Wake Forest's New Restaurants Keep Choosing Buildings That Already Have a History
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Drive up Capital Boulevard through Wake Forest right now and you'll see the growth story everyone expects from a Triangle suburb: a new burger chain here, a steakhouse there, a fitness club going up next to a grocery anchor. That story is real and it's still unfolding. But it's not where the interesting decisions are happening this year. The more telling choices, the ones that say something about what kind of town Wake Forest wants to be, are happening two miles south, inside buildings that have been standing for decades.
Three of this year's most talked-about restaurant arrivals in Wake Forest didn't pick a new outparcel. They moved into spaces with a past: an 80-year-old car dealership, a shuttered Hardee's, a Mexican restaurant that had been serving the same corner for 26 years before it closed. Meanwhile, the corridor keeps doing exactly what corridors do. That split is the story.
None of this is a knock on Capital Boulevard or Grove 98. Wake Forest's first Whataburger opened near Wegmans on March 26, 2026, and a Raleigh location followed two weeks later on April 9, part of the chain's broader push into North Carolina after recent openings in Greensboro and Charlotte. Firebirds Wood Fired Grill has signed a lease at Grove 98, the same corridor development also adding Whataburger and Chopt, and was targeting a summer 2026 opening as of the developer's own 2025 outlook. Warehouse BBQ, the family-owned smoker that started as a food truck out of Youngsville, confirmed this month it's opening a second brick-and-mortar location in the Market of Wake Forest, the Big Lots-anchored shopping center on Capital Boulevard.
That's a corridor filling in the way corridors fill in across the Triangle: a national chain here, a regional favorite scaling up there. It's useful information if you're deciding where to grab dinner on a Tuesday. It's not, on its own, a story about Wake Forest specifically. You'd see the same pattern in Holly Springs or Fuquay-Varina.
What's different is what's happening on White Street and around it. Sabatino's Italian Ristorante opened February 24, 2026, at 131 Crenshaw Cors Drive, taking over the space that had been Patronies Pizza and finishing it out with seating for about 140 guests plus a covered patio. Gym Tacos is moving into the former Hardee's at 216 East Roosevelt Avenue, a building that sat empty rather than getting demolished for something new. And Las Margaritas, the Mexican restaurant that served Wake Forest for 26 years at 111 South White Street before closing, is reopening under new ownership as Las Mas Mexican Food & Cantina after a full remodel of the same building.
Here's the pattern laid out side by side:
| New Arrival | Address | Building History |
|---|---|---|
| Sabatino's Italian Ristorante | 131 Crenshaw Cors Dr. | Former Patronies Pizza |
| Gym Tacos | 216 E Roosevelt Ave. | Former Hardee's |
| Las Mas Mexican Food & Cantina | 111 S. White St. | Former Las Margaritas (26 years) |
| Canastas Chicken | 911 Gateway Commons Cir. | Opened Dec. 19, 2025, in existing retail space |
Every one of these is an operator choosing to inherit a building's existing footprint, parking, and name recognition instead of starting from a graded lot. That's not an accident of availability. Downtown Wake Forest doesn't have the open outparcels that Capital Boulevard does. If you want to open a restaurant on White Street or in the historic core, you're working with what's already there. The businesses betting on downtown are betting on the buildings themselves carrying some of the goodwill a 26-year Mexican restaurant or a familiar Hardee's corner already built up in people's memory.
The clearest example of this pattern, and also the most patient one, is the Wake Forest Food Hall. In August 2022, developer Jacob Anderson of Alliance Group NC described plans to convert the former S&W Chevrolet dealership at the corner of East Roosevelt Avenue and North White Street into a roughly 20,000-square-foot food hall with indoor and outdoor seating, plus a 2.5-acre park behind the building and a long-buried creek slated for daylighting. Anderson called the timeline "ambitious, but I hope to have the first restaurant in by summer of 2023."
That didn't happen on schedule. The Wake Forest Business & Industry Partnership's list of developments to watch for 2025, published that January, still described the food hall as "one of the most eagerly anticipated new amenities in Downtown Wake Forest," with the opening now retargeted for that year instead of 2023. Whether the doors are open as you read this or the project is still finishing out its final vendors, the honest version of the story is that a genuinely ambitious idea, preserving an 80-year-old building rather than tearing it down, has taken longer to deliver than its own developer first promised. That's worth knowing before you plan a night out around it. It's also worth knowing because it tells you something about downtown Wake Forest generally: the projects reusing old buildings take longer than the ones filling new outparcels, but they're the ones people keep waiting for.
None of this restaurant movement happens in a vacuum. Downtown Wake Forest runs its outdoor calendar on a rhythm that predates any of this year's openings, and if you're deciding where to spend an evening in the next few weeks, here's what's confirmed:
Most of these events sit within walking distance of the same White Street block where Sabatino's, Gym Tacos, and Las Mas are all opening or reopening. That's not a coincidence the town is trying hard to hide. A concert series that predates most of this year's construction is exactly why a restaurant operator would rather inherit foot traffic on White Street than build fresh on a highway.
If you already live in Wake Forest, the useful takeaway isn't a list of new places to try, though you now have one. It's that the town's two growth stories, corridor expansion and downtown reoccupation, are running on different clocks and different logic. The corridor moves fast because the land is easy. Downtown moves slower because it's harder, and because the payoff for getting it right, a building with 26 years of goodwill already baked into the address, isn't something you can build new no matter how much capital you have.
That's a distinction that plays out well beyond restaurant openings. It's the same logic that shapes which parts of town hold their character and which ones start to look like anywhere else. Understanding that difference is part of what makes Wake Forest worth paying attention to, whether you're deciding where to eat this month or thinking further down the road about where you'd want to put down roots.
If that day comes, or if you're simply curious what a home near this corridor of change might be worth, the team at Bespoke Realty Group knows this stretch of Wake Forest block by block. Request a Bespoke Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
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