There is a paragraph on Wake Forest Coffee Company’s LinkedIn page that reads like it was written by someone who thought about it for a long time. It argues that coffee houses have always been where great ideas get born and world problems get solved, where poetry gets recited and governments get overthrown in conversation, where the famous and the ordinary end up talking to each other. Business deals close over coffee. Friendships get made over espresso and biscotti. People fall in love drinking cappuccinos.
Then it lands: the writer would like to think their coffee house is all of the above. A place for thinking, reading, planning, loving, relaxing, working, conspiring, philosophizing, but especially dreaming.
That is either insufferable or exactly right, depending on how many hours you have spent at 156 South White Street.
The building came first
Wake Forest Coffee Company opened in 2008 in a two-story building put up in 1919. Before it was a coffee shop it was the town grocery store. Then an upholstery shop. Then a Western Auto parts store.
That layered history matters to how the place feels. This is not a coffee shop designed by a coffee shop designer. It is a hundred-year-old commercial building on the main downtown block, with the proportions and quirks that come with that, converted room by room into somewhere people sit.
The stated mission is to spark and build friendships for the betterment of the local community through the crafting of delicious beverages. Which is a lot of words for: we want you to stay.
The syrup wall
Here is the practical thing that separates this place from the other coffee options in town.
Wake Forest Coffee Company has an enormous syrup selection. Not four bottles behind the counter. A serious wall of them. Regulars describe never running out of new combinations to try, and the staff keeps a barista favorites list for people who want something invented rather than ordered.
The move, according to a decade-long regular who posted about it publicly, is to skip the menu entirely. Tell the barista what flavor profiles you like and let them build something. They will either suggest a combination or make one up. That reviewer’s standing order is a large white chocolate macadamia nut cold brew with a splash of almond milk, which is not a thing you will find written anywhere.
This is a different game from single-origin pour-over. Down the street, Black & White will hand you a Kenyan and expect you to taste blackcurrant. Here the point is that coffee can be a flavor delivery system and that is fine. A town benefits from having both.
They also have matcha now, added relatively recently, and breakfast burritos substantial enough that regulars describe them by weight.
It stays open late, and there is music
Most coffee shops close in the late afternoon. Wake Forest Coffee runs 6:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends.
Those evening hours change what the business is. A shop that closes at four is a morning errand. A shop open until eight is somewhere you go after dinner, somewhere teenagers meet up, somewhere a book club can run without anyone getting swept out. It also means the space works for live music, which they host on weekend nights.
The music is the piece people who have not been in a while tend to miss. Local acts, small room, no cover situation, a genuinely different use of the same space that served you a cortado eleven hours earlier.
The price point
Worth saying plainly, because it comes up constantly in reviews: this is one of the more affordable independent coffee shops in the area. Most of what is on offer sits comfortably under fifteen dollars, including the food.
Affordability is not a small thing for a business whose whole premise is that you should stay for three hours. A shop where a sitting costs twelve dollars is not a third place, whatever it says on its website. It is a transaction with chairs.
Parking is street and lot, both close. There are bike racks. They serve food across the day rather than a pastry case and nothing else.
Why people call it a downtown institution
Wake Forest went from 47,601 residents at the 2020 census to a Census Bureau estimate of 54,337 in 2023. Somewhere in that growth is a large group of people who moved here from a place where they had a spot, and who are looking for a new one.
Wake Forest Coffee Company has been that spot for a lot of them since 2008. The reviews are consistent about what does it: the baristas remember people, they will guess correctly at what you want, and the room does not push you out. One customer described coming for ten years and watching it improve the whole time, which is not the usual arc for a business that old.
There is a version of this town where the only coffee is a drive-through and a chain. That is not the version we got. Part of the reason is a 1919 grocery store on White Street where somebody decided the point was the conversation and the coffee was how you paid for the chair.
Wake Forest Coffee Company, 156 South White Street, Wake Forest. wakeforestcoffee.com