Walk East Chatham Street in downtown Cary this week and you will pass two sets of freshly hung signage on the same block. One marks a dining room that seats 75 people inside a building that pumped gas for most of the twentieth century. The other belongs to a Baja-style grill making its second stop in the Triangle. They opened three days apart, on the same street, and neither one had anything to do with the other's timeline.
That kind of overlap does not happen by accident. Opening a restaurant takes months of lease negotiation, permitting, and buildout before a single plate goes out. Two independently owned businesses landing on the same stretch of Chatham Street in the same week means two separate groups of people looked at that specific corner and decided, on their own, that it was worth the bet right now.
The Cheerful Place on the Corner, Again
The building at 107 E. Chatham Street, at the corner of Chatham and Academy, has been part of downtown Cary's story since before most of downtown existed in its current form. A filling station stood on that corner as early as 1934, back when East Chatham was little more than a country lane, according to historian Carla Michaels of Friends of the Page-Walker, Cary's historical society. An ad for the station in that year's Cary High School yearbook described it as "the cheerful place on the corner." K.M. Lloyd took over the site in 1951 and opened a modernized Amoco service station there, and most recently the same address housed Gurkan's Downtown Auto Repair.
That building is now Lloyd's Full Service, which opened its doors and patio on August 26. The name and the tagline are a direct nod to K.M. Lloyd's original station, and so is the design: the sweeping ceiling of the old service bays stays exposed, and the waiting room's lower ceiling now holds an intimate dining area near the hospitality stand.
The restaurant comes from Early Bird Night Owl, the hospitality group already running The Mayton and its restaurant Peck & Plume in downtown Cary, along with The Durham hotel. In the kitchen is chef Dennis Bernard, who spent roughly 15 years in Chicago with One Off Hospitality, the group connected to chef Paul Kahan, working stations at Blackbird and Big Star before becoming chef de cuisine at Dove's Luncheonette and later The Publican. In 2016 he was a finalist for Best Chef de Cuisine at Chicago's Jean Banchet Awards.
The opening menu leans into the building's history as much as the chef's resume does. Alongside linguine with clams, a grilled sirloin with chimichurri, and garlic lemon roasted chicken thighs, there is a hot dog called the Corner Dog, a tribute to the hot dogs once served at Ashworth Drugs, a longtime landmark that used to sit across the street. Most entrees run $20 to $26, with a "meat and two" section anchored by a $34 sirloin plate. The patio, built for roughly 100 more diners, includes a retrofitted delivery van turned into an outdoor bar. For now, hours are Wednesday through Friday, 4 to 9 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday added for both lunch and dinner. Weekday lunch and weekend brunch are planned to follow this fall.
The site itself was acquired by the same ownership group behind The Mayton: Chatham Street Commercial's Jordan Gussenhoven and George Jordan, Bill Zahn of Triangle Real Estate Company, Steve and Grant Knier of Monument Property Group, and investors Grant and Austin Yarber. It is not their first adaptive reuse project downtown. Chatham Street Commercial also handled the relocation and restoration of the Williams House, a structure dating to 1938 that now holds a coffee and brewhouse, a champagne bar, and a bridal shop. Restoring a 75-year-old service station instead of clearing the lot and building new is a more expensive route, and it is one this group has clearly chosen more than once.
A Few Doors Down, a Different Kind of Bet
Three days later, on August 29, a very different kind of restaurant opens at 147 E. Chatham Street. K38 Baja Grill will be its seventh location overall and its second in the Triangle, following its debut in downtown Raleigh's Seaboard Station.
K38 was founded in 1993 by Josh Vach, who named the restaurant after a specific spot on the coastal highway down Mexico's Baja Peninsula, kilometer 38, a surf break he encountered on trips down the coast. More than three decades later, the concept has grown into a fast-casual chain built around fish tacos, house-made queso, and elote.
Where Lloyd's is a single, historic, chef-driven restoration, K38 is a proven, replicable format making its second appearance in this market after testing the concept in Raleigh first. Both bets landed on the same block in the same week.
Two Very Different Owners, One Very Specific Window
Neither business needed the other to succeed, and neither timed its opening around the other's calendar. That is what makes the overlap worth noticing. A hospitality group willing to spend extra to preserve a seventy-five-year-old gas station, and a seven-unit regional chain expanding on a proven format, arrived at the same conclusion independently: this particular block of East Chatham Street, right now, is where they wanted to be.
That is a different kind of signal than a single announcement. One restaurant opening on a block could be a coincidence of available real estate. Two, arriving within a three-week window, from operators with no reason to coordinate, says something about the block itself rather than about either business individually.
The Corner Isn't Fenton, and That's the Point
If you have followed Cary's restaurant scene at all over the past few years, the name that usually comes up first is Fenton, the roughly $1 billion, 92-acre mixed-use district that opened in 2022 at the I-40 and Cary Towne Boulevard interchange. Fenton is still adding names. Sweet Paris Crêperie & Café is planning a late-August opening at 1 Fenton Main Street, its first Triangle location, joining a roster that already includes M Sushi, Ford Fry's Superica, Doc B's, Colletta, Sports & Social, and roughly 20 retail stores from Arhaus to Kendra Scott. The Pagemore Hotel and an Eastern Mediterranean restaurant called Barouk are both still to come there in 2027.
Fenton and downtown Chatham Street are not competing for the same thing. Fenton was planned as a district from the ground up, leased out storefront by storefront to national names inside a master plan. Chatham Street is the compact grid Cary residents already walk through on the way to the farmers market or the library, filling back in one recycled building at a time. Both are real. But if you only pay attention to Fenton's announcements, you would miss the story of a seventy-five-year-old service station getting a second life on foot, in the older part of town.
What Else Is Already on That Block
Chatham Street's dining scene did not appear overnight for either of these new arrivals. The block and the streets around it already carry:
- Faulisi Caffe and Big Dom's Bagels for coffee and breakfast
- Hank's Downtown Dive, Lawrence Barbecue, and Saap for lunch and dinner
- Bond Brothers and Sidebar for a drink after work
- Juliet Books, an independent bookstore that opened July 28 just off Chatham at 200 Parkthrough Street, run by Marcie Montague and a business partner
Parking has also caught up with the growth. Two new public decks, on Cedar Street and Academy Street, now offer more than 500 free spaces within two blocks of Lloyd's front door, which matters if you have avoided downtown Cary on a Friday night in the past out of habit.
None of this means the corner of Chatham and Academy is destined to become the next Fenton, and it does not need to be. It is doing something Fenton's master plan cannot: proving that the oldest, smallest-scale part of downtown Cary is still worth restoring rather than replacing. The gas station that once welcomed travelers passing through on Highways 1 and 64 is a restaurant again. The corner is lit up in the evenings instead of sitting quiet. If you have driven past that intersection for years without much thought, this is the week to walk it instead.
If you are curious about what else is changing in the neighborhoods around Cary, or you just want someone who pays close attention to this kind of local detail when the time comes to buy or sell, Kendra Kohut would love to hear from you. Let's Connect.
