Yumma Mediterranean Grill opened on Capital Boulevard, named for the owners’ mother

The name is the story. Yumma means mother, and the siblings who opened Yumma Mediterranean Grill on Capital Boulevard named the restaurant after theirs, then built the menu out of what she cooked.

The restaurant is open at 11216 Capital Blvd., Unit 106, in Wake Forest. WRAL’s Foodie News roundup on Sept. 11 flagged the opening and described the food as “fresh shawarma, kebabs, hummus and more.”

What they serve

It is fast casual, which in this category means you order at the counter, you pick a base, and somebody builds it in front of you. The menu runs to platters, wraps and appetizers, according to the restaurant’s site. Shawarma and kebabs anchor the protein side. Hummus anchors everything else.

The siblings describe the approach as food “made with love, fresh ingredients, and recipes passed down through generations,” which is the sort of line every family restaurant uses and which, in this case, comes with an actual family attached. The site says the whole point was to carry their mother’s way of cooking into a restaurant without losing it along the way.

Catering is available, and the restaurant is on DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub. For a new counter-service spot on a commuter road, being on all three from day one is a deliberate choice, not an afterthought.

Hours and the address you actually want

Yumma is closed Monday. It runs 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. The phone number is 919-435-0090.

One thing to sort out before you drive: two addresses are floating around. WRAL put the restaurant at 10016 Capital Blvd. near the Wake Forest Sam’s Club. The restaurant’s own contact page says 11216 Capital Blvd., Unit 106, and so do its Grubhub and Seamless listings. Go with 11216, and call ahead if you want to be certain. We will update this if the restaurant tells us otherwise.

Capital Boulevard keeps filling in

The 11000 and 12000 blocks of Capital Boulevard have become one of the busiest stretches of new commercial activity in town, and not in the way people usually mean when they say growth. This is not a new shopping center. It is existing strip space turning over, unit by unit, into things people use on a weeknight.

The Town of Wake Forest’s permit record shows how fast that corridor has moved this year. Warehouse BBQ took 12281 Capital Blvd. in June. The Wash House Laundromat was permitted at 12313 in July. NP Wake Forest, a medical practice, took 12217. Spectrum took a suite at 12516, where Sweet Traditions also changed hands. Vitamin Shoppe changed owners at 12616.

Add Yumma to that and you get a corridor that has gained a barbecue joint, a laundromat, a clinic, a vitamin shop under new management and a Mediterranean counter inside about eight months. None of those individually is a headline. Together they are the reason traffic on that stretch feels worse than it did last year.

It also puts the restaurant in a useful spot for more than just Wake Forest. Capital Boulevard is the road people from Rolesville, Youngsville and the northern end of Franklin County take home, and a counter-service place with a 9 p.m. close catches that traffic at exactly the hour when nobody wants to cook. The delivery apps extend that reach further. A restaurant in a strip center on a state highway is not a destination, but it does not need to be. It needs to be on the way.

Why fast casual Mediterranean keeps landing here

The category travels well to suburbs like this one for a few plain reasons. The food holds up in a delivery bag better than most, which matters when a third or more of the volume goes out the door. It reads as healthy without anybody having to say the word. It feeds a family with two adults who want different things, because the same grill produces a chicken plate and a falafel wrap without a second kitchen line.

And it fills a gap. Wake Forest has had a run of new restaurants this year, and we covered a batch of them in our Wake County restaurant roundup and in the wider map of 44 new businesses that opened here in 2026. Most of the new arrivals are barbecue, pizza, salad, Mexican and Salvadoran. The Mediterranean side of town has been thin.

What to order first

We have not eaten through the menu yet, so treat this as a starting point rather than a verdict. The shawarma is the item the restaurant leads with and the one WRAL named, which usually means it is the thing the kitchen is most confident about. Order it as a platter the first time rather than a wrap. A platter shows you the rice, the salad and the sauces all at once, and it tells you more about a new Mediterranean kitchen than anything else on the board.

Then get the hummus. Every place in this category lives or dies on it, and it is the fastest way to know whether the family recipe claim is doing real work or just sitting on the website.

Yumma Mediterranean Grill is in our directory under Restaurants & Food, with the rest of the Wake Forest listings. The full listing, with address, phone and hours, is here.

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