Pinehurst Is Having Two Restaurant Booms at Once, and Most Locals Only Notice One

Walk into the Pinehurst Track Restaurant on a Saturday morning and the first thing you'll be told, gently, is that the register doesn't take cards. It never has. The blueberry pancakes are the same ones regulars have been ordering for close to three decades, and even though the place changed hands last year, the new owners weren't interested in changing much else. Casey Parrish, who bought the restaurant with her partner Harry Arsi, put it simply when a local outlet asked what they planned to do with the place: "If it's not broke, why fix it?"

That's one Pinehurst. Across town, inside the Main Clubhouse at Pinehurst Resort, a restaurant called Wiregrass opened its doors for the first time on April 29, serving a farm-to-table menu built around ingredients from neighboring farms. Around the same time, PL8TE Southern Table started rolling out a daily biscuit buffet at the Pinehurst No. 8 clubhouse, six to nine thirty every morning. Two brand-new restaurants, same season, same small town, and neither one has anything to do with the other.

That's the thing worth understanding about Pinehurst right now. There are two restaurant scenes expanding here at the same time, on two different sides of a line that most people who live here never think to draw, and if you only pay attention to one side, it can genuinely look like nothing's changing.

Two new restaurants, one address that isn't really the Village

The resort's side of the ledger has been busy. Along with Wiregrass and PL8TE, the Deuce added breakfast service on April 23, and the Carolina Dining Room closed on May 6 to begin a full renovation that won't reopen until late December, with 1895 Grille at The Holly picking up dinner service in the meantime. The spa closed in mid-June and won't reopen until October. None of this is secret. Pinehurst Resort posts it on its own resort updates page, because most of it is aimed at hotel guests and members, not at someone walking their dog past the clubhouse on a Tuesday.

That's the pattern worth noticing: the restaurants opening on resort property are built around overnight stays, golf packages, and dining plans. They're real, they're new, and they're genuinely good additions if you're the kind of local who plays No. 8 or hosts out-of-town guests at the hotel. But they aren't the restaurants a Village resident is popping into for a Tuesday dinner, because they aren't really built for that.

The Village grew too, just under a different roof

While the resort was opening kitchens, the historic Theatre Building on Cherokee Road quietly finished turning into something closer to a small food hall. Lisi Italian started as a single dinner restaurant from Jim and Mickey Reale, named for Jim's grandmother Letizia, known to family as "Lisi." In 2021 they added The Market at Lisi next door, a counter for sandwiches, wine, and Italian imports open from early morning. In 2023 they opened Augie's at Lisi Market, a cocktail bar tucked into the same footprint. Three concepts, one building, four years, all still walkable to each other and to Market Square. You can read the family's own account of how it came together on Lisi's site.

The Track Restaurant's ownership change belongs to this same side of the ledger. Parrish and Arsi took over on April 1 of last year, with previous owner Tracy Cormier staying on as manager through the transition, according to the local writeup on the handoff. At the time, the new owners said they'd stretch hours from noon to 2 p.m. starting that May. The restaurant's more recently updated hours listing still shows Tuesday through Sunday, 6:30 a.m. to noon, so that extension doesn't appear to have stuck. The menu hasn't changed. The cash-only policy hasn't changed. What changed is who's behind the counter, and that's the kind of update that matters to the people who actually eat there every week and would notice nothing else about it.

Down the street, Drum & Quill keeps doing what it's done for years: live music most nights, a patio that welcomes dogs, and a reputation locals have voted on directly through Best of the Pines. It isn't new this year, but it's the steady anchor the newer Village additions are building around.

Same season, two different builds

Set side by side like this, the split is obvious. Lived day to day, it isn't, because almost nobody crosses back and forth between the two columns in the same week.

The calendar that belongs to neither side

There's a third category of Pinehurst life that doesn't sit on either side of that property line, because it isn't a restaurant at all. It's the recurring civic calendar that both resort employees and Village old-timers show up for, usually because it's free and outdoors.

• Sandhills Farmers Market, Wednesdays from 3 to 6 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., at James W. Tufts Memorial Park. Wednesdays run as "What's For Dinner Wednesday," built around picking up a meal's worth of produce and protein in one stop. Details are posted on the Village of Pinehurst's own event page.
• Live After 5, Fridays at the Village Arboretum from 5:15 to 9 p.m., free, with food trucks and kids' activities. The 2026 season opened April 11 with local artist Cierra Doll, and past Fridays have featured acts like the Parks Brothers Band and Whiskey Pines.
• Cars & Coffee, the first Sunday of every month from 9 to 11 a.m., hosted by the Sandhills Motoring Club right in the Village.
• Walking Mindfully, a guided meditation walk led by Eve Gaskell, also the first Sunday of the month, from 2 to 3 p.m. Same day as Cars & Coffee, opposite end of the emotional spectrum, both listed on The Pines Times' Pinehurst events page.

None of this belongs to the resort or to any single restaurant group. It's run by the Village, by the Sandhills Motoring Club, by an independent meditation guide, by farmers who show up twice a week regardless of who owns the Track Restaurant that month. It's the one part of Pinehurst life where the two restaurant tracks actually stand in the same field at the same time, usually holding a taco from a food truck.

Why the two tracks don't cross

None of this is a coincidence or an oversight. Resort dining exists to serve people who are staying somewhere on the property for a few nights and want a full slate of options without leaving. Village dining exists to serve people who live within walking distance and want somewhere to be on a Tuesday that doesn't require a tee time. Both groups are growing this year. Neither one is really competing with the other, because they were never trying to serve the same dinner.

That's worth knowing if you've lived here a while and felt like Pinehurst was standing still. It isn't. It's growing on two separate tracks at once, and the only place they reliably overlap is a Friday evening lawn at the Arboretum or a Wednesday farmers market table. If you've only been checking one side, the other one has been quietly getting more interesting without you.

Brittany Paschal grew up in Moore County and still keeps close tabs on which corners of it are changing and which aren't, whether that's a restaurant lease changing hands on Cherokee Road or a renovation timeline at the resort. If you're weighing a move within Pinehurst, or just curious what a home in the Village side of town is worth these days, you can explore the Pinehurst neighborhood page or reach out directly through B. Paschal Co. to get exclusive access to her private listings before they hit the wider market.