For most of this year, the building at the corner of Six Forks and Millbrook sat empty. The drive-thru lane was roped off. The signage was gone, scraped down to bare stucco where a bucket of chicken used to glow after dark. If you live in North Ridge, you drove past it on the way to Costco or Wegmans and didn't think much of it, because empty storefronts on Six Forks Road come and go. This one is about to matter more than most.
The Longo family, who have run Vic's Italian Restaurant under various names in Raleigh since 1993, confirmed in March that they were taking over the space at 5434 Six Forks Road, inside Colony Shopping Center. The building had most recently housed a KFC and Taco Bell. Vic's will keep the drive-thru lane, but not for ordering. Owner Mario Longo Jr. told the business news site Business Debut that the family designed the new location as a fast-casual counter service concept with 75 to 80 seats, and reserved the drive-thru strictly for picking up food ordered ahead or through a delivery app.
"We don't want you to wait in line if someone's waiting for 10 pizzas," Longo told the publication. "You'll get an alert that your food is ready, come around, and pick it up."
That one detail tells you more about how this corner is changing than the name over the door does.
A Corner Built For Pickup, Not For Sitting Down
Look at what's actually clustering around Six Forks Road near North Ridge this year and a pattern shows up that no single opening would reveal on its own. Vic's is designing its Millbrook location around a pickup window. A couple of miles up the same road, Andy's Frozen Custard opened at 340 E. Six Forks Road with its own drive-thru built into the concept from day one. Whataburger opened at Six Forks and Wake Forest Road in April, on a lot that sat vacant since a long-closed Applebee's was torn down. All three are quick-service, order-ahead, grab-it-and-go.
Compare that to what's already established a little further south, closer to Village District and North Hills. Vivo Ristorante, a family-run Italian spot at 7400 Six Forks Road, and Village Tavern have built reputations on the kind of dinner where you sit, order a bottle of wine, and stay. That stretch of Six Forks has functioned for years as North Ridge's answer to a night out. What's opening at Millbrook right now isn't competing with that. It's filling a different need entirely, the one where you've got a 6:15 pickup game at Millbrook Exchange Park and need dinner in a bag by 5:45.
If you've noticed yourself ordering ahead more often this year rather than making a reservation, you're not imagining a shift in your own habits. The restaurants opening closest to you are being built for exactly that behavior.
One Naming Quirk Worth Knowing
If you've ever tried to give someone directions to Colony Shopping Center, or searched for it online, you may have run into a small mismatch. Commercial leasing listings for the property sometimes describe it as being in the "North Hills" retail corridor, even though the shopping center sits at Six Forks and Millbrook, a separate intersection from the North Hills mixed-use district a bit further down the road. It's a quirk of how commercial brokers label properties by nearby landmark rather than by neighborhood name, and it means a search for restaurant news "in North Hills" can sometimes surface something that's really happening at your own corner. Worth knowing before you drive to the wrong parking lot.
What's Happening West, At Durant Nature Preserve
Not everything changing near North Ridge involves food. If your weekend routine includes the Border Loop Trail at Durant Nature Preserve, plan around a construction project the City of Raleigh has underway this year. The city is restoring an aging stormwater detention pond near the corner of Spottswood and Welborn Streets that was built in the 1980s and has since filled with sediment and debris, causing erosion along the creek that feeds Lower Durant Lake. A portion of the Border Trail is closed while the work continues, along with occasional single-lane closures at that corner.
The rest of the preserve's five miles of trails remain open, including the shorter Secret Creek Trail, which stays close to the water and skips the closed section entirely. Dogs are still welcome on a leash throughout the park. If the full 2.5-mile loop is what you're after and it's temporarily unavailable, Millbrook Exchange Park offers a fallback close to home, with its own dog park and nearly two dozen tennis and pickleball courts if you'd rather trade the woods for a court reservation this month.
The Last Weeks Of Shelley Lake's Summer Schedule
Shelley Lake Park has run its evening event series through the warmer months, with programming scheduled between June 10 and September 16 this year. If you haven't made it out to one yet, the window is closing, not the trail itself, which stays open year-round with its familiar two miles of paved path around the lake. Sertoma Arts Center, tucked inside the park, keeps its exhibit rotation on a roughly bimonthly schedule, so whatever is hanging in the gallery space right now won't be there much longer either. It's a small, low-key reason to route a Saturday morning walk past the lake before the schedule resets for fall.
What Actually Changed Here This Year
None of this rewrites what North Ridge is. The country club is still the country club. The tree-lined streets around Six Forks and Falls of Neuse still look the way they've looked for decades. But the corner you pass through most often, the one with the Food Lion and the bank branch and the traffic light that always seems to catch you at the wrong moment, has quietly rebuilt itself around a different kind of errand. A year ago that building was a fast-food drive-thru in the old sense, order at the box, pull forward, pay. Now it's becoming something closer to a pickup counter for a family-run Italian kitchen, sitting a few hundred feet from a shopping center that some databases still file under a different neighborhood's name.
Neighborhoods rarely announce these shifts with a ribbon cutting you notice. You just catch yourself, a few months in, driving past the same stoplight and realizing you've started ordering ahead more than you used to, walking the shorter trail instead of the long loop, timing your Saturday walk around a gallery show you almost missed. That's not a renovation or a development. It's just what daily life at this particular corner looks like this year, and it's worth knowing before the next round of change starts the same way this one did, with an empty building nobody thought twice about.
If you're weighing a move within North Ridge or curious what a renovation-minded approach could do for a home near this corridor, Build the Life is happy to talk through it. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready.
