News & Observer, May 29th, 1994

TAR HEEL OF THE WEEK

Regardless of the fire, he'll back

By Craig Jarvis

Raleigh - Arthur Gordon is trying his best to stay upbeat as he kicks through the sticky coal that used to be his kitchen.

Every day since Tuesday's fire he has returned to consider what it's going to take to rebuild the Irregardless Café. The locally mythologized bistro says as much about its owner and chef as it does about the region's taste for healthful, largely vegetarian cuisine in a neo-hippie atmosphere.

Gordon is lucky because he can draw on 20 years' worth of support from customers who talk about the café as though it's a way of life. The 44-year-old Gordon can also find meaning and comfort in the spiritual quest that ha led him to this point in his life. Still, the emotional impact of the fire has been almost like a death in the family.

"When I close my eyes at night - some people will say I'm just having neuron nerve-ending flashers, but to me they're the lights of your soul - it seems pretty peaceful now, content," he said. "It seems to be telling me the symbol in Chinese literature for crisis is the same symbol for opportunity.

"But when I go into that building and smell that smoke, and come away with headaches, I have to wonder it it'll ever be the same."

Fire investigators say a cast-off cigarette might have started the fire at Raleigh's first no-smoking restaurant, although they haven't confirmed the exact cause. The café will probably be closed all summer.

There's something familiar about Gordon at first glance. It's not surprising to pick up the ‘60s New Age lingo in the chatter comeing from this bearded, roly-poly, self-described "philosopher-king."

The day of the fire, Gordon poked through the charred rubbish behind the Morgan Street café wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, "Lettuce give peas a chance." It's a puckish veneer over an idealist who can't contain himself.

He's irrepressible," says long time friend Frank Harmon. "He's a very spontaneous and inventive person."

Born and raised in Durham with his brother Sandy and sister Barbara, Arthur Gordon was a natural salesman, according to his mother, the wisecracking Ruth Gordon.

"When they were growing up I said be a good cook and marry a doctor - but I was talking to Barbara," she says. (As it turned out, Arthur Gordon's first wife was a doctor.)

As a youngster, Gordon expressed an interest in dentistry and then decided he wanted to be a farmer - despite his mother's admonition that there "hasn't been a Jewish farmer since Moses."

Eventually, though, Gordon went to UNC-Chapel Hill, where he studied chemistry and philosophy.

Cooking, he says was something he did partly to overcome shyness. "With cooking it's clear what I'm supposed to be doing," he says. "It was a way of dealing with social situations. I knew what my role was."

After college he applied to a culinary institute, but was told he needed a year's experience as a cook. So, instead, he found some partners and a building - his mother remembers it as "a fallen-down drop-off for drugs, I think" - and went into business.

"It was like an old Judy Garland movie: "There's a barn. Let's put on a show - or open a restaurant,'" Gordon said.

He devoted himself to learning the trade and to mastering the subtleties of the culinary art: What tastes sweet, sour, salty and bitter, and how to blend those elements into an extraordinary dining experience.

Gordon applied the same intensity to his search for spiritual fulfillment. Now he's a practicing Jew who is involved in the men's movement and its attendant drumming as a path to enlightenment. He's looking to tune out some of life's worries and spend more time contemplating the wonders that most people miss.

Some of his philosophy - and a lot of his personality - is evident in the restaurant. Longtime customers say Irregardless is Irregardless because Arthur is Arthur.

"There's something about the quality - no only the philosophy, but the philosophy carried through into the ambience," said Hillary Herbert, a Raleigh, a Raleigh Freelance writer and one of the restaurant's original patrons. "You can even see it in the wait staff. They take more time, they get to know you. It's something about the way the food is put on plates, like they had thought about it."

Bruce Kaplan, who went to work for Gordon in 1977 when he was 16, remembers the early days with the man who eventually made him into a chef. The staff put on about five additions to the restaurant.

"We'd work lunch then go out and, under the supervision of a builder, we'd add on to the kitchen. Then we'd come back and start on dinner. Or we'd go paint a bathroom," said Kaplan, now the chef at the Art of Irregardless at the N.C. Museum of Art. "We'd do what we had to do to keep the place going. It's not your typical restaurant."

Kaplan says Gordon was a good teacher. "He listens to you. You get to try out things you want to do. He's not always telling you what to do," says Kaplan. "He's fair."

But what's he really like? "Short, plump, bald-headed and he has a black beard," says - who else? - his mother. "I said, Arthur, it took us 200 years to get out of Russia - you look just like those bearded Russian Jews. Really, he has a darling personality. He never says ‘no' to anybody."

The story behind the real Arthur Gordon is the real story behind the café. There has been several versions of how the Irregardless - no a real word - Café got its name.

Gordon uses the statistical term "outlier" to explain. "An outlier in statistics throws the significance of your data askew, it's something that's so far off the scale you have to throw it away," he says. "I kind of realized a long time ago that it's a good definition of what I am, I'm really sort of an outlier.

"Putting it in Southern charm, I call myself a downright outlier. It's that slight rebelliousness, on, on the scale but not quite wanting to fit in with everyone else, that lead to me repeatedly using the term ‘irregardless' in term papers even though the teachers would circle it in red.

"Now I can make it into a proper noun and no one can deny it's a word. It's kind of pixie, all being done as a joke, but it says we hope you'll pay attention to us because we're going to be a little different and we hope you like us."

Gordon ends his worrisome week with a cup of coffee at a downtown café on his way out of town Friday morning for a long weekend at the beach. He'll be back, her promises - he'll be back.