An institution reopens, a Michelin pitmaster picks Raleigh Iron Works, and smoked rolls head to Apex

Quiet week in the six towns, so we widened the lens. Across Wake County the restaurant news is anything but quiet: a 90-year-old Raleigh institution is coming back from the dead, a Michelin-recognized pitmaster picked Raleigh Iron Works, and a father-son roll shop is bringing its smoker to Apex. Here’s the county roundup.

42nd Street Oyster Bar rises again

Few closings stung Raleigh like 42nd Street Oyster Bar going dark in March 2025 after more than 90 years on West Jones Street, a dining room that seated state legislators and anniversary couples at the same oyster counter. Now it’s coming back: a reopening of the institution at 508 W. Jones Street is in the works for this fall, per This Is Raleigh’s tracking of the year’s openings. Revivals of beloved rooms tend to become the most-argued-about openings of their year, and this one, with 2,400 people a month still searching the restaurant’s name a year and a half after it closed, will be no exception.

Lewis Barbecue brings a Michelin nod to Raleigh Iron Works

Charleston pitmaster John Lewis, fresh off a Bib Gourmand distinction from the Michelin Guide, is opening a Raleigh location of Lewis Barbecue at the Salvage Yard, phase two of the Raleigh Iron Works development, Axios reported. The numbers are serious: more than 8,000 square feet of restaurant plus a 1,600-square-foot commercial smokehouse for the Texas-style brisket that made his name in Charleston and Greenville. He’ll have company; the Salvage Yard’s tenant list already includes Triangle Rock Club, NOCO Brewery from the Bond Brothers, Cannonball Music Hall, Peach Lab, Mami Nora’s and Tilden’s Car Care.

Longleaf Swine heads north

Raleigh’s own Longleaf Swine, the whole-hog operation with a 5,000-strong monthly search following of its own, is opening a second location at 7701 Lead Mine Road in north Raleigh this fall, taking over the old Sawmill Tap Room, a space that closed in 2023 and has sat empty since. Between a Michelin-recognized Texas brisket house and a homegrown whole-hog second act arriving in the same season, north Raleigh’s barbecue argument is about to get much better sourced, and Wake Forest sits fifteen minutes from both.

A Parisian cafe for The Exchange, and tacos beside smashburgers at Poyner Place

Cafe Royale opens this September at The Exchange in the former Optimist coffee space, sharing a courtyard with Capulet, and it comes from the owner of Peregrine, Capulet, Watts & Ward and Rosebud, per This Is Raleigh. The plan reads like a Left Bank daydream: espresso and tea by day, champagne, dessert cocktails, pastries and cheese boards by night. Meanwhile at the Shoppes at Poyner Place, La Sultana Kitchen has opened at 5821 Poyner Village Parkway beside the new Nash & Smashed, WRAL’s foodie column reports, giving that corner of north Raleigh two brand-new reasons to skip cooking in one strip. Poyner Place sits just off Capital Boulevard on the Wake Forest side of the beltline, which makes both spots an easy detour on the commute home.

Also on the county radar

The coming-soon board is crowded behind these. NC Triangle Dining’s running tracker lists Jaggers, the burgers-and-chicken concept, for Glenwood Avenue; Basic Brewing at The Platform and Voodoo Brewing on Fayetteville Street, both pouring by year’s end; Lina’s Bakery & Café on Falls of Neuse; Kokoro Ramen downtown; Mikey’s Pizzeria on Bale Street; Lucky AF sushi on Ridge Road; and Level 99, the entertainment concept, at Crabtree Valley Mall. Not all of them will hit their dates. Enough will that the spring version of this roundup is already writing itself.

Legacy Rolls expands to Apex

Down in the southwest corner of the county, father-son duo Jerry and Justin Canada are bringing Legacy Rolls, their Spring Lake-based fast-casual concept, to Apex, per News & Observer reporting cited in the same WRAL roundup. Apex has been one of the county’s fastest-growing towns for a decade, and its restaurant roster keeps drafting behind the rooftops the same way Wake Forest’s does; nearly 600 people a month search for Apex, NC restaurants, and the answer list keeps getting longer.

What’s in it for the six towns

County openings shape home-town business in ways that show up later. Every regional operator that succeeds in Raleigh becomes a candidate for a second or third location in our towns; Longleaf Swine proving a north Raleigh room works is exactly how concepts end up eyeing Wake Forest and Rolesville next, the way Lil Hombre graduated from Clayton to the 535 Warehouse and Legacy Rolls is graduating from Spring Lake to Apex now. The Grove 98 corridor exists because operators watched the rooftops and each other. When we cover the county, we’re reading the same scouting reports the restaurants do, a season early.

Why we’re watching the county

Wake Forest readers eat in Raleigh, work in Cary and take visiting parents wherever the food is best, so when the news in our six towns runs slow, we’ll widen to the county rather than stretch thin stories. The pattern this week rhymes with home: institutions getting second lives, pitmasters following rooftops, and fast-casual concepts picking suburban main streets over mall pads. It’s the same playbook we watched fill the Grove 98 corridor, running at county scale, and with new-restaurant searches for Raleigh sitting at a very winnable difficulty, this beat is one the magazine intends to own. When any of these openings put a business inside our coverage towns, it gets a directory listing the day the doors open. Know about an opening closer to home that we should have first? Send us the tip.