the country, really kind of solidified ourselves as a Market that was, you know, growing and had a direction. Our farmers are the ones who sell the produce, so the customers can ask the farmers directly, you know, “How did you grow this? Are there any chemicals in your soil?” You know, things like that, really building that relationship.

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I would say our website, you know, took on more. We upgraded that while I was there and that was a really good thing. I think just having a full-time manager was a huge structural leap. I basically set the agenda for the board meetings, you know, with the input obviously of the board. And I think that gave some structure to the business aspect.

MN:  They had some getting caught up to do.

SN:  Yeah; yeah. We you know, dealt with our tax status: you know, could we be a nonprofit? And so we spent a lot of time working on that, and that was another kind of structural thing.

I know it’s been four years since you’ve been the manager. The Market gets lots of applications every year from new farmers and vendors. Can you tell me a little bit about what you were looking for when you were choosing farmers and vendors?

SN:  Diversity of product—that was the big thing. We didn't need somebody who only grew zucchini, tomatoes, and eggplant. And cucumbers; we had plenty of those. So we were looking for folks who raised meat. That was a big thing while I was there. Oh, that was another structure thing. We had the meat laws [Laughs], and we had all these rules that went into place concerning who could sell meat at the Market. You know, there is in North Carolina—you can slaughter a certain number of birds, and it was just like getting up to code, really.

So that really grew, and we were looking for more meat producers, because that really was diverse. Looking for more artisan producers; that’s really grown at the Market. But we were trying to diversify our prepared foods. You know, we got folks in like April McGreger, the Farmer’s Daughter.

MN:  Can I interrupt about the artisan food thing? When I first started going to the Market on my own as a young adult, there were a lot of artisan food makers. And there were a lot of farmers who grew stuff and sold produce, but they also had food items that they sold. And this was probably in the early ’90s. And at some point—who was it who came?

It was a lot less regulated, and at some point, I don’t know if it was the County or State or what it was, but some kind of inspector came through and kind of shut a lot of that down, and really like we lost a lot of stuff. There were people who had biscuits and fried apple pies and salmon cake biscuits—

SN:  That they fried there, right? I mean they fried the pies there.

MN:  Some of the people fried stuff there, and goat cheese, and peanut butter cookies, and all this stuff that you’d go there and get that was really good. And that all got shut down in the ’90s at some point, and then in order to bring back a lot of that stuff—. Or not bring back that stuff, but bring back, you know, some prepared food, some artisan food products that aren't really what they had twenty years ago, but they’re great, maybe they’re better. But for that to come back, it had to come back as a legitimate, codified, inspected, regulated industry.

SN:  I sat in on a home health inspection with one of our vendors who did a lot of vegan things, and she was a baker. I will say this; with the artisan food producers or prepared food producers, at the end of my time at the Market—and you see it way more now—you are finding more of those vendors who use the other farmers’ products. That wasn’t happening as much. You know, some of the prepared food vendors were going to the cheapest places to get their ingredients, and not buying from other farmers. Now, some did, obviously, but—. You know, like I’m thinking about April again; I mean it’s just like tons of the fruit. I mean, she buys right there at the Market, you know, and that was a big turning point, I think. And there’s the demand for that. It’s expected in our community that you would do that.
           
So I think, you know, and folks like Chicken Bridge Bakery and Sari Sari Sweets, I mean they’re using—I’m sure I’m forgetting somebody, but—that was a big turn in a good direction.

MN:  We do these events with the Farmers’ Market—we just did one last weekend—where we come and give people samples of things that we’ve made from produce, you know, that we get at the Market in order to help people—it helps advertise us, but it helps advertise the Market. But what it does, it gives people a concrete example of something that they could, you know, they look at our pickled okra, and they say “Yeah; that guy right next to us—”

SN:  Which we’re eating right now.

Yes.

SN:  It’s good.

MN:  “—you know, has the okra, so now we know we can do that, because Matt said the recipe was really easy.”

And that was okra that you had gotten at the Market.

MN:  Yeah. I was looking around, and I was like, “Pickled red peppers? Pickled tomatoes?” I was looking at what they had at the Market, and I was just going, “You know, a lot of this stuff is kind of, you know, so moisture-based, you know, it’ll kind of collapse. What am I going to pickle?” And so when [the other chefs participating in the event] chose to do the deviled eggs and the pimento cheese, then because of my dad’s influence on me when I was growing up and the food they did at Crook’s that I ate every day, you know, the next thing on that plate should be pickled okra, in my mind. And so I don’t know if you thought of it or I did, but I was like “Okay, great, perfect.” There’s tons of okra and it’s really great right now, this year, because it’s so hot and sunny all year long and everything—it likes that; it’s been really good this year.

So then what happened was [market volunteer] Kelly [Clark] actually did do a little kind of quote from Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking and printed it out, where he talked about his sort of Southern hors d'oeuvre platter that tied those three things together.

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Well, let’s talk about how you got the Deli started.

MN:  You know, in our area we were really lucky to have a lot of really good places to eat dinner, but I really got kind of bored and frustrated with our lunch options. And there’s so many things that led us to this, and I guess I knew that I didn't really want a fine-dining restaurant that my family ran, you know, that was primarily doing business at night, and, you know, a little more upscale or whatever. I did learn that from growing up in the restaurant business. And I’m glad we don’t do that. I’m glad we do what we do. We serve a lot of everyday people who come, some of them every day, and it’s a really diverse mix of ages, and—everything else that you would mix up in people.

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But I really just didn’t want a place that everybody in the world who ever went there had to get into a car to be, you know—I really wanted it to be in the middle of a community, and—

SN:  But the spot we got, the coffee shop next door, Open Eye, was trying to put a bakery in there and it just kind of fell through, and that had been their former space. They were tiny. And they moved two doors down to a much larger space, which suits them well. And they were trying to get this bakery going, and it just didn’t happen. And so, we just happened to have the right timing of it, and it is a little kind of shotgun spot, and—it’s tiny for the amount of food we push out of there. But yeah; it’s a totally diverse group of, you know, customers: regular Carrboro folks, folks from Chapel Hill come in, folks from Fearrington Village, which is south of town, come up; yeah—it’s different mix.

So tell, for people who don’t know, what your specialties are.

SN:  Right. So we make our own pastrami and corned beef, and that’s kind of our hallmark. We get antibiotic- and hormone-free meat from a company called Meyer Natural Beef out of Iowa that Cliff’s Meat Market—which is catty-corner from us—generously brings in for us. [Editor’s note: Meyer Natural Angus company headquarters is in Colorado. It was founded by a rancher from Montana and sources beef from ranches in Montana, Missouri, and Colorado.] And I think this is a key story. There is a large company called Buckhead Beef—and I’m saying this. And they used to be our meat purveyor, and they have great beef. And two months after we had opened, they just decided they didn’t want to do business with us anymore. They were upping their minimums and we were definitely meeting the minimums, but we did not have a very good sales rep. He never came by, never checked in; and it was kind of devastating to me, because Buckhead, around here, is where everybody got their beef, and we were getting Niman Ranch beef through them. And I was like, “Dude; what are you thinking? Why are you cutting us off?”

And the best thing happened from that. We are so tiny that—we have a reach-in; we don’t even have a walk-in—half of our reach-in is full of brining and curing meat. And we would have to store meat as well, because we would get, you know, cases in every week, or couple of times a week.

Now, when Buckhead dropped us, we immediately went to Cliff’s—

MN:  We walked across the street and talked to Cliff, and they saved us.

SN:  They saved us. They were like, “We’ll get it in for you. We’ll store it. We’ll sell you a case or two at a time.” And if they had not done that, there’s no way we would have been able to keep up with our production.

MN:  No, we certainly would have changed what we did.

SN: But that is—that is a great spirit of Carrboro, and when people talk about doing business in Carrboro, or doing business locally, I’m like, “That’s why.” That’s why, because there are not many other places that would do that for you.

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MN:  And we make the pastrami, and that enables us to, you know, put the meat on the plate, and then we can get a lot of really good vegetables from the Farmers’ Market to put on the plate next to it.

SN:  Yeah, that’s one of the best dishes, that’s—I think that’s our hallmark dish at the Deli is the pastrami plate. You can also do a corned beef plate—but it’s a portion of our pastrami or corned beef.

SN:  But we always, in our case, it’s not a typical deli case, except for we always have a creamy coleslaw and an oil-and-vinegar potato salad, and then we have—

MN:  Everything in between that probably reflects the season—

SN:  Like today. Right, we usually have some sort of bean salad. Well, today we have slow-roasted broad beans, and the broad beans—were these from Kathy and Mike?

MN:  Well actually I got half of them from Perry-winkle Farm and then half of them from Brinkley Farm.

SN:  Brinkley’s. And we have watermelon salad with lime, cayenne, and mint.

MN:  And I got those from Stanley Hughes this time.

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SN:  But it’s really fun to think of sides that complement, you know, the pastrami and corned beef. I would say that the pastrami plate—that represents what we do. And then we do breakfast also at the Deli. We thought there was a real need for a good biscuit on this side of the county. And so kind of, we do these pastrami biscuits that are really, really good. And I think it’s funny, because we make all this pastrami, and I grew up eating, obviously, country ham biscuits. And it’s very similar; I mean you’ve got cured, salty meat. So Igrew up with sugar-cured hams, which are still salty, but they have a little bit of sweetness to them; that’s just what my dad’s family always got. And the pastrami has brown sugar in it, and it caramelizes as it slow roasts, and it’s really great with these buttery biscuits that we make. It’s just delicious.

So I would say that’s the other thing that’s kind of a hallmark of what we do.

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Well, is there anything that you guys wanted to talk about—and it could be about the restaurant, about the Market, anything that—that I didn’t ask you?

SN:  Well, I wanted to say one more thing about the Market—or maybe two quick things. One is most people probably know this by now if they’re familiar with the Carrboro Market, but, you know, it was started out of an initiative where Bill Dow was a fellow at the School of Public Health at UNC. And I just think that, you know, he realized that he didn't want to practice medicine to keep people healthy; he wanted to farm. And that was the way to make an impact on helping people be healthy.

I bring that up because I think it’s a testament to our community. Because the University has a unique relationship to our area, and there’s just no way to say that it doesn’t have any influence. The people that go to UNC, the people who teach at UNC, the people who work at UNC—not just faculty but, you know, the other folks, it all comes together, and I’ve talked about this a lot when I gave talks when I was the Market manager to other Markets. You know, why did the Carrboro Market thrive so much? Well, it is a unique mix of the people who are down here: really talented farmers who were on it, and an environment that people are willing to pay a little bit more for their food, because they know the person who grew it.

And there’s a connection there that can’t be found in the supermarket. And this is what I’ll say about the Carrboro Market is that in the Carrboro Market’s rules—the farmer or a family member or one of the owners of the business unit has to be there to sell. Other Markets do not hold that rule, and I understand all the reasons behind it. This is not a judgment thing, but let me just say what it does, is it creates this unique relationship between the farm and their customers.

MN:  It’s a kind of a bond.

SN:  It’s invaluable. And I think it has cultivated a whole community and culture of folks who care about what they eat, care about the people who grow it, care about their environment, and care about their bodies and what they’re eating, and then the byproduct of that is what we’ve done as a restaurant, and other restaurants in our area. It has just spawned so much good business, from a group of farmers coming together and having a business.

MN:  And the Carrboro Farmers’ Market also—a lot of Farmers’ Market can do this—is a really great place for people to—they might have been, you know, some kind of student at UNC. And then they discover that what they really want to do is, you know, work outside with their hands and do their own thing. And they can be right next to somebody like Brinkley Farm, and Michael Brinkley, and he’s, you know, whatever—fourth generation—

SN:  —generation farmer, yeah.

MN:  —hundred year old farm. You know, so it’s a great venue for both people—

SN:  That is so interesting here, yeah.

MN:  —both established family farms and novices, if they can get in and do a good job, you know, and find a niche for them all to complement each other.

Well, thank you so much.

To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.