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You Will Want This Once-Secret Recipe for the Best Pickled Carrots
It’s from The Seaboard Cafe in Raleigh — and comes with a great story
This is only partially a story about a really good pickled carrot recipe, a recipe that has been kept a secret for the past 29 years by the Seaboard Cafe in Raleigh, North Carolina, a restaurant that happily just reopened after six weeks in purgatory.
The Seaboard Cafe, which opened the same year I graduated from high school a mile down the road, is an accidental Raleigh icon. It’s a sandwich shop hidden inside the old brick railroad station that used to provide a straight shot by train to New York City, where I moved 20 years ago. (Now you have to take the Carolinian an extra hour east, through Rocky Mount.)
I previously thought the Seaboard Cafe was an old Raleigh lunch counter, someplace with recipes handed down by generations of North Carolinians. But it is actually the 1991 passion project of a Mexican American from Houston, Richard Perales.
The cafe has always been an indoor-outdoor affair, with paper plates and stackable plastic patio chairs, in between the blue and white wooden roof of the old train platform and all the flowering potted plants set out for sale. All this gives it a European cafe kind of feel, for Raleigh: a European cafe with tuna salad on wheat and stackable plastic patio chairs.
The Seaboard Cafe’s pickled carrots — sweet, crisp, and “to die for,” as the Yelpers put it — are also iconic. Now that I have made them a handful of times, I can tell you that these pickles are easy to consume as they are to make, which is very easy. They are good straight out of the fridge, good at room temperature with cheese, good chopped up in tuna salad, good eaten with spicy Korean fried chicken, good added to a carne asada torta instead of a jalapeño. They’re also good still warm, straight out of the pot.
Now that I have made them a handful of times, I can tell you that these pickles are easy to consume as they are to make, which is very easy.
At the cafe, on the other hand, you usually get one single stick served right on top of your sandwich…
