Firebirds fires up at Grove 98, a gun shop doubles its space, and a toy designer bets on Wake Forest

The 98 corridor gets its anchor restaurant, a 15-year-old retailer bets on South Main, and downtown keeps collecting reasons to walk around. Here’s the Wake Forest business news worth knowing this week.

Firebirds Wood Fired Grill opens at Grove 98

Firebirds Wood Fired Grill plans to open its Wake Forest restaurant by the end of September, according to the Wake Forest Business & Industry Partnership. The Charlotte-born chain has been cooking over open wood fires since 2000 and now runs more than 60 locations, but the Wake Forest restaurant at 1311 Grove Village Road gets a newly designed version of the concept. Expect the things the brand is known for: hand-cut aged steaks, wood-grilled seafood, the FIREBAR® with its weekday happy hour, and a patio built for October evenings.

The opening says as much about the corridor as the restaurant. Two years ago this stretch of Dr. Calvin Jones Highway was mostly dirt. Today Grove 98 in Wake Forest holds a run of new restaurants within a few hundred yards of each other: Torchy’s Tacos, CAVA, Dave’s Hot Chicken, Five Guys and Nothing Bundt Cakes are all open, and Firebirds gives the development its first full-service dinner house. For a town where the restaurant conversation used to start and end downtown, the list of restaurants in Wake Forest, NC now has a second center of gravity. Dinner reservations are recommended once the doors open, and the menu posts to the restaurant’s Wake Forest page along with curbside and delivery options.

Carolina Gunrunners doubles its space on South Main

After 15 years in business, Carolina Gunrunners has moved from Falls River Town Center in north Raleigh to 1209 S. Main Street, taking over a former auto parts store near the Main Street and 98 Bypass crossroads. The move nearly doubled the shop to 5,000 square feet. That’s enough room to bring its online sales operation and surplus inventory into the same building for the first time; the company previously leased a separate space just to hold them. “We’re now able to house everything under one roof,” co-owner Michael Jarvi told the WFBIP.

Founded in 2011, the federally licensed retailer sells handguns, shotguns, rifles, ammunition, knives, optics and accessories, with a large online storefront alongside the counter business. Jarvi says the extra square footage lets the shop actually display its inventory instead of cramming it, and he credits the town for making the landing easy. Local police response times made an impression too: when a falling product tripped the alarm late one night, officers were on the scene within two minutes. The shop is open Monday through Saturday.

Preztin sets up shop downtown

Alex Perez spent a decade designing toys for names like Fisher-Price and Jazwares. Now he’s building Preztin, his own studio on South White Street making original tabletop games, 3D-printed toys and collectible figures for grown-ups who take play seriously. His rule for everything the studio makes: “silly, clever, and unforgettable,” as he put it in a WFBIP profile this month. Perez plugged into the local startup scene through a Wake Forest Founders program at The Loading Dock and later pitched at one of the group’s events. The studio calls its output First Edition games and collectibles, aimed at the growing crowd of adult collectors the toy industry has learned to take seriously. A design veteran choosing a small downtown over a licensing deal is the kind of bet worth watching, and the first releases will tell us how it lands.

Smoked tacos settle in at the 535 Warehouse

If you haven’t walked the south end of White Street lately, Lil Hombre is reason to. The smoked-taco concept from Clayton opened its second location at 535 S. White Street in the 535 Warehouse, cooking proteins over live fire and folding them into a hybrid corn-and-flour tortilla pressed with cheese, in three styles: a lettuce, roasted salsa, cheddar and chipotle mayo combo, a traditional cilantro-salsa-onion version, and a fajita-style build with chipotle slaw, per Business Debut. Owner Jason Howard makes the marinades in house, the margaritas are hand-built, Mexican beers and frozen drinks round out the bar, and the kitchen runs until the food sells out. Doors open at 11 a.m. daily, with late Friday and Saturday hours. The 535 Warehouse project has been filling in around it, with Cardinal Bar and Pure Barre among the neighbors.

Coming to Rogers Branch Road

The Town of Wake Forest’s running list of new businesses points to the next cluster: 3605 Rogers Branch Road, where Anstead’s Cigar Barn (Suite 106), barre3 Fitness (Suite 104) and Pulp Juice & Smoothie Bar (Suite 105) are all in the pipeline. The barre3 studio is already hiring its founding instructor team, so an opening date shouldn’t be far behind. The same permit list runs from laundromats to imaging centers, which is roughly what a town growing this fast looks like on paper. We’ll add each of them to the directory when the doors open.

And the hospital push continues

Getting a hospital built in northern Wake County is still the town’s biggest open economic question. This month the WFBIP published a piece from Rep. Mike Schietzelt on the shortage of acute-care beds in the area, the proposed hospital campus in Wake Forest, and how North Carolina’s Certificate of Need laws decide where new hospital facilities can go. Not a ribbon-cutting yet. But the pressure is building, and every new restaurant and retailer on this list adds a little more.

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