Ashley
Christensen

I t started as a young kid for Chef Ashley Christensen. Standing at hip height around her parents’ kitchen in Kernersville, North Carolina, watching impromptu meals unfold. Friends and family coursing through, tasting her mom and dad’s creations, often based on the produce from their expansive gardens outside.

She was strongly influenced by the deliciousness of the food her parents were preparing back then, and its connection to the land, but her lasting memories are less about the food itself.

“I watched how they engaged with their community, the way people feel when someone welcomes them into their home and takes care of them,” she says. “I’m very proud to get to go to work with a team of folks who work every day to share a feeling like I felt in my home as a child.”

Ashley’s talents as a chef are bona fide, renowned for her ingredient-driven food that riffs on classic dishes. Her repertoire ranges from elevated Southern staples like fried chicken and Mac & cheese, butter beans and silky grits, to more far-ranging dishes like latkes and lamb carpaccio. There’s a restraint to her cooking, and a wabi-sabi elegance to her presentation.

In 2014 she was presented with the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast, recognizing her first restaurant, Poole’s Diner. In 2019, she took home the national James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef. Those awards gave Ashley and her talented teams a stamp of approval that has helped to cement Raleigh as a food destination and catapult her name forward as a leader in the restaurant industry

But there are plenty of great chefs and great restaurants out there. What truly sets Ashley apart goes straight back to those childhood days, and a passion for hospitality, for sharing, that goes straight to her core as a person.

Even in high school, she was already emulating her parents’ get-togethers for her own friends.

“After my parents divorced, I was still living in the home I was raised in,” she says. “My mom was finding herself and still working very hard. My father had moved back to New York, where he’s from. As a high-school kid, my favorite way to throw a party was, ‘Oh, my mom’s out of town. I’m not going to throw a rager. I’m going to throw a dinner party.’”

As Ashley’s home-ec teacher caught wind of these dinner parties, she encouraged Ashley to stick with cooking. It was the first time she had entertained the idea that this might be a professional calling, and that encouragement laid the foundations for the rest of her journey.

What’s come since high school, since the Beard Awards, is a veritable pipe dream for any ambitious chef. One successful restaurant became two, two became three, and it’s continued to spiral into a mini-empire of some of Raleigh’s calling-card establishments. The reason it all works is the same reason it’s always worked for her. She cares deeply about taking care of people, she retains her childlike enthusiasm for food, and she is determined to share that food with as many people as possible while fostering the welcoming spirit in her teams that set Poole’s on its successful course from the day that it opened.

Regardless of which Christensen restaurant you walk into—the classic Poole’s, the more special occasion Death & Taxes, the laid-back Neapolitan-inspired Poole’side Pies— the attitude is the same. You’re never treated like a check, a table to turn over, a one-and-done customer, no matter how busy they are. You’re a guest, a three-dimensional human being in a place where you feel like you belong. It’s not kitschy, there’s no saccharine, feigned nicety. You genuinely emerge satisfied, taken care of, and in a better place than when you arrived.

Given how many projects Ashley has on her plate at this point, it’s a testament to her ability to attract people from all walks of life that share her commitment to service and warmth, and a testament to her like-minded teams that are helping to carry the torch as she’s stepped back from much of the day-to-day work in the kitchen.

Ashley is a product of her upbringing, even as she remains committed to change and evolution. She is confident yet gracious, determined yet intensely empathetic. It’s hardly the norm in a notoriously cutthroat business. Her humility has been a guiding light in the burgeoning food scene in our home state.

There’s a reason everyone flocks to Ashley. In an era of celebrity-chefdom, she’s the genuine article. She can cook with the best of them; it’s just that she’s not cooking for herself, or for accolades—she’s cooking for the world. That principle is essential to her own relationship with her craft.

“To me, craft is never something that you hold tightly,” she says. “Craft is something that must be shared.”

The day we spent at her home in Raleigh, we almost struggled getting to the interview. She was so enthusiastic about feeding every single member of our crew, and understandably the crew was just as enthusiastic about eating every bite she’d created for us, things just moved a little more slowly. She always has a lot to give, and we had a lot to eat.

You wouldn’t exactly categorize her food as a means to an end, which would be doing a great disservice to the food itself, but in some ways it is. Food is a way of bringing people into the conversation for Ashley. Gathering has the power to spark something much more impactful than just a few delicious bites.

Encouraged by one of the Triangle’s most ardent philanthropists, Eliza Kraft Olander, who is now both a close friend and business partner, Ashley put her first private dinner up for a charity auction several years ago. At the time, she was deep in the weeds most nights in her kitchens, so she didn’t fully grasp the full potential she had to give back to her community. But her eyes were wide open as the auction closed. She raised $35,000 for the Frankie Lemmon School, a local development center that welcomes children with and without special needs. It’s a charity she remains deeply engaged with to this day.

Food culture can sometimes seem so frivolous, so petty. But what Ashley is tapping into, what drives her above all else, is our intrinsic need for something even more primal than flavor.

“What keeps me most motivated is the idea that people, through all the wild things that have happened, still want connection,” she says. “Without connection, we are not human. Humanity is connection, and nothing sings louder.”

Poole’s Diner remains the centerpiece to all of this. Inside the historic building, two old-school formica horseshoe bars make the space unique, their surfaces marked by the patina of countless diners past. Once a pie shop, then a meat-and three luncheonette, it was a place of comfort and respite in its former incarnation for Ashley’s father in his truck driving days.

At its core, Poole’s is a place defined by, and shaped by, stories. It tells the story of her childhood, reimagining not just the recipes she remembers, but the feelings. It tells the story of North Carolina, through the dishes and their ingredients, grown in the dirt, raised on the land and caught off the coast of our home state. And the story of downtown Raleigh, honoring its history and helping to write its future.

For someone like Sunny Gerhart, Ashley’s original sous chef at Poole’s, it’s also served as a springboard to go out and tell a new story. Gerhart’s St. Roch restaurant, also in downtown Raleigh, was nominated for a James Beard of its own this year. Ashley beams with pride as she mentions Sunny’s accomplishments and references his exceptional dedication.

As Ashley’s story continues to grow and evolve, everything still springs from this humble little diner that will always be its beating heart. Grab a seat at the counter.

You’re welcome here.

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