Death & Taxes

Fire as the first station

Smoke settles into the pass before the plates leave it, and Chef Ashley Christensen keeps Death & Taxes in Downtown, Raleigh, fixed around that decision. The kitchen works from flame rather than garnish: oysters roast, shrimp arrive for peeling, steak takes its shape from the wood-fired grill and the cook standing over it. Christensen has held the restaurant owner and chef role here since 2015, within the Raleigh structure she built across AC Restaurants, with Poole's Diner as the earlier anchor and Death & Taxes as the more fire-led room in the group.

Her lineage is published less as a chain of named mentors than as a sequence of rooms, each one adding pressure to the next. North Carolina State University sits at the beginning of her record. Poole's Diner gave her a long first station in Raleigh; Beasley's Chicken + Honey and Fox Liquor Bar followed in 2011; Poole'side Pies came later. At Death & Taxes, the discipline narrows. The grill is not an accent to the menu. It is the method the room is built to serve.

A menu written in embers

The program moves through small plates, à la carte mains, sides, desserts and wood-fired steaks, with sharing built into the format rather than announced as theater. The known signatures sit close to the fire: roasted oysters, peel-your-own shrimp, wood-grilled steak. Other dishes have carried the same logic, from embered winter squash with leeks and hazelnut to grilled half-chicken with embered mirepoix and red wine jus. The point is not smoke for its own sake. Christensen's kitchen uses heat as a tool for concentration, letting alliums blacken, vegetables soften at the edge, and shellfish keep their brine under a layer of char.

The restaurant's wine program is curated, and the bar leans into craft cocktails, but the food sets the tempo. Prime dry-aged cuts have appeared beside Maldon salt, peppercorn and red wine jus; tagliatelle has carried crab, bottarga, smoked tomato and lemon breadcrumbs. The vocabulary is modern American, with Southern sourcing underneath it. Local produce and North Carolina seafood do not need a speech here. They need the right distance from flame.

The room around the grill

The historic downtown building holds the room close: dim light, open kitchen, industrial edges softened by the warmth of the fire. Death & Taxes occupies a renovated bank building, and that history gives the dining room its weight without turning it into a museum piece. The counter and the pass keep the work visible. Guests can read the method in the movement of cooks, in the timing of plates, in the way smoke reaches the room before the steak does.

Service stays upscale casual, which matters in a room that could easily over-polish itself. Christensen has said, “I think the biggest thing that we do is make ourselves available for conversations.” That line fits this floor. The craft is precise, but the exchange remains human, carried between server, cook, guest and the grill at Death & Taxes.