Ray Mack's Kitchen and Grill

Soul food restaurant in Durham, NC

Address

4832 NC-55, Durham, NC, 27713

Phone

(919) 452-2644

Website

raymackskitchenandgrill.com

About Ray Mack's Kitchen and Grill

Ray Mack's Kitchen and Grill runs on a lineage of Durham kitchens. Ray McKay, the cook everyone knows as Ray Mack, was born and raised in the city and still lives there, and the food he serves traces straight back to the women who raised him. He describes his mother as a cooking woman and says his aunts can burn in the kitchen, and he learned the way Southern cooking has always been handed down, standing beside the stove, watching, tasting, doing it until the recipes were his own. He puts it plainly: he learned from the best. What he plates now is that inheritance, cooked out in the open for his own city. The menu is soul food and grill work. From the trailer the orders come off fast and Southern: beef and chicken Philly cheesesteaks, cheeseburgers and hamburgers built to order, fried chicken wings, and fried onion rings, with jalapenos, sweet peppers, grilled mushrooms, bacon, and extra cheese added on for the asking. Beyond the grill window sit the dishes he grew up on, the collard greens and potato salad, beef tips over rice, fried shrimp, and the smothered and grilled meats he handles over open heat. He smokes, he grills, and by his own account he can do it all, but the through-line is the plain, seasoned, Sunday-table cooking of a Durham family. What sets Ray Mack apart from a straight food trailer is that he teaches it. He built a following cooking these same recipes on camera, walking through oxtails, smothered turkey wings, barbecue chicken wings, Southern string beans, sweet potato pie, and his Carolina Gold barbecue chicken step by step. He is known for making it look easy, for keeping the instruction straightforward, and for singing a little while the pan works. The channel is an open kitchen, the same food he sells, shown from the first cut to the plate, so a home cook a thousand miles away can put the same dinner on their own table. Ordering is direct and personal, the way a family operation tends to be. Customers text their orders in to the trailer, pay by cash, card, or CashApp, and get their food handed to them by the man who cooked it. There is no corporate script and no counter full of strangers; Ray Mack tends to know the regulars by name. Married more than twenty years and a father of six with grandchildren coming up behind him, he cooks like someone feeding his own, which in a sense is what soul food has always been. For anyone in Durham looking for a Philly off the grill, a plate of wings, or the collards and beef tips that come off a lifetime of watching his mother and aunts work a kitchen, this is a place with a clear source for every recipe on it.

Ray Mack's Kitchen and Grill is the working kitchen of Ray McKay, known as Ray Mack, a Durham native who learned to cook from his mother and his aunts and turned that home training into both a food trailer and a widely followed soul-food cooking channel. He built the channel first, teaching Southern recipes on camera, oxtails, smothered turkey wings, collard greens, sweet potato pie, and his Carolina Gold barbecue chicken, and became known for making the cooking look easy and singing while he worked. The trailer brings the same food to his own city, ordered by text and handed over by the cook himself. Customers describe the recipes as wonderful and easy to follow, and the operation as personal rather than corporate, run by a man who greets regulars by name and cooks the food he grew up eating.

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