Long before rooftop dining spots became chic, dining rooms at department stores were popular spots to get a meal, break a deal and socialize
by Katherine Snow Smith

While enjoying a whole grilled branzino at the glass-enclosed RH Rooftop Restaurant in the furniture retailer’s new, three-story store in North Hills, longtime Raleigh resident Sherry Owens thinks back to another era of shopping and dining. 

“Oh, I miss the Capital Room at Belk’s. You’d go through the line and see all the food, then decide what you wanted,” she says. “The restaurant was the reason we went, but then I’d say, Maybe I’ll go look at some shoes.”

Memories of the cafeterias at the Hudson Belk downtown (which most folks called just “Belk’s”) and in Crabtree Valley Mall remind Owens of Balentines, another favorite Raleigh cafeteria that was a respite for hungry shoppers, power lunches and busy families. “I was in the mortgage business and my husband Jerry was in real estate, and we both had business meetings at Balentines as well,” Owens says. Decades before our capital city boasted multiple James Beard Award winners, cafeterias suited Raleighites just fine.

Everyday elegance, almost

Dining facilities in shopping venues and districts were born out of necessity in the late 1800s.

“More than 150 years ago or so, women couldn’t eat unaccompanied by men. Department stores developed restaurants so their shoppers had a place to eat and it wasn’t an impropriety to be there without their husbands,” says Laura Reiley, who writes about the business of food out of Ithaca, New York, and formerly covered the topic at The Washington Post. “Every U.S. city had at least one department store with a fancy tea room.” She points to Manhattan’s “Ladies’ Mile,” a row of fashionable department stores in the Gilded Age, each with some kind of food offering.

Retailer Karl Hudson opened his own branch of Belk in downtown Raleigh in 1915. It’s unclear when the venerable Capital Room Cafeteria with “HB” engraved in the flatware started serving on the fourth floor, but it closed in 1995 when the store shuttered. The Crabtree Capital Room opened in 1972 with the mall and lasted until 2004. Balentines operated six cafeterias around the state, with its flagship Oberlin Road restaurant serving from 1960 to 1999.  

These cafeterias, where customers could pick out a meat, two vegetables, rolls and a drink for around $5 to $8, were staples across the Triangle. Along with Belk and Balentines, the lineup of food you, well, stood in line for included K&W, S&W and the Piccadilly. Some shopping centers boasted two or three cafeterias. Most are extinct now, though K&W Cafeterias still operate near Garner and in Chapel Hill. 

Of all the cafeterias in Raleigh, Belk’s Capital Room and Balentines were known for offering a more formal dining experience as well as a local, familiar feel. Men wore suits and women brought out their pearls and heels. Owners and managers circulated the dining rooms, topping off coffee or offering a dessert on the house. Diners and employees, from the ones dishing out the corn pudding to the busboys, knew each other by name. Neither restaurant was open on Sundays.

“It was almost like a family dinner. You’d see people you knew and everyone would visit around the tables,” says Smedes York, whose father, J.W. York, developed the Cameron Village shopping center (now The Village District). “You’d go in and Red [Balentine] and later Johnny [Red’s son] would greet you,” York says. “It was very comfortable.”

The Capital Room served up the same recipe of service and camaraderie. “I can remember huffing and puffing and rushing up the escalator at Belk’s in Crabtree,” says Joe Preston. “You’d turn the corner and see the line was all the way out to the lobby and know it was going to be a long night.” Preston grew up eating at both Belk locations with his parents, Superior Court judge Edwin Preston and Dot Preston, a Meredith College professor. “We’d always see lots of people they knew, and my father would instruct me to go get the coffee pot and go around and refill their friends’ cups,” he says.  

The business of food — and people

Other Capital Room trademarks included elegant models strolling past tables wearing the latest fashions and self-serve relish stations with their signature watermelon-rind pickles. The downtown location was a de facto corporate dining room for Raleigh businesses and the legislature.

“If school was out, I had to go to court with Dad and stay in the judge’s chambers all day. Finally, we’d get to go eat at Belk’s, but it was like being back in court — judges and lawyers everywhere,” Preston says.

“I’m sure a lot of deals got done there. It wasn’t a spot for a two-martini lunch, but business was being conducted,” says Linda Peterson, whose late husband, Skip Peterson, managed the downtown restaurant from 1970 to 1975, before 11 more years at the Crabtree location. “He loved seeing all the judges, lawyers, lawmakers and newspaper people come in,” she says. “Skip would joke: If I ever find myself in any kind of trouble, nobody will take me to trial because I feed all of them.”

But the clientele wasn’t limited to powerbrokers. Office workers, families and even unhoused people were regulars. Skip Peterson set aside “quite a few” to-go boxes every day for people who were down on their luck, his wife recalls. She commends the late Karl Hudson Jr. for always wanting to do right by the employees and customers.

Both downtown and Crabtree cafeterias hired prisoners on work release. “They were always on time,” Peterson says, adding that one of her husband’s best cooks was on work release. 

Balentines customers and staff knew each other personally as well. “I always liked seeing the same people working behind the counter,” says frequent diner Larry Maddison. The cafeteria was also one of the first businesses in the area to make a point of hiring people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. “I always appreciated that,” Larry adds.

His wife Clare recalls Balentines lunches as a family ritual. “Any time Larry’s mother, grandmother and aunt would come up from Scotland Neck to shop or visit family, we’d go to Balentines for a nice lunch. You could have a good meal with a white table cloth. It was quiet enough to talk and you could get a big table,” she says. (Without a reservation, no less.)

Owner Red Balentine was also a big draw, known for pacing around tables to chat with guests and share his sense of humor. 

“Red told me once that sometimes people called asking what the fresh fish was going to be that night. He’d say, Hold on, let me contact my people down on the coast. Then he’d act like he was calling on another line and say, Hey, what are y’all hauling in today?” says York.

There was not, indeed, a fleet of fishing boats, but Balentines was known for offering good seafood. “From time to time they would have white shad and shad roe. It was interesting you’d have a delicacy like that in a cafeteria,” Larry says.
One of the most popular Balentines features was the “early eater’s specials.” Lunch diners got a discount if they came before noon and dinner patrons could eat a full meal for $4.50 before 5 p.m.

Changing times

Over time, malls gave birth to the food court and retailers repurposed those elegant dining facilities — floor space could bring more money with clothes and jewelry than reasonably priced food, Reiley says.

The downtown Belk store and cafeteria closed in 1995, when shoppers finally became too scarce, though diners were still steady. The News & Observer columnist A.C. Snow headlined a column in the final days: “Like a death in the family.” The complete state Supreme Court gathered there for the last lunch along with many other somber downtown employees.

Balentines had to close its Oberlin Road location in 1999 because the building was up for sale and the kitchen needed extensive renovations. An N&O editorial thanked the Balentines legacy for maintaining its $5 specials, which were the “heartiest fare of the day” for people on a fixed income. It also praised proprietors and employees for delivering meals to patrons who were home sick.

In 2004, Belk executives announced the closing of Crabtree’s Capital Room, saying the company needed to fill those 10,000 square feet with more clothing and accessories to compete with newer malls and retailers. Patrons signed a petition to keep it open and the N&O published anguished letters to the editor. The paper paid homage to the cafeteria in its final weeks, sharing some of the restaurant’s most beloved recipes, including meatloaf with creole sauce and seven-layer casserole.

Shopping and dining habits would continually change over the next decades, and now retailers are starting to look for new ways to entice customers off their computers or phones and back into the actual stores. RH Raleigh, The Gallery at North Hills is evidence of that. 

“We believe in creating immersive spaces that activate all of the senses: sight, smell, taste, touch and sound,” says Gary Friedman, chairman and chief executive officer of California-based RH. “These new galleries and the integrated hospitality experience position our brand for the RH of the future.”  

The whole branzino, with an eye spying up at diners, was certainly part of a meal to be remembered by Owens, her husband and their niece. So were the RH restaurant’s six-tier chandeliers hanging over indoor olive trees and a cascading cast-stone fountain. 

“This was really good. It’s certainly not Belk’s,” Owens says with a chuckle. “It’s going to take some getting used to.”

This article originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.