Restaurant Recos for Durham NC

[Robert_Dentice]

Nice! I’ve heard from wine friends here about Oakwood Pizza Box for wine, especially Champagne, but haven’t been. (Technically, these are in Raleigh and the rural outskirts of Chapel Hill not Durham, but it’s effectively one metro area and no more than a 45 minute drive or so from any one place to another.) Also good to hear about Fearrington - it has a special place in our local culinary history and should be as good as this.

Still VERY confused by the entire geography of this area.

[Mark_Golodetz]

Congratulations, a great school.


brewery bhavana in Raleigh according to my son is fantastic.

[Stan_Y]

Daughter and son-in-law just relocated to Raleigh (north side), so looking for recs. They like wine but are more into the brewery scene.

Nathan V. turned me back on to Stanbury, which is like a very short walk from Oakwood Pizza Box. Small plates, lots of flavor, quite good. I need to ask if they’ll let me bring wine. I’m a little north of north Raleigh, similar distance to Durham and downtown Raleigh, and go there to eat…not so much out this way.

[Stan_Y]

Still VERY confused by the entire geography of this area.

These were very separate, distinct areas when my parents grew up here in the 40s and 50s…Raleigh the state capital with NCSU but small/quaint and boring, Durham with a rather more vibrant business community (“Black Wall Street”) and Duke, Chapel Hill a very small college town. In the 1960s a special zoning area of several thousand acres in the middle, near the airport, was set aside as Research Triangle Park for tech business development. In the 80s and 90s, it was the location of the 2nd largest sites for companies like IBM, Cisco, and GlaxoSmithKline; as some of these companies have wound down, Apple and Google have just announced that labs with several thousand employees are being built. The area as a whole is still quiet and boring compared with a major metro area but that is part of its charm and quality of life, even as things start to build out and as congestion increases. Good place to raise a family.

[Andrew_Kotowski]

Also referred to as the “Triangle” (Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill) with “Research Triangle Park” or RTP being the center of a lot of the tech. Red Hat was founded in Raleigh (IBM acquired), Lenovo is down the street in Morrisville and SAS is headquartered in Cary, which is a very up-and-coming area.