Park once. That is the only trick you need for downtown Cary this September.
For most of the past few years, a night out downtown meant picking a lane. Dinner near the depot. Drinks somewhere with patio room for the whole group. A show at the Cary Theater if you planned two weeks out and didn't mind circling for a spot. This month, all three sit within a few blocks of each other on East Chatham Street, close enough to walk between courses.
That's not a coincidence of timing. It's what happens when a fifty-year-old arts festival, a restored 1950s gas station, and a nine-year-old film festival all land on the same stretch of pavement within about six weeks of each other.
The gas station that became a restaurant
Start at the corner of Chatham and Academy, where a filling station has sat since the 1950s. Its most recent tenant was Gurkan's Downtown Auto Repair, a 1,280-square-foot shop that most people driving past probably assumed was headed for a teardown. Instead, the group behind The Durham, The Mayton, and the soon-to-open Gables hotel restored the building and opened Lloyd's Full Service there after a test run during Lazy Daze weekend. The footprint nearly triples, with another 2,300 square feet of indoor space plus a patio built around a fire pit. The menu leans into comfort without apology: linguine and clams, a signature cheeseburger, garlic lemon roasted chicken thighs, a grilled sirloin with chimichurri, and a rotating seasonal list.
Walk another block and you hit K38, which just opened its second Triangle-area location at 147 E. Chatham St., following its debut in downtown Raleigh's Seaboard Station. Companywide, it's the chain's seventh restaurant. The name is a small piece of trivia worth knowing if you end up in line: the K stands for kilometer, marking the 38th kilometer post on the coastal highway down Mexico's Baja Peninsula, where founder Josh Vach surfed before opening the original taco shop in 1993. Three decades and seven locations later, that roadside stand logic still shows up on the menu.
A little farther out, just past the downtown core at 701 E. Chatham St., Doherty's Irish Pub has leased the former Spirits Pub & Grub space. It will be the chain's fifth location, joining existing spots in Cary, Apex, Holly Springs, and Pittsboro, and it's bringing a patio with more than 100 seats. It's a longer walk from Lloyd's and K38, not a stumble away, but it's the same corridor doing the work.
A theater built in 1946, still doing its job
Between the two restaurants, at 122 E. Chatham St., sits the reason a lot of people will be on this street the weekend of September 10 through 13: BEYOND: The Cary Film Festival, now in its ninth year at the Cary Theater. The building started life in 1946 as the town's first indoor movie theater and got a full restoration in 2014, which means the pattern on this block isn't just new restaurants moving into old buildings. It's old buildings getting asked to do their original job again, just with better sound and a working bar.
BEYOND has drawn 200 to 300 short film and screenplay submissions in each of the past two years, and this year's entries topped 150 before the May deadline even hit, a sign the festival's reputation keeps building rather than plateauing. The festival puts short films and screenplays in front of an audience of more than 1,000 cinephiles and industry professionals, with $1,000 cash prizes across categories including Best Narrative Short, Best Documentary Short, and Best NC Filmmaker Short. Tickets went on sale August 13 and are available now through the theater directly.
Lazy Daze already broke the seal on this street
If Chatham Street feels unusually busy right now, credit goes partly to what just wrapped up. Cary's Lazy Daze Arts & Crafts Festival hit its 50th year on August 22 and 23, drawing more than 250 artists from 22 states to the Town Hall Campus a few blocks north. Cary's Assistant Director of Citizen Information and Outreach, Carolyn Roman, described the milestone as "50 years of creativity and community," which is a tidy way to put it, but the number that actually explains the scale is population. The first Lazy Daze happened in 1977, on East Chatham Street itself, when Cary's population sat around 21,763. Today that number is closer to 187,000, and the festival grew right alongside the town, from a one-day street fair into a two-day event with four entertainment stages and 25-plus food vendors.
Founder Jerry Miller ran the show for most of those five decades before he passed away in 2025 at 93, and this year's festival built in tributes: a gallery of his own artwork at the Herbert C. Young Community Center, a poster retrospective at Town Hall, and chalk art that still lines parts of the Academy Street corridor if you haven't walked it since late August. The festival's proceeds have also funneled more than $1 million into local nonprofit grants over the years, including early money that helped build the Cary Town Clock at Academy and Chatham in 1983.
None of this is really about nostalgia. It's about a street that has been absorbing Cary's growth for fifty years and is currently in the middle of doing it again, just with tacos and film reels instead of pottery booths.
The stretch, if you're counting blocks
- 107 E. Chatham St.: Lloyd's Full Service, in the restored 1950s filling station at Chatham and Academy
- 122 E. Chatham St.: The Cary Theater, host of BEYOND: The Cary Film Festival, September 10 to 13
- 147 E. Chatham St.: K38, the Baja-inspired taco spot's second Triangle location and seventh overall
- 701 E. Chatham St.: Doherty's Irish Pub, opening in the former Spirits Pub & Grub space, a short drive past the core
If you've only got one weekend
Grab dinner at Lloyd's or K38 before a BEYOND screening next week, since the festival runs Thursday the 10th through Sunday the 13th. If pub food and a bigger patio are more your speed, keep an eye on Doherty's for an opening date, and if you missed the chalk art from Lazy Daze, walk Academy Street sooner rather than later before the last of it fades.
Downtown Cary has had busy months before. What's different this time is how little ground you have to cover to see all of it.
If you're the kind of person who notices which blocks in Cary keep drawing new investment and new foot traffic, that instinct is useful for more than deciding where to grab dinner. Whenever you're ready to talk about what a street like this means for buying, selling, or just understanding your own neighborhood's trajectory, Triangle Home Sales is here. Let's Connect.
