Cacao beans have more than tripled in price since 2020. Commercial equipment costs are surging under new tariffs. And when Escazú’s lease came up for renewal last December, the Raleigh chocolate shop’s landlord proposed a 35 percent rent hike.
But rising expenses aren’t the only challenge facing owner duo Tiana Young and Danielle Centeno, who opened Escazú in 2008. Since the pandemic, they’ve noticed a fundamental shift in how customers shop.
“Being tucked away somewhere used to be a plus, but now it feels like a con,” Young says. Escazú has stood on Blount Street for 15 years, operating from a quiet storefront with ample parking. “People are just not coming to a one-off store. They want to go somewhere where they can do all the things.”
What’s being built and what people are attracted to, Young has observed, are “clusters of things,” from Cary’s gleaming mixed-use Fenton development to the industrial-chic Raleigh Iron Works to Person Street Plaza’s walkable hub of shops and cafés.
For all those reasons—plus wanting a space where customers can see the chocolate-making process through glass windows—Escazú is relocating to Raleigh’s Gateway Plaza this June. The 1960s-era shopping center sits behind a Greyhound station off Capital Boulevard.
They’re not the only businesses making the move. Fiction Kitchen, the vegan restaurant that stood on Dawson Street in downtown Raleigh for over a decade, cuts the ribbon on its new permanent location on May 14 in Gateway Plaza. Also opening May 14 in the plaza is Mala Pata, a Latin American restaurant with an adjacent mezcal bar called Peyote. And there’s an unannounced restaurant concept that is expected to take over the former Fine Folk space in the coming months, reportedly from well-established operators in Raleigh.
When that concept moves in, it will be the first time since the plaza’s 2018 revitalization that every unit will be filled.
So what’s behind this clustering trend? Has the pandemic permanently changed how and where people spend their money? Centeno theorizes that it’s in part reflective of Raleigh’s changing demographics. Since 2020, the Raleigh metro area has expanded at nearly four times the national rate, growing by 10.2 percent to reach 1.6 million people by 2024.
“When we all reemerged from our houses, these new people became part of the mix, and it changed the customer dynamic,” says Centeno. This influx of newcomers, combined with shifting consumer habits, has created both challenge and opportunity.
But relocating to a busier commercial district isn’t merely about visibility. For Centeno and other Gateway Plaza newcomers, there’s a deeper calculus at work. After weathering pandemic shutdowns and supply chain chaos, these business owners are looking for security in numbers. They’re looking to build resilience in a world where another crisis feels just around the corner.
Planning With the Past In Mind
Gateway Plaza was originally anchored by a Winn-Dixie grocery store. It changed hands several times over the decades and underwent the typical decay of mid-century strip malls before being revitalized in the 2010s and acquired by its current owner, Loden Properties.
The shopping center has a less fussy feel than other developments that have sprung up around Wake County. Centeno says she and Young like that the plaza isn’t “as rigid as some other places, where they want it to look homogenous.”
Angela Salamanca—the longtime Raleigh restaurateur who’s opening Mala Pata with partners Marshall Davis, with whom she runs Gallo Pelón, Ex-Voto, and Patty Boy, and Eric Montagne and Zack Gragg, who have previously worked together at places like Locals Seafood and Standard Beer + Food—says Gateway “looks different than a lot of the other places that have popped up around downtown, that are maybe a little bit more manicured.” Fiction Kitchen owner Caroline Morrison, who grew up in Durham and attended Meredith College in Raleigh, says the plaza used to be one of her “favorite thrift store areas.”
The plaza currently houses the bars Mordecai Beverage Co. and Natural Science Bar; the casual Japanese eatery Miso Ramen; Union Special, a bakery with a large wholesale component; and a music store, a game shop, a hair salon, a hot yoga studio, and a large co-working space, almost all of which are locally owned.
This mix creates a natural ecosystem where customers can spend a full day. There are shared outdoor seating areas and a stage in the parking lot. But some of the most innovative community-building is happening indoors, among the businesses themselves.
At the east end of the plaza, Mala Pata and Fiction Kitchen are pioneering a space-sharing arrangement: they’re sharing restrooms, a dishwashing station, and—despite the fact that Fiction Kitchen is fully vegan while Mala Pata specializes in dishes like carnitas tacos and fish cooked in chile broth—a large walk-in cooler.
They’ve established clear boundaries to make it work. Fiction Kitchen has the front part of the walk-in, eliminating the need to navigate through Mala Pata’s meat products. Fiction Kitchen’s kitchen floor is painted bright green and Mala Pata’s burnt orange, with a clear border where the two meet. (“There’s no one cutting through our kitchen with a tray of chicken,” Morrison clarifies.)
This arrangement emerged from the food hall experiences of Mala Pata’s partners, who, between the four of them, operate Ex-Voto, Patty Boy, and Locals Seafood at Durham Food Hall. (Locals also previously had a stall at Transfer Co. Food Hall in Raleigh.)
At the Durham Food Hall, where the INDY reported in 2023 on extensive operational and management issues, “there were some things that weren’t really thought through, with so many people working in shared spaces,” Salamanca says. The lessons from those experiences informed how Mala Pata approached its current collaboration.
The arrangement affords efficiencies that not only lower day-to-day costs, like dishwasher labor, but provide built-in flexibility in case of emergency.
Mala Pata’s menu is centered around masa and agave, and its owners put a lot of thought into representing that in the main dining room: there are custom corn-husk lamps from Colombia and a massive branch salvaged from a 30-year-old agave plant. But they also designed with contingency plans in mind. If disaster strikes, Peyote, the tiny seven-seat mezcal bar tucked into a breezeway beside the restaurant, can function as a compact headquarters for takeout service.
“It’s our solution if we ever have another pandemic,” Salamanca says. “It’s a smaller footprint. We can push as much food as we can, and it can be done by very little staff.”
Fiction Kitchen’s move from downtown was similarly strategic.
“The space we were in had a couple of restrictions for trying to make a pandemic work,” Morrison says: no outdoor seating, and takeout was difficult because of street logistics.
The pandemic transformed their business model overnight.
“We went from never doing takeout to now, takeout is still 30 percent of our business,” Morrison says. “There was no way for us to say, ‘OK, we’re not doing takeout anymore.’”
The specter of COVID looms large. Even the name “Mala Pata,” which translates roughly to “bad luck,” acknowledges how the partners came together through adversity. (The story behind “Peyote” is more fun: during a brainstorming session to come up with a name for the bar, someone suggested that taking the hallucinogenic cactus might help with creative inspiration, and the name stuck. “We just talked about it! We didn’t do it!” Salamanca insists.)
At the other end of Gateway Plaza, Union Special keeps emergency supplies at the ready. The bakery had barely finished its first six months in business when the world shut down. During those early days, owner Andrew Ullom created a makeshift takeout window for selling baked goods and loaves of bread.
“I still have it. I’ll never get rid of it,” he says, of the takeout window. “It’s across the street in a storage unit. If something hits tomorrow, I still have a takeout window.”
Ullom was previously a co-owner of the comfort food restaurant Fine Folk, which occupied the space next to Union Special before closing in 2023. He also had a downtown expansion of Union Special that closed the next year.
“There is some trauma that we all carry. If this goes down the tubes, then what do we do? If business slows down, how do we get people to actually come here?”
“There is some trauma that we all carry,” he says. “If this goes down the tubes, then what do we do? If business slows down, how do we get people to actually come here?”
Ullom’s approach to future-proofing Union Special involves expanding the bakery’s wholesale operations: he’s securing a new production facility, partnering with a major food distributor to get his bread into markets throughout the Southeast, and placing products at RDU.
Escazú’s move to Gateway Plaza comes with a significant menu expansion. They’ll begin offering scooped ice cream, a product they’ve made for years but only sold in pints. The owners don’t use the exact term “pandemic proofing” but acknowledge they’re diversifying their business to be more resilient.
“The idea of having two different seasonal products makes the business stronger,” Young says, noting that chocolate sells best in the winter and ice cream in the summer. “And ice cream is not as cacao dependent, so we’ll have two different main ingredients as opposed to one.”
Young and Centeno have also designated part of the new Escazú space for packaging and shipping, if at any point they have to go back to contactless service.
“At this point, it’s very clear that there is absolutely no normal,” Young says. “Everything is different. We need to put ourselves in a position to weather what’s going on currently and hopefully be stronger.”
Speaking Up
As small businesses gird themselves for hypothetical crises, they’re also facing immediate challenges.
Morrison says Fiction Kitchen might seem like it would be unaffected by international trade issues given its focus on local produce, but that’s not the case.
“My brother and my mom and dad were like, ‘Oh, the tariffs aren’t going to impact you, since you buy from local farmers,’” Morrison says. “And I’m like, ‘Well, we have chemicals, we have compostable stock, and even some of our soy products—while we grow the soybeans here in North Carolina, they get shipped overseas to be in production.’”
Meanwhile, Ullom is expecting a bill of $10,000 to $15,000 for an industrial bread-making machine he purchased in October that can produce 2,000 rolls per hour—equipment vital for the expanding wholesale business. While the bakery’s identity celebrates American manufacturing—Union Special is named after America’s oldest industrial sewing machine company—the specific piece of equipment Ullom needs cannot be sourced domestically.
“That equipment does not exist in the United States,” he says. “It just is not made here.”
Ullom, who upon opening Union Special in 2019 painted the bakery window with a John Lewis quote—“Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”—says he had expected that he would be able to take it down by now. Instead, he plans to update the quote to something explicitly supportive of worker organizing.
Morrison also says Fiction Kitchen is “trying to be more vocal in the political climate right now.”
In the past, Morrison says, “we never came out and said that we were a queer-owned space. But now I’m very intentionally hiring LGBTQ+ people, anybody that needs to be supported, who feels different in this environment. We will fight what we feel like is this administration’s pursuit to damage individual rights.”
In an uncertain landscape, businesses at Gateway Plaza are seeking strength through proximity.
“We all work together to fix small problems and large problems,” Ullom says. “Everybody here operates under the thought that rising tides raise all ships.”
Reach Staff Writer Lena Geller at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
You must be logged in to post a comment.