Drive South White Street on a Thursday night in October and you will find a crowd waiting outside Town Hall for a walking tour about train wrecks and restless spirits. Drive two miles east on Highway 98 the same evening and you will find a parking lot full of cars angled toward a restaurant that did not exist here a month ago. Both are Wake Forest. Neither looks like the other, and that gap is new.
For most of this town's history, "going out" in Wake Forest meant one thing: White Street, or somewhere close to it. That stopped being true sometime in the last two years, and 2026 is the year it became obvious. The town now runs on two separate dining corridors that opened, reopened, or expanded almost entirely independently of each other. One is a century-old grid of storefronts recycling its own history. The other is a Wegmans-anchored development building from scratch. What nobody has done yet is move the town's actual calendar of gatherings to the newer one.
The Corridor That's Rebuilding Itself From the Inside
Walk South White Street this fall and the most interesting new option isn't new at all. Las Margaritas served Wake Forest for 26 years at 111 South White Street before closing. It sat empty for two years. This year the space reopened under new ownership after a full remodel, rebranded as Las Mas Mexican Food & Cantina, occupying the same address that fed three decades of downtown regulars.
A few blocks over, the building that spent years as a Hardee's on East Roosevelt Avenue has a new tenant too. Gym Tacos, which already operates locations in Benson, Greenville, Raleigh, and Durham, picked 216 East Roosevelt Avenue for its Wake Forest debut, moving into a building most residents still associate with drive-through breakfast.
Neither of these is a groundbreaking. Both are older buildings finding a new use, in the same footprint they've always occupied. That's the pattern on this side of town: downtown doesn't clear lots, it recasts them.
The Corridor That's Building From an Empty Field
Highway 98 tells a different story, and Firebirds Wood Fired Grill is the clearest example landing this month. The chain is preparing to open its newest location inside the Grove 98 development by the end of September, and this isn't a small operator testing a market. Firebirds will be the company's 74th restaurant, part of a national footprint expected to hit 76 locations by the close of 2026. A brand with only a handful of openings left on its 2026 calendar picked Wake Forest's Highway 98 corridor for one of them.
That corridor has been building toward this for a while. Grove 98's earlier phases have already added Whataburger, whose Wake Forest location became Wake County's first when it opened this past March near the development's anchor grocer. The northwest quadrant of Grove 98 is fully leased, and past tenant announcements from developer Stiles Corporation list Dave's Hot Chicken, Five Guys, Chopt, Piada, and BIBIBOP Asian Grill among the names that filled out its second retail phase. None of it is downtown. All of it is new construction along a highway bypass built specifically to carry this kind of traffic.
Here's the difference in plain terms:
| Corridor | What Arrived in 2026 | Building Type |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown, South White St. and East Roosevelt Ave. | Las Mas Mexican Food & Cantina (reopened space), Gym Tacos (reused space) | Existing storefronts, new tenants |
| Highway 98 / Grove 98 | Whataburger (opened March), Firebirds Wood Fired Grill (opening by end of September) | New construction |
One side of town is filling in old rooms. The other is filling in a master plan.
The Part of Town That Still Throws the Parties
Here's what doesn't split the same way: the fall calendar. Everything Wake Forest has scheduled for residents this season runs through downtown or the parks immediately around it, and Grove 98 isn't on any of it yet.
The season's Concerts in the Park series wrapped its 2026 run on September 13 at the Joyner Park amphitheater, with the local group Band Next Door closing out a summer of free Sunday-evening shows. The Wake Forest Public Art Commission held its Community Celebration of the Arts on September 12 at the Renaissance Centre, with a puppet show from Grey Seal Puppets as the headline act. Good Neighbor Day filled Joyner Park on September 19, and the Wake Forest CROP Hunger Walk stepped off from the Birthplace Museum on September 20.
What's still ahead this fall is downtown too:
- Spirits of Wake Forest ghost walks return Thursday through Saturday nights, October 1 through 30, hosted by Wake Forest Downtown, Inc. in partnership with Firebox Theatre Company. Tours run about 75 minutes through the historic business district along South White Street, starting outside Town Hall.
- Wake Forest Pride Fest takes over East Owen Avenue and Brooks Street on October 10, its third year running, with the town closing that stretch of road for the afternoon.
Grove 98's own marketing has talked about adding concerts, movies on the green, and art fairs to its lifestyle mix since the project's earliest phases. None of that has landed on this fall's actual events calendar. Right now Grove 98 is where you eat and shop. Downtown is still where the town gathers on purpose.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you're deciding where to eat on a given night, the honest answer depends on what you're after. Want the newest thing in town, full stop? That's Highway 98 this month, where Firebirds opens with a scratch kitchen and wood-fired steaks in a corridor that didn't exist a decade ago. Want a plate of food attached to a building with history? Las Mas is back in the same White Street storefront that fed Wake Forest for 26 years, and Gym Tacos just gave an old Hardee's a second life two blocks away.
If you're deciding where to spend a Saturday, there's no real choice to make yet. The ghost walks, Pride Fest, the summer concert series that just wrapped, the arts celebration, the hunger walk. All of it runs through downtown's few blocks and the parks that border them. Grove 98 has the newest kitchens in town. It doesn't have a single date on the fall calendar.
That's worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who plans a weekend around what's happening rather than just where to park. Wake Forest's two halves are growing at the same time, but they're growing into different jobs. One handles dinner. The other still handles the town.
If you're weighing a move within Wake Forest or into it, that split between dining corridors and gathering places is exactly the kind of local texture that doesn't show up in a listing photo. Ensemble Properties works this market block by block and can walk you through which side of town fits how you actually want to live. List With Ensemble.
