Words by Nicole Letts
Raleigh’s Peregrine delivers a culinary delight of cultural crossroads
When the Uber pulls into The Exchange, an executive park in the midtown area of Raleigh, North Carolina, I’m a little confused. Peregrine, a 2026 James Beard Award semifinalist, is in an office park?
As the road winds, I realize we’re not driving through just any complex. Expansive green spaces abound. Business folks, wrapping up their workdays, perch on benches reading or chatting with others. They seem to be lingering longer, enjoying their surroundings. When the car pulls around the semicircle in front of the restaurant, I am met with a small but lush herb garden to my right and a manicured lawn dotted with Roman-inspired statues to my left, part of Peregrine’s sister concept, Capulet Cocktail Club. Just 15 minutes from my hotel downtown, this corner feels a world away.
Here, on the ground floor of 1000 Social St., chef Saif Rahman helms Peregrine. It’s a Tuesday evening, and the sun-soaked restaurant is bustling. Its tall ceilings are accented with fixtures reminiscent of wide-brim hats, which Rahman says were designed as a nod to fellow North Carolinian Ava Gardner. Mangrove stilt roots serve as an art installation. Rahman tells me that in Bangladesh, where he was raised until he was 10, the swamps are where the tigers lurk, their stripes getting lost in the plant’s twisty branches. Sconces, appropriately shaped as water lilies, the national flower of Bangladesh, adorn the walls.
“We’re celebrating my first-generation American story,” Rahman explains. “I’m from Bangladesh, but I grew up in New York City and then moved to the South. I want to showcase my experience because that’s what America’s built on: different cultures coming together.”
Photo credit: Forrest Mason
Photo credit: Peregrine
Rahman’s menu is just as thoughtful as the interior design. It’s separated into three sections: arrivals (starters), journeys (mains), and wanderings (sides). Designed to evolve with the seasons and ingredient availability, it’s a tight menu that provides diverse options with limited distractions. At first glance, dishes are familiar. There’s bread and butter, crab salad, crispy octopus, roasted chicken, monkfish, charred carrots, and gold rice, to name a few.
Yet, a deeper read reveals creative ingredients that encourage the diner to step, ever so slightly, outside of their comfort zone. Carolina crab salad features mango and makrut lime and is served with papadum. Octopus is glazed in house-smoked sriracha, sprinkled with aromatic herbs including confetti cilantro clipped from the on-site garden, and served atop Alabama white sauce. The roasted half chicken, one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes, has a yogurt and cashew milk gravy and is served with one claw on as an homage to the bird’s life. Even the bread and butter have Rahman’s clever, global twist. Freshly baked naan arrives tableside, served with an elegant pat of salted honey butter.
Rahman has plans to edit the menu often, working with each season’s bounty, but there are a few things that he says will never change, particularly his gold rice pulao. “The rice, it’s in my veins. It’s in my blood. Rice is always going to be here,” he says.
Pulao, or pilaf, is a South Asian rice dish made by cooking rice with aromatics and vegetables. Peregrine’s pulao features saffron, pistachio, mint, stone fruit, and unsurprisingly for a Southerner, ghee. “I use a lot of butter—a lot,” Rahman laughs.
At Peregrine, Rahman meets his diners where they are, and then he gently pulls them somewhere new, perhaps to Bangladesh or New York, or a new-to-them corner of North Carolina. Eventually, as with all new things, that unfamiliarity becomes recognizable. It might even start to taste like home.
