Our Past & Present

History of the Angus Barn
The Legacy of Thad Eure, Jr.
Remembering Alice Eure
A Legacy of Service - The Life of Thad Eure, Sr.
A New Direction for An Old Barn - Van Eure

The History of the Barn

When the first customers asked for a glass of water, the staff at the Angus Barn Restaurant were perplexed. But only momentarily. Thad Eure, Jr. grabbed a decorative bucket and gourd dipper off the wall and handed them to a waitress.

“Here’s your water station for tonight. I’ll try to do better tomorrow,” Eure said. Eure along with Charles M. Winston were novices in the restaurant business when they opened the Angus Barn on January 28, 1960.

Anyone who opens a restaurant knows to put in water stations. These two young men were total novices when it came to the restaurant industry, however, they found the public to be very understanding as long as they sensed the owners were caring and honest with them. The owners found that customers were kind enough to forgive their honest mistakes.

Triangle diners did more than forgive a few minor mistakes. They have made the Angus Barn one of the nation’s most successful restaurants. With an annual sales volume of 10 million, it is one of the nation’s top 50 grossing restaurants. It is consistently ranked by national trade publications as one of the 100 best restaurants in the country.

The rustic red barn on Highway 70 west of Raleigh marked it’s 46th anniversary in June of 2006. While the Barn has grown and changed over the years, Eure’s basic principals– hospitality, attractive atmosphere, and good value for the customer’s dollar have remained the same.

In an interview some 15 years ago, Eure explained, “if the Angus Barn is successful, it’s because we’re consistent. It’s easy to set a high standard, but it can be a monumental problem to maintain it day in, day out. We don’t try to do everything, but what we do, we do well.”

What the Barn does is cook steaks…lots of them. Most nights the restaurant serves 600 to 700 aged western steaks, for an average of 20,000 a month.

Beef was the staple of the original Angus Barn menu. The two young owners, Winston and Eure, attempted to provide people with what they seemed to want – steak and potatoes – in an atmosphere that created a total dining experience.

Thad Eure, Jr., 28 was just out of the Air Force and Charles M. Winston, 30, was selling air conditioners. They wanted to go into business for themselves and they thought the restaurant business had the least competition. The two admitted they knew nothing about the restaurant business but noted that in 1960 the Triangle didn’t have a restaurant that was more than four walls and a window.

The pair wanted a country setting where they could display “junk” they had been collecting for years – everything from old farm implements to a stuffed beaver to an antique heart of pine timbers.

Field of dreams
In 1959, they bought five acres of land on Highway 70 for $6,750.00. The pastoral setting seemed appropriate for their theme. The location, halfway between Raleigh and Durham, was selected because they believed their venture would need to draw from the entire Triangle area to be successful.

The decision turned out to be the right one. The Barn was convenient for business people with its proximity to the airport and the Research Triangle Park, which was just an idea at the time. People did not seem to object to driving 15 to 20 minutes for a special occasion meal.

If you build it they will come…
The original restaurant seated about 275 and cost approximately $200,000.00 to build. Acquiring the necessary capital to pay for its construction proved to be a problem for the two hopefuls. Eure and Winston borrowed as much as they could from everyone they could. For much of the financing, they can thank Eure’s father, the late Secretary of State, Thad Eure, Sr., who put up his own home for collateral so the bank would loan them the money.

The two owners, along with their wives, Alice Eure and Flo Winston, spent most of their time actively involved at the restaurant. They planned the decorations, ran the cash register, seated customers, and, on so many nights, they even washed dishes.

“Automatic dishwashers were expensive, so we installed a three-compartment sink,” noted Eure in recalling the incident years later. “Now anybody in their right mind knows you can’t wash dishes for 200 or more people every night in a three-compartment sink. All that first week, our dishwashers kept telling us it couldn’t be done. We kept trying to motivate them, telling them what a great job they were doing and how much we appreciated it.”

Eure and Winston did not realize how much they appreciated it until the end of the week when the first Saturday crowd arrived. When the dishes started to pile up, the disgruntled dishwashers walked off the job.

“They all walked off,” Eure recounted years later. “Charlie, Flo, Alice and I saw the sun come up Sunday morning and we were still washing dishes. That’s when we got smart and bought a dishwashing machine.”

They learned to handle other management problems in the same trial and error fashion. Some of the inexperienced could not handle the confusion of the new restaurant and left without telling anyone, including the customers at their tables.

Rose Beach, one of the Barn’s first employees, recalled that Eure and Winston went out and sat down on the fence for a while to calm down. At the end of the night the two called all the employees in and asked what changes needed to be made.

Eure and Winston continued to rely on their employees’ advice in operating the business. Their help was invaluable after the Angus Barn burned down in 1964.

Eure received a call early in the morning on February 7th, 1964. He and Winston had planned to leave later that day for Greensboro, where they were going to purchase property for a second Angus Barn. Instead they stood by and helplessly watched while their restaurant burned to the ground. The windmill and a pair of andirons were all that were left. The cause of the fire was never determined. It was obviously not a kitchen fire since that was the last area of the building to be burned.

Build it bigger and better
The partners decided to rebuild bigger and better, asking employees for their input to help correct some mistakes in the original design. The new Barn boosted the seating capacity to 550, and also included offices, a gift shop and several storage buildings on the 50-acre site. The interiors were designed by Alice Eure. The project was honored with a Superlative Achievement Award for total design by Institutions Magazine.

The new Angus Barn opened January 27th, 1965. Nearly all of the employees, except for those who moved away from the area, returned to their “old posts” opening night. Everything resembled the old Angus Barn except it was larger.

Don’t rock the apple cart
The complimentary cheese and relish tray, the red and white gingham uniforms, and the barrels overflowing with polished red apples were still there. A large barrel of apples was originally put out for decorative purposes, but a couple of guests took one on the way out of the Barn and suddenly Eure and Winston realized that the apples would become The Angus Barn’s trademark for “after dinner mints.” It became an expensive promotion, but one customers love. In 1971 the Barn was spending $15,000 a year on apples, but as Eure noted then, “we let our customers do the advertising. Little things like free cheese and apples do the same thing. Take the courtesy phones in the lobby — when a customer is able to make a call without searching for change, it is truly appreciated.

• In November of 1982, Thad Eure, Jr. purchased Charles Winston’s interest in the Angus Barn.
  
  
• In November of 1984, an enlarged lobby and the Wild Turkey Lounge opened to accommodate customers waiting to be seated.
  
  
• In November of 1988, Thad Eure, Jr., 56 years of age, died after a three month battle with pancreatic cancer.

At the time of his death, Thad Eure, Jr. was recognized as an outstanding leader in the restaurant industry, having served as president of both state and national Restaurant Associations. Both associations established annual awards in his honor. After Eure’s death, Alice and Thad’s daughter, Van, continued to co-own and manage the restaurant.

The Wine Cellar opens it’s doors
In May 1991, Alice and Van turned the Barn’s basement into a spectacular 30,000-bottle Wine Cellar, and ultimate dining experience, showcasing one of the world’s largest wine lists featuring 1,200 types of wines from all over the world. The Barn has earned national and international recognition for its beverage management.

One of the many coveted awards that the Angus Barn has won over the years has been the Dirona Award in 1966 as a distinguished restaurant. Wine Spectator magazine described the Angus Barn as one of the best places in America to enjoy red meat and a bottle of wine. The Los Angeles Times claimed that the Angus Barn’s Chocolate Chess Pie rated in the top ten in the U.S.

On October 3rd, 1997, Alice Eure passed away from an aneurism. Van Eure continues to own and successfully operate the Angus Barn, inspired by her father’s leadership and the desire to treat each customer as the most important person in the world. The Angus Barn moves into the new century with its continuing mission to serve customers with the same quality cuisine, the same efficiency and courtesy customers have come to expect from Beefeaters Haven.

The Legacy of Thad Eure, Jr.

Remembering Alice Eure

In the year 2006 the Angus Barn had served North Carolina for 46 years leaving us 4 years to go before we catch up to the man who had so much to do with getting it started… Thad Eure, Sr. Service seems to be in the Eure blood. Thad Eure, Sr. was Secretary of State in North Carolina for 50 years, building a reputation as a dedicated and courteous man who inspired others and worked to make North Carolina a better state.

On July 21, 1993, the people of North Carolina lost a dear friend. Thad Eure, Sr., affectionately known as “the oldest rat in the Democratic barn,” served the state of North Carolina for more than half a century. He will be remembered not only for his trademark red bow tie and straw bowler, but also for the dedication and courtesy he delivered. He influenced generations of politicians, including Governor Jim Hunt, who said of Mr. Eure, “He inspired me and thousands of young people to believe that we could work in politics and government to make North Carolina a better state.”

Mr. Eure believed in preserving our state’s history, of which he himself was so much a part. When others moved from the old State Capitol to more comfortable work space, Mr. Eure refused to give up his office in the copper-domed building. It was in this office, which he occupied during the tenure of 13 North Carolina governors, where Mr. Eure gave thousands of schoolchildren their first experiences with “good government.” Mr. Eure welcomed the public — from school groups to governor’s pages to grandparents — into his office to speak with him or to see his famous bow tie collection. “He always left his office door open — literally,” said former state Democratic chairman Betty McCain.

Mr. Eure will always be remembered for his loyalty and honesty, as well as for his confidence in young people. At his 88th birthday party, when he announced his retirement, he declared, “ I once again say, Give a young man a chance,” his 1936 campaign slogan. He later added that now he would change that slogan to “Give a young person a chance.” It was his strong belief in the abilities of young people that encouraged his son, Thad Eure, Jr., to buy a plot of land between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill for $6,750.00. The rest is history.

In 1959 Eure, Sr. walked across the property where the Angus Barn now sits and encouraged his son and his partner, Charles Winston, to buy the five acres of land. Mr. Eure told Charles and Thad that “one of these days, boys, this is going to be a wonderful piece of land.” He pointed out that the Raleigh-Durham Airport (at that time just a puddle jumper) was certain to grow.

There was a new project just getting started, a small business venture called Research Triangle Park, that might bring a few people into the area. Little did he know how many people! Mr. Eure went on to say, “If you boys can scratch up some option money, I’ll go down to my office and personally type up an option agreement so that you can tender the option to the owner of the property.” Though everyone in the community thought the two young men were crazy for trying to build a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, the Secretary of State of North Carolina, who had not practiced law in 24 years, went down to his office that Sunday evening and typed the option himself.

During the construction of the Angus Barn, Mr. Eure offered encouragement and support to Thad, Jr. and Charles when they encountered various obstacles. When the borrowed money was exhausted, Mr. Eure, Sr. stepped in, and he and Mrs. Eure put their home up as collateral so that the young men could borrow an additional $40,000. Thanks to that help, the Angus Barn was able to open for business on June 28th, 1960.

Thad Eure, Sr. may not have been directly involved with the operation of the Angus Barn, but his involvement was substantial. Thad, Jr. said, “My father is the best friend that I have, and I sincerely hope that my children may someday be as proud of me as I am of him. My father has a simple philosophy of life that I don’t think I can live up to, but it really is a beautiful way to practice the art of living.” Very simply put, his basic rules are: to think clearly without confusion; to act from honest motives; to love your fellow man, and to trust in God. While doing these things, he feels that you should also maintain a very good sense of humor and that every day you should begin that day by saying, “Every day in every way I am going to strive to be better than I was the day before.”

So thank you, Mr. Thad Eure, Sr., for the many things you did to help the Angus Barn, as well as the people of North Carolina. Your philosophy is an inspiration to us all.

A New Direction for an Old Barn

The Stength Behind the Angus Barn

It is late afternoon and up in her office in the big red silo, Van Eure can sense the stomachs rumbling. Soon they will fill the expansive parking lot, beefeaters and bourbon swillers, wine snobs and teetotalers, business types brandishing expense accounts, regulars with standing reservations, working folks who have scrimped to celebrate a milestone. More than 900 will arrive, in cargo shorts, three-piece suits and custom-made tuxedos, in big honking diamonds, dusty cowboy boots and borrowed dresses, each hungering for prime beef served in a downhome atmosphere with a heaping side of V.I.P. treatment.

They’ll get it. Because this is the Angus Barn, Triangle icon of nearly 40 years, and Van Eure, owner and general manager, has learned well how to give the people what they want. “What we do here isn’t that complicated,” she says. “Basically, it’s beef. Not that fancy. But it’s the Angus Barn standard that brings people back. We don’t just serve meals. We serve memories.

Service, for Eure, is about more than maintaining standards; it is a way of life that began with her legendary grandfather, Thad Eure, who served 52 years as North Carolina’s secretary of state. Her father, Thad Eure, Jr., created a restaurant empire that began with the Angus Barn and eventually included the Darryl’s and Fat Daddy’s chains, 42nd Street Oyster Bar and the Border Cafe. Her mother, Alice, a businesswoman and decorator, helped run the restaurants and became an advocate for, among other causes, children and mental illness.

You could say Van Eure, 52, was bred to this life. She is tall and athletic, with long dark hair and a deep Southern accent, her father’s big smile and shrewd business sense, her mother’s philanthropic bent and caring touch.

“If there’s any proof of genetics and heredity, Van is it,” says Jeff Crabster, a manager at the Angus Barn who also was her housemate of 14 years and is godfather to Eure’s baby daughter. “She is the total combination of her grandfather, her father and her mother.”

She is also so much her own person. Unpredictable, frank, hard-headed and unapologetic about her wild days. She does things her way, and she tells it like it is. “You should see her in a board meeting,” says T. Jerry Williams, the president of the N.C. Restaurant Association. “She’s still in a world of men, but she never holds back. When something is foolish, she’ll bust out laughing.”

She’s a natural, everyone says, in the way she runs the Angus Barn, one of the country’s top 50 independent restaurants and among the largest and highest-grossing independents on the East Coast. People fly to Raleigh to dine there. The wine collection, averaging 30,000 bottles and 1,200 selections, is rated by Wine Spectator as one of the top in the country. Eure, who sits on state and national restaurant association boards, continues the public leadership her family made its legacy.

She chairs the Board of Associates for Theater in the Park, chairs the Walk For Hope Foundation and the Cheyenne Foundation, a legal defense fund she founded to prevent cruelty to animals. She lends her wealth, her name or the Angus Barn to countless good causes. Walk For Hope has raised more than $13 million for research on mental illness since her family founded it in 1989.

But, natural, this wasn’t. Van Eure is a complex woman — a tattooed debutante, an animal rights advocate who owns a beef palace, a notorious party girl who became a shrewd business tycoon. She was once a competitive swimmer, and she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. She had three operations to repair facial damage after a drunk in a bar on New Year’s Eve punched her face in 13 years ago. She takes Karate lessons, spends a day a week reading to her 14-year-old stepson’s class, keeps a veritable zoo at her house and daydreams of throwing away her multi-million dollar business to become an animal trainer.

For a long time, the Angus Barn and all the responsibility, joy and power it brings were the last things she wanted. She ran half a world away to distance herself from the family name, the legacy and a future serving steaks at “Big Red.” “There was a time when I would have bet everything against the notion of coming home,” she says. “I never would have imagined living this life. It’s totally unnatural to wear panty hose and go to meetings and be places on time.”

Love and work
She works incessantly, at home during the day and from late afternoon until after midnight four days a week at the Angus Barn. At 6 p.m. on a recent Friday, her 8-year-old daughter, Ali, plays in the same room with her pet dog while Van calls an unhappy customer. Eure introduces herself to the man, who is clearly surprised the restaurant’s owner is bothering to follow up a complaint. She apologizes about the service, asks him to accept a gift certificate and give the restaurant another chance. This is standard practice; when something isn’t up to par, the Angus Barn makes amends, fast.

She says she’s working on cutting back but there is always something, someone. People want to attach her name to a cause, they want her financial backing, they want gift certificates or a chance to host their event at the Barn. Her staff says she can be away from her desk for an hour and receive 50 voice messages. She is famous for her post-midnight voice mails, made after the restaurant closes. But this is what it takes, she says, to keep an icon going. The Barn is a place of business, not just for her, but for much of the Triangle. This is the place to show off to out-of-towners, prospective partners, big fish clients. More deals have been struck in the Wild Turkey lounge than in most downtown boardrooms.

But the Barn is also a place people come to mark life’s passages. Every weekend, dozens of balloons are taped to tables at which people celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. About once a week, a couple gets engaged.“This place is so much more than a restaurant to people,” Eure says. “That’s what so special about it, what I love about it so much. People come here year after year, they do business, they propose, they celebrate anniversaries and good times. It is a very special, emotional place.”

On the job
On this night, as usual, she has a list of customers who made reservations, so she can seek out people she knows to say hello. Her job looks like a lot of fun, schmoozing customers and taking compliments, but her nights are filled with hundreds of details, as she moves tirelessly among the restaurant’s three floors. In the main dining room, she grabs a pitcher of water. “This is called MBWA,” she explains. “Management by walking around. I help out when the wait staff is slammed, and I’m also able to check on customers this way.”

She will prowl every corner, greeting customers, checking food, pouring water, taking crying children to the Country Store gift shop to pick out a toy, making sure every Angus Barn standard is met — and chastising employees when one is not. She expects from employees what she would do herself. Eure can clean a toilet, order supplies, choose wine, wait tables and cook a petite filet mignon. She learned as part of the Thad Eure Jr. management training program, she says.

For the early seating, Duke doctors and Chick-Fil-A executives fill two private dining rooms, and a party of 20 is arriving to mark the retirement of St. Mary’s president Clauston Jenkins. All will get her attention. First, she greets the doctors and the fast food folks. The Chick-Fil-A group is a religious crowd by nature, and they are so inspired by Eure’s graciousness, that some gather to pray over her. She accepts as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

For the next three hours, she roams the restaurant, making conversation, picking up napkins, getting crayons for bored children, inspecting food stations and bars, delivering $40 steaks to waiting diners. She stops to visit the Smiths, a couple who come every Friday night. Nearby sits another couple, newcomers to the Barn. Balloons decorate their table, and a standard birthday pound cake is boxed up. Eure asks how their meal was and they laugh, patting their bellies. The husband says “We’re so full we need a wheelchair to get out of here.”

The father’s legacy
Van Eure was 5 when her daddy opened Big Red with partner Charles Winston, 14 when she started working there, 34 when she was made general manager and 42 when her mother died and she became the sole owner. The fact that Van Eure is a good boss is apparent from the longevity of the Barn’s staff: where many restaurants experience a 75 percent turnover rate, the Barn hovers at 14 percent. Employees wear their time as a badge of honor: 10, 15, 20 years or more. Many of them saw Eure come in, learn the business, mature into this role. She is not merely loved, as she was when she was a child, but respected. “Well, everybody knows how wild Van was,” says Betty Shugart, who began working at the Barn 41 years ago and now is kitchen manager. “And we had our doubts. But she has grown into the job. We love her like she was our own daughter. I’ve never known anyone who was as giving and caring as Van.”

The eldest of three children, Van was the family rebel; her clashes with her father began at a young age and lasted through most of her life. The teddy bear that Thad Eure Jr. seemed to people around town was a grizzly at home. A strict parent who didn’t tolerate his children misbehaving, he was quick to yell and punish. The children never received allowances; they worked at the Barn for money. “The Eures certainly had money,” says Shugart, “but the children were never spoiled. If they wanted something, they worked for it.”

Van wasn’t a complete rebel. She went to college and had drive enough to swim competitively at Rollins College and for a year at Carolina. But she lacked direction. After graduating with a degree in education, she went on a three-month leadership training program to Kenya. She saw giraffes, climbed mountains, learned to cook in a pit. At the end, she packed her bags and went to the airport. And watched the plane leave without her.

Five years, she stayed. She started teaching swimming and then English to schoolchildren. She opened a Montessori school. She came home every Christmas and was ready to flee by New Year’s. In Kenya, she fell in love with an Australian, who proposed. She was 27 and ready to settle down. En route to Australia, she brought him home to meet her parents. Over dinner at the Barn the fiance made a disparaging remark about her brother and something in her snapped. “I think being home, it was like all of a sudden I remembered who I was and what was really important, and I knew this man wasn’t right for me,” she says. Once again, she watched a plane take off without her. She stayed in Raleigh and her father let her bartend at Darryl’s. She worked and she partied and she wondered what to do with herself.

In 1983, when her dad decided to build a 60-foot silo next to the Barn, to house a bar, Van asked to help. Working with her father every day wasn’t easy. There was so much to learn. And so much for each to discover about the other.“During that time, I really saw what kind of man he was — how he made people be better, how much he cared about the people who worked for him, how he could admit his own mistakes — and I saw him in a new way. I think he was seeing me in a new way, too. He saw that I was trying to work hard and learn and that I was a serious person, and our relationship really began, at that age, to become what most fathers and daughters experience at a much younger age.”

The relationship gradually improved. In time, her dad sat Van down to talk about the future. He would like to think that the Barn would go on for a long, long time, that it would remain in the family. If Eure were to inherit this legacy, Van would need to accept the responsibility. This was not the life she planned. But now, the thought of another person, a stranger, running the Barn, seemed wrong. In 1988, she called her father one night and said, “I’m still not sure, but I want to try.”

The decision was well timed. Her father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He kept his sense of humor and made Van go to the restaurant when she wanted to stay at his bedside. She wrote him a 10-page letter listing all the things he had taught her, assuring him she had listened and learned and would be able to go on because of the way he raised her. In 10 weeks, he was gone.

It has been more than a decade now. The grief over lost time, not these past 18 years, but all those long, battling years, still brings bitter tears. On a table in her living room, she keeps a silver-framed picture of them. The father’s arm is thrown around the daughter, pulling her into his bulk. “Even now this looks strange to me, to see him hug me,” she says. “I’m just so glad we worked it out. Those six years we had together were such a gift to me.”

She has preserved his office at the restaurant, incongruously tiny for the huge personality that he was. An old electric typewriter sits ready to be tapped. Pictures, mostly family photos, cover almost every inch of wall. They tell the story of a man who loved people and good food and his family most of all.

Marriage and family
After her father’s death, Van Eure threw herself into the job, married it. She gradually reconciled herself to the notion that a real marriage and the Barn wouldn’t both fit in her life. She persisted, she says with her wry laugh, in extraordinarily bad taste in men. Until Steve Thanhauser came along. Husband and wife are very different. He, a city boy from New York with little interest in animals, runs his own marketing company. She, a Southern belle with a nomadic soul, prefers the company of children and animals to most people.

Thanhauser was a colleague, a radio station marketing representative when they met. Years later, after he started his own business and was a divorced single parent, he asked her out. Five times she said no. “Oh my God, what would I do with a nice guy?” she thought. She finally agreed to meet him at the movies. That night, they both say, they knew they would marry.

In June 1997, she walked down an aisle in her mother’s back yard. Three months later, her mother died. Suddenly, Van had the Barn to manage alone, plus a new marriage and a new role as stepmother to a little boy. Stress and grief overwhelmed her. She worked 80 or 90 hours a week, trying to hold the Barn to the standards her parents would have wanted. She wasn’t feeling well. Her body was changing. She thought, at 42, it must be cancer. Instead, she was pregnant, past her first trimester. Eure was shocked. Her life was stretched so thin now; what would an infant do? She worked until the end and delivered a daughter who looks just like Steve.

Long way home
Eure and Thanhauser live on a private drive far up Six Forks Road. Their house is furnished not like the Barn, with large wooden chairs on the front porch and French provincial overstuffed furniture inside. African artwork and pottery abound. An oil portrait of Thad Eure in suit and customary red bow tie hangs in the hall. Here animals enjoy the famed Eure service. Two rescued wild ponies from the Outer Banks and two Llamas share a small pasture out front. Gracie is a rescued Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. Dogs Ruby, Lucky and Sasha warn of visitors, and Bobby the cockatoo hangs out on a perch in the playroom.

She says it is not inconceivable to one day sell the restaurant. But for now, there are big plans —adding another wine cellar banquet room, celebrating the place’s 46th anniversary in style. “You can’t say something will never happen because you don’t know what life will give you,” she says, “and now I have a very important job to raise these two children.”

“But I also have a family of employees at that restaurant who care so much about their careers. And I don’t think I could ever drive past it and think that someone else owned it. The Barn is my child, too.”

Reprints by M. Miller of the News and Observer.

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