A bottle shop with 18 taps and the biggest patio in downtown Wake Forest

Downtown Wake Forest has picked up a lot of places to eat over the past two years. What it has not had much of is somewhere to sit outside with a beer for three hours and nobody rushing you out. The Hideaway, at 308 E. Roosevelt Ave., is built around that gap.

The shop opened after the Town of Wake Forest issued a permit to The Hideaway Wake Forest LLC in July, listed on the town’s running record of new businesses under the restaurant and bar category. It is a hybrid: part bottle shop, part taproom, part backyard. You can buy a four pack and leave, or you can pour something from one of the taps and stay until close.

What is actually on tap

The numbers are the pitch. The Hideaway keeps 18 rotating draft lines, more than 200 cold craft beers in the coolers, and more than 300 wines, according to the shop’s own site. The draft list moves, so the beer you had in August is probably gone. The bottle and can side covers the range you would expect, with IPAs and stouts and lagers, plus reds and whites for the people who came along and do not drink beer.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A lot of taprooms treat wine as an afterthought, with two reds and a white nobody has heard of. Three hundred labels is a different kind of commitment, and it changes who walks in the door. The Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce lists the business as a retail craft beer and wine shop in downtown, and describes the bottle side as “a carefully-curated bottle shop.”

The shop is family run. Mike Greenberg is listed as the manager on the chamber directory.

The patio is the whole point

The Hideaway claims “the Biggest Outdoor Patio in DT Wake Forest,” and whether or not you want to referee that against every other spot on White Street, the patio is clearly what the business is organized around. It is dog friendly. There is live music every Saturday evening, usually local acts. Karaoke started in September.

They also rent the space for private events, and wine tastings are being scheduled. For a downtown that has been trying for years to give people a reason to stay past dinner, that mix does more work than another restaurant would.

The event rental piece will matter to anyone planning a birthday, a team thing, or a post-game gathering this fall. A shop with a patio and a tap wall handles a group of 30 without a restaurant buyout, and it does not need a caterer to say yes. Our read: that is the part of the business most likely to keep it busy through the winter, when the patio stops doing the heavy lifting.

Hours, and the one thing to plan around

The Hideaway is closed Monday and Tuesday. It opens at 1 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday and runs to 9 p.m., opens at noon Friday and Saturday and runs to 10 p.m., and opens 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday. If you are used to walking up to a bottle shop on a Monday evening, that is the one to remember.

Draft updates go out through the shop’s social accounts and through Untappd, which is the practical way to check what is pouring before you drive over.

Where this fits in downtown

The Hideaway is not the only new thing on that side of town. The same town permit list shows Railway Smoke and Beverage at 306 S. White St., The Planted Bean at 149 S. White St., Magpie and Crow at 143 Wait Ave., and Aimz Eatery at 714 N. White St., all permitted this year. That is four more front doors within a short walk, and it is the reason downtown evenings feel different than they did in 2024.

We mapped the wider pattern earlier today in our look at the 44 new businesses that opened in Wake Forest this year. The short version: the growth is splitting between the Rogers Branch Road corridor out near Heritage and the older downtown blocks. The Hideaway lands firmly in the second group, and it is the kind of business that only works downtown, where people are already walking.

What we would check before you go

Two phone numbers are in circulation for the shop. The business site lists 919-263-4634. The chamber directory lists a 954 area code number, which is a South Florida prefix and is likely an owner’s mobile that was used on the membership form. Use the 919 number.

Beyond that, the practical advice is the usual for a rotating tap list: if you are going for something specific, check first. If you are going to sit on the patio with whatever is good, do not bother.

The bigger read

Bottle shops that also pour have quietly become the default third place in small North Carolina downtowns, because they clear the low bar a bar has to clear and the low bar a retail shop has to clear at the same time. You do not need a kitchen. You do not need a full ABC permit for spirits. You need a cooler, a tap wall, and somewhere to sit. Wake Forest now has one on Roosevelt with room for a crowd, and a Saturday music schedule that gives people a reason to pick a night.

The Hideaway is listed in our directory under Bars & Breweries, alongside the rest of the Wake Forest listings. You can find the full listing, with hours, address and contact details, here.

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