Most cafes have a basement. Almost none of them do anything with it. Sugar Magnolia’s basement has hosted hundreds of concerts.
The room downstairs
In 2018, the owners of Sugar Magnolia Cafe partnered with a Wake Forest resident named Mike Allen to turn the basement of their hundred-year-old White Street storefront into a live music venue. Allen had already been running a project to get original artists into storefronts around town. The cafe had already been putting performers in the upstairs dining room and had already run out of space doing it.
The result was Magnolia Roots Music Lounge. Bluegrass, country, singer-songwriter material, local and regional acts, played in a low-ceilinged basement room with folding chairs lined up and old show fliers papering the walls. The scale is the point. You are close enough to hear fingers on strings.
Allen’s broader project, the Wake Forest Listening Room, started in 2017 and hosted more than 300 performances in the space below Sugar Magnolia before eventually expanding its footprint elsewhere downtown. That is a serious number of shows for a basement in a town this size.
Then the cafe changed hands
In October 2019, Amy and John Stephens bought Sugar Magnolia Cafe and the music lounge with it.
They were not outside investors. They live in Wake Forest with their daughter, Raelyn, and both came out of food and beverage. John has close to two decades in the industry, including years as a general manager with Jersey Mike’s and four years owning his own franchise. He grew up in Raleigh, went to Ravenscroft, and moved to Chicago, where he met Amy, who was born and raised there. They decided to raise their daughter in North Carolina and married in Raleigh.
Buying a hundred-year-old cafe with an established identity is a specific kind of challenge. The temptation is to renovate it into your own thing. The Stephenses did not do that. Their own framing when they took over was that they wanted to enhance the cafe, not reinvent it, and six years on the tea service, the gift shop, the beer and wine, and the basement stage are all still there.
What it actually is
Calling Sugar Magnolia a cafe undersells the number of businesses operating inside one storefront.
It is a lunch spot. Salads, sandwiches, croissant-served things, a Mediterranean plate with olives, olive oil, and toasted flatbread. Crocks of pimento cheese and chicken salad with vegetables and gluten-free crackers. Cupcakes and shortbread bars that change constantly, recently including bourbon maple bacon and cinnamon roll cupcakes.
It is a tea house, and this is the part that surprises people. They do full tea service, and they do tea parties as an event, booked ahead. The tea list runs long: black, green, oolong, herbal, decaf.
It is a coffee shop with lattes.
It is a bar, in a small way. Beer, wine, and what the Facebook page cheerfully calls bubbly.
It is a shop. Locally produced art, jewelry, crafts, gifts.
And it is a venue.
Reviews on this last point are worth reading with some care. The tea service in particular draws strong opinions in both directions, including at least one detailed and unhappy Tripadvisor review from someone with high expectations about what an afternoon tea should be. The overall recommendation rate sits around 98% across several hundred Facebook reviews. Go in expecting a charming small-town cafe doing tea well rather than a hotel tea room, and the calibration will be right.
The building
219 South White Street, a hundred-year-old storefront in the downtown historic district. The Downtown Wake Forest Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002 and covers 25 contributing buildings put up between roughly 1890 and 1949.
The interior leans eclectic rather than restored-to-period. Local art on the walls, mismatched charm, the kind of room where you notice something new on a fourth visit. It photographs well, which is presumably why so many of the 168 photos on its Yelp page are of the room rather than the food.
Hours are limited and it is worth checking before you go. Closed Sunday and Monday, 10 to 3 on Tuesday, 10 to 4 Wednesday and Thursday, 10 to 5 Friday and Saturday. Music schedules run separately.
What the next chapter looks like
Six years into the Stephens era, the interesting thing about Sugar Magnolia is that the two halves have not collapsed into each other.
Plenty of cafes bolt on live music and end up with neither a good cafe nor a good venue. What Sugar Magnolia has is a daytime business that stands on its own and a separate room, with its own name and its own audience, running underneath it at night. People who come for the bluegrass may never eat a scone here. People who book a tea party may never go downstairs.
That is harder to pull off than it looks, and it is a large part of why a small White Street cafe has outlasted a change of ownership without losing what people came for.
Sugar Magnolia Cafe, 219 South White Street, Wake Forest. sugarmagnoliacafe.com