Shine and Dine Cafe opens for breakfast on South Main

The doors were supposed to open on 1 June. They opened on 25 August. Anybody who has tried to get a restaurant through a health department inspection will recognise the gap, and it is the only interesting thing about Shine & Dine Cafe that is not about food.

The cafe is open at 1318 S. Main St., Unit 108, in Wake Forest. WRAL’s Foodie News reported the grand opening on 25 August and described the menu as breakfast, bowls and traditional plates.

Who is behind it

Mina Luka and Wael Feloboss are the co-owners. They built it as a full-service restaurant rather than a counter, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a dining room that seats around 45.

The kitchen’s own description of what it does is American food with a Southern influence, which in this county can mean almost anything. What the early menu descriptions point at is a breakfast-forward operation: eggs and plates in the morning, bowls through the middle of the day, and a dinner service that runs later than most places in the same category.

The hours are the story

The opening hours announced before launch had the cafe running 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, closed Mondays. Call before you go, because pre-opening hours are the first thing a new restaurant adjusts once it sees where its trade actually is.

If those hours have held, they are unusual, and they are the reason to pay attention. A 6 a.m. open serves a commuter town properly. Wake Forest sends a large share of its working population south on Capital Boulevard every morning, and the window between 6 and 7 a.m. is badly served by almost everything else in town. A place that is genuinely open at six, with table service, is solving a real problem rather than joining a crowded category.

The 9 p.m. close on the other end is the more commercially interesting half. Breakfast restaurants that close at two are choosing to earn one revenue period a day out of a full lease. Running the same room from breakfast to dinner six days a week is harder on staff and considerably better on the economics, assuming the dinner trade shows up.

Where it sits on South Main

The 1318 S. Main address has changed hands before. The Town of Wake Forest’s new business permit record shows Shine & Dine at Suite 108 twice this year: once in March under an owner-change notation, and again in July as a restaurant permit. The June target and the August opening sit between those two filings, which is the paperwork trail of a build-out taking longer than planned.

South Main is not downtown, and it is not the Capital Boulevard strip either. It is the middle stretch, close enough to residential streets to catch neighbourhood trade and close enough to the through road to catch people passing. Randy’s Sewing Center took a suite at 1225 S. Main this year, and Suds City was permitted at 2208 S. Main, per the same town record. It is filling in as a working commercial street rather than a destination one.

The category it is walking into

Wake Forest has added restaurants at a rate we mapped in our look at the 44 new businesses that opened here in 2026. Most of the arrivals this year have been barbecue, pizza, Mexican, Salvadoran and Mediterranean. Sit-down breakfast has been thinner, and what exists tends to cluster at weekends.

That is the gap Shine & Dine is aimed at, and it is a better gap than it looks. Weekday breakfast is a habit business. People do not shop around for it the way they shop around for dinner, and a place that gets a commuter’s order right three times in a row tends to keep them for years. The trade-off is that habits are slow to form, so the first six months tell you very little.

What the delay actually tells you

Nearly three months between a target date and an opening is normal, and it is worth understanding why rather than reading it as a bad sign. By the owners’ own account before launch, the construction and equipment installation were finished and they were waiting on final health department permits. That is the ordinary shape of a restaurant build: the visible work finishes early, and the invisible work decides the date.

The practical lesson for anyone following new openings in this town is to treat announced dates as intentions. The town’s permit record is the more reliable signal, and even that runs ahead of doors opening, sometimes by months.

What we would order

We have not eaten our way through the menu, so treat this as a starting point. On a first visit to a new breakfast kitchen, order the plainest plate on the board: eggs, a side, toast. A kitchen that can time eggs properly at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday can do everything else. A kitchen that cannot will hide it under sauce on the more elaborate dishes.

Then come back at dinner, because that is the service with the most to prove and the least foot traffic supporting it. If the room is busy at seven in the evening on a weeknight, this one is going to work.

Shine & Dine Cafe is in our directory under Restaurants & Food, with the rest of the Wake Forest listings.