Wake Forest Flying Biscuit owner plans north Raleigh cafe

Tahir Rafiq, the franchisee who runs the Flying Biscuit Café at Wake Forest Crossing, has signed a lease for a fourth café at 6609 Falls of Neuse Road in north Raleigh. He plans to open it in the first quarter of 2027, according to FSR Magazine, which reported the lease on August 31, 2026.

The new café will be in the Falls Village shopping center. The company’s website lists it as “Falls Village – North Raleigh” with an opening in the first quarter of 2027. Rafiq already runs Flying Biscuit cafés in Wake Forest, Cary and Chapel Hill, FSR Magazine reported, and the Falls of Neuse Road store will be his fourth.

The café also appeared in the October food news column that Raleigh Magazine published on October 1, 2026, which said the chain is “aiming to bow on Falls of Neuse Road early next year.”

What is planned at 6609 Falls of Neuse Road

Rafiq picked the site for its traffic patterns, nearby schools and established neighborhoods, according to a September 3, 2026, report in Fast Casual. “I just felt like this part of town was missing a great breakfast option,” Rafiq said, according to Fast Casual. The report says the café will aim at families, neighborhood groups and the lunch crowd.

Vijay Shah and Shelley Bhattia of TradeMark Properties and Cori Nix of CBRE worked on the lease, according to both trade reports.

The company’s page for the coming café describes the same format as its open stores. According to the company’s website, the Falls Village café will have:

• A dining room and a patio.
• Delivery and carry-out orders.
• Catering for events of any size.
• Free on-site parking.

The page lists no phone number or hours yet. It sends job seekers to the company’s careers page.

A former movie theater address in Falls Village

The 6609 Falls of Neuse Road address was the home of Raleighwood Cinema Grill, a movie theater that sold food, beer and wine. WRAL reported on December 10, 2019, that Raleighwood’s parent company, Raleigh Entertainment Corp., had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and that the theater was closed. WRAL gave its location as the Falls Village shopping center and said the business had opened in 1993.

Falls Village is a 190,000-square-foot community shopping center with a signalized entrance off Falls of Neuse Road, according to a CBRE leasing listing for the center at 6647 Falls of Neuse Road. The same listing puts traffic on Falls of Neuse Road at 39,500 vehicles a day and lists five suites for lease, ranging from 1,000 to 2,033 square feet.

Rafiq’s three open cafés

Rafiq’s open cafés, according to FSR Magazine and the company’s location pages, are:

• The Chapel Hill café at University Place, 201 S. Estes Drive, Unit E2, which opened in 2022.
• The Cary café at Parkside Town Commons, 1103 Parkside Main St., which opened November 13, 2023, as the chain’s 30th location.
• The Wake Forest café at Wake Forest Crossing, 12646 Capital Blvd., Suite 168, which opened in October 2025.

The Daily Tar Heel named Tahir Rafiq and Zinnia Rafiq as the Chapel Hill café’s owners in March 2022. Before that store opened, Chapelboro reported that Rafiq had spent 15 years in hospitality, including a stint as vice president of operations at IHOP.

The Wake Forest café is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to the company’s website. Its phone number is (919) 263-8692. The site lists online ordering and catering for the Wake Forest store. The Cary and Chapel Hill cafés keep the same hours.

Flying Biscuit in Raleigh and the chain

The Falls of Neuse Road café will be the third Flying Biscuit in Raleigh. According to the company’s website, the two open Raleigh cafés are Flying Biscuit in the Village District at 2016 Clark Ave. and Flying Biscuit at Brier Creek at 9400 Brier Creek Parkway, Suite 101.

The Flying Biscuit Café started in Atlanta in 1993 and is still based there. Fast Casual reported on September 3, 2026, that the chain has 43 locations, with 12 more in development across Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. The company’s own location pages give a lower count of 34 locations.

The chain’s menu centers on breakfast and lunch served all day. Its location pages promote shrimp and grits and biscuits, and say each café bakes almost 5,000 biscuits a week.