I remember walking down Wilmington Street this summer with an empty belly and a hankering for chicken and waffles, a Southern delicacy. I had heard about Beasley’s Chicken & Honey, a new restaurant downtown that rivals Gladys Knight’s, the restaurant that brought the unseemly combination together.

As I strolled down Wilmington, the dirty, parallel sister of the frou-frou Fayetteville Street, a homeless man by the entrance to the Moore Square bus station asked me for change. I turned my head, making eye contact with the man in a hoodie, and walked on as if I were deaf.  

When I got to Beasley’s, the waitress seated my friends and I at a corner table. There are only two walls at Beasley’s — the rest of the restaurant’s borders are tall glass windows. I was at the corner of them.

I ordered a generous helping of fried chicken white meat served on top of a waffle that fit over the entire plate. The chicken was covered in honey before being served, but that didn’t stop me from drizzling the complementary maple syrup that came with the food.

While eating that meal, I started thinking that Technician could run a large feature on the eclectic restaurant scene in Raleigh. Hillsborough Street may offer limited options, but good food and edgy takes on traditional cuisine can be found within a short walk or bike ride from campus in downtown Raleigh. I bounced the idea around with my friends and we thought it would be popular.

Sitting by the window, I would occasionally observe the passers-by on the busy corner of Wilmington and Martin streets. It was a Friday night, and maybe people were commuting in and out of the bus station. The college-age crowd was swarming throughout downtown, just like me, for some dinner and entertainment.

Then I saw the man in the hoodie walk by the window. His sulking face was directed down toward his ratty shoes. If he had looked up, he would have been eye-level with my plate of decadent food.

He was going hungry, and I was shoving an immense portion of overpriced food in my face. Though I lost my appetite, I continued to eat. But instead of dedicating this combination of feature stories solely to food, I thought we should see the bigger picture of the food, and its flipside — hunger.

We are, in fact, what we eat, and we should acknowledge how privileged we are to have food on our plates three — or more — times a day. We should also acknowledge how that food ends up on our plates and who’s working to make sure we don’t go hungry.

Please keep reading, and bon appétit.