On Halloween night in 2024, Fullsteam Brewery poured its last pint on Rigsbee Avenue. The taproom had anchored that stretch of downtown for fourteen years, since the brewery opened there in 2010, and it closed because Fullsteam couldn't lock in a long-term lease with its Rigsbee Avenue landlord. Rising rent and construction noise from new apartments going up next door made staying even less appealing. What most people didn't know at the time was that owner Sean Lilly Wilson had already spent roughly a year in quiet talks with Capitol Broadcasting, the company that owns American Tobacco Campus, about a different address entirely. What happened next says more about how Durham's food and drink scene actually works than any single opening could.
Fullsteam didn't fold. It didn't scatter its concept across three ghost kitchens or quietly disappear into a strip center. It committed to American Tobacco Campus, claiming 9,000 square feet of the old Power Plant building, tucked between the campus's landmark water tower and smokestack. Wilson called it the brewery's "forever home." That word, forever, is doing real work. A business that survived fourteen years at one address doesn't use it lightly, and the build-out has carried into this year as Fullsteam finishes the space alongside two other names, Lutra Cafe & Bakery and East of Texas, all landing on the same campus in 2026.
The Pattern Underneath the Openings
Here is what's easy to miss if you only skim the headlines about ATC's latest restaurant news: almost none of the businesses filling the campus right now are new businesses. They're established Durham names, already known, already loved somewhere else, choosing to consolidate at one address instead of expanding into new territory.
Honeygirl Meadery is a good example. It didn't open at ATC as a startup betting on foot traffic. It had already built a following making mead around Durham, then rebranded and expanded under the name Ment Beverage Co. at the end of 2024, moving its tasting room into the heart of the campus. The expansion let it add cider, beer, and sake, including what's believed to be the first sake produced in Durham, made with rice grown in eastern North Carolina. That's not a business hoping ATC will make it. That's a business that had already made it, using ATC as the platform for what came next.
Ekhaya works the same way. The Bantu-fusion tapas concept comes from chef Zweli Williams, a chef the Triangle dining scene already knew before this restaurant existed. East of Texas, which soft-opened July 31 and holds its grand opening on August 10, isn't a first-time restaurant either. It's an established Tex-Mex barbecue concept expanding out of Winston-Salem, founded in 2023, now occupying nearly 5,700 square feet in the Reed Building with roll-up garage doors and a mezzanine built for indoor-outdoor overflow.
Lutra Cafe & Bakery followed a similar arc, from pop-up stands and farmers market tables to a permanent storefront on the campus, now serving breakfast and lunch seven days a week with weekend brunch added on top.
None of this reads as a developer getting lucky with leasing. It reads as Durham's most durable food and drink names deciding, independently, that one already-dense campus solves a problem each of them had somewhere else.
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you're deciding where to spend a Saturday or a Tuesday after work, here's the state of the campus as of this week, not last year's version:
- Ment Beverage Co. (formerly Honeygirl Meadery) is pouring mead, cider, and Durham-made sake in its expanded tasting room, with games and a retail section on-site.
- Ekhaya is taking reservations for its Bantu-fusion tapas menu in an intimate space built for a slower kind of evening.
- Lutra Cafe & Bakery is open weekdays 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and weekends 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., built around its signature sweet and savory buns.
- East of Texas soft-opened July 31 and holds its grand opening August 10, bringing Tex-Mex barbecue and roll-up garage doors to the Reed Building.
- Fullsteam Brewery is in the final stretch of its build-out inside the old Power Plant, with a restaurant on one side, a bar on the other, and a small stage for live performances once the doors open.
That's a coffee and bakery counter, a meadery experimenting with sake, a chef-driven tasting room, a barbecue joint expanding from another city, and a longtime brewery finishing its next chapter, all within walking distance of each other and all built around different hours of the day.
Why the Daypart Spread Is the Real Story
American Tobacco Campus has always been a known quantity for Durham residents as a destination tied to an event. You went for a Durham Bulls game at the ballpark next door, or a show at DPAC, or dinner somewhere upscale on a night you'd already decided was an occasion. The campus itself draws more than a million workers, visitors, and residents a year across its million square feet of restored tobacco warehouses, so the traffic was never the issue. The issue was that most of what filled that traffic was built for a ticket-holding crowd.
What's different now is the daypart spread. Lutra opens at 8 a.m. on weekdays for people who work nearby and want breakfast before a meeting, not before a curtain call. Ment gives you somewhere to land after work on an ordinary Wednesday, no game or performance required, and Fullsteam is set to add a second version of that same option once its build-out wraps. Ekhaya and East of Texas fill the evening slots that used to require a reservation made a week out. Stack those together and the campus stops functioning as an occasional destination and starts functioning as a rotation, the kind of place you default to because something on it fits whatever time of day you happen to have free.
Parking reinforces the shift more than people expect. Several garages and a surface lot serve the campus, with parking commonly free for roughly the first two hours, which matters more for a lunch stop or a quick coffee than it ever did for a three-hour dinner and a show. A campus built around occasion visits doesn't need two free hours. A campus built around daily use does.
The Corner Worth Watching
If you want a single spot that captures what's happening, it's the block around the Power Plant and the Reed Building. That's where a fourteen-year-old brewery chose to rebuild from scratch, where an established meadery expanded into sake production, and where a Winston-Salem barbecue concept picked its first Triangle expansion. Century-old brick, restored rather than replaced, now houses businesses that had every reason to go somewhere cheaper or newer and chose this footprint instead.
That's not a story about a shopping center filling vacancies. It's a story about where Durham's most proven food and drink operators decided their next chapter belonged, and what it means that they all landed on the same corner at roughly the same time.
For residents, the practical upshot is simple. The reasons to walk over to American Tobacco Campus multiplied this year, and most of them have nothing to do with what's on the schedule at DPAC or the Durham Bulls Athletic Park next door.
Shannon Kennedy pays attention to details like these because they're part of what makes a neighborhood feel lived-in rather than just listed. If you're curious how a corner like this one shapes daily life in Durham, or how these kinds of shifts show up in the value of a home nearby, Let's Connect.
