The Community Grocery store at Oberlin and Van Dyke has been for sale for a while, and went up on Craigslist earlier this week. The little store has had two owners in the last 61 years, and this one is ready to retire. As a favorite hog dog and chicken salad spot for many, the future is up in the air for the little place. One potential buyer this year was ready to go, but couldn’t secure funding, so back to the drawing board. One of these days, you’ll get to go fishing, Gro-man!

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The worldwide tea sensation, TeaGschwendner has landed their fourth U.S. store in Raleigh’s Cameron Village.

TeaGschwendner began as a small tea shop in Trier, Germany, and features a selection of more than 250 varieties of tea, including black, green, oolong, white, rooibush, herbal and fruit.  Seasonal specials will be e-mailed or listed on the store’s Facebook site. They will also offer “Introduction to Tea” classes in 2009 which include teaching mixed with tea tasting. More classes will come early next year.

The store is located next to Globtrotter, facing the Village Draft House.

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Raleigh’s best restaurant, Bloomsbury Bistro, has reintroduced its popular three-course tasting menu (.pdf) for two. The menu is available from Monday thru Saturday nights and includes items such as Sautéed boneless Carolina mountain trout wrapped in Prosciutto di Parma over a big bowl of roasted acorn squash bisque with wild rice risotto, haricots-verts & jumbo lump blue crab as well as the delicious Chicken Normandie (Roasted breast of all natural chicken over blue cheese gnocchi & haricots-verts with green apples & smoked bacon in creamy cider-rosemary sauce.)

The price is $50 per couple which includes an appetizer, an entree, and a desert. (Tax, tip, and drinks not included).

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On Saturday morning the City of Raleigh is hosting a charrette to focus on the strategic vision for the Five Points area. The meeting runs from 9am to 1pm at Our Savior Lutheran Church and will feature an on-site Five Points walk as part of the meeting.

For additional information, contact Carter Pettibone with the Raleigh Department of City Planning at 807-8482. Participants are asked to RSVP to carter.pettibone@ci.raleigh.nc.us  by tomorrow (Thursday).

Zoës Kitchen, a 22-store fast casual chain out of Birmingham opens today in Oberlin Court. The restaurant’s menu (.pdf) features “Mediterranean – Southern Style”, with a mix of dinner entrees, sandwiches, wraps, salads, and more.

The restaurant’s space is open, with two sides wrapped by large, south and west-facing windows. So, the restaurant will get a generous dose of sunlight every day. The interior features a hard gray floor with red and yellow coloring on the walls and ceiling. One might expect noise to be an issue, however in a mostly full room, it didn’t seem any noisier than Moe’s at North Hills. The funkiest aspect of the decor is the artwork by local children. The restaurant is supplying local elementary school students with art supplies, and posting their work around the restaurant. Each piece can be purchased for $20, with the proceeds going to the artist’s school. They plan to cycle the collection every quarter, freshening the decor.

I settled on the chicken kabobs for lunch, and they did not disappoint. The pair of kabobs included onions, green peppers, and tomatoes, which is especially rare in a casual restaurant. The chicken was good quality, and the marinade, while a bit heavy on the oregano, was nevertheless excellent. The platter was generously heaped with rice, grilled pita, and a side Greek salad. The rice and pita were fine, but the salad really was the star here. The vinaigrette salad dressing was delicious, especially with bites containing feta cheese.

While a better kabob dinner does exist in Raleigh, Zoës offers an extremely good, large plate of food at the $9 price point. As with the addition of Noodles & Co. to the area, it is refreshing to find good food requiring a fork that doesn’t cost $15. It is entirely reasonable to imagine a family of 4 sitting down and having a good, non-greasy meal here below the ever-vanishing $30 price point.

An interesting offering from Zoës is the menu’s Dinners For Four section. Aimed at the To-Go crowd, the four hot dinners offered can be ordered ahead and picked up at around the $25 price point. They also offer some of their salads and hummus in pound and half-pound tubs, as well as a full catering menu.

The restaurant’s hours, if I recall correctly, are 10am-9pm, 7 days a week. They are located in Oberlin Court, the mixed-use development on Oberlin Road near Wade Avenue.

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The Raleigh Downtowner posted today that both the Cameron Village and (beyond horrible) Wake Forest Road Blockbuster locations will be closing on July 12. Somewhere that North American Video guy (who incidentally was charging over $100 for video rental memberships at one point) is laughing uncontrollably.

In other news I just cancelled HBO, TWC’s HDSuite, and got a Netflix subscription yesterday.

TeaGschwendner is coming to Raleigh! The 145-store (mostly in Europe) tea retailing operation will open in the former Peanut Roaster space in Cameron Village in August. There is more information to come, and more was covered in Sue Stock’s Friday column.

The City of Raleigh has released the final documents outlining the Hillsborough Street renovation plans, and they are posted at hillsboroughstreet.org. The plan calls for eliminating the outer lanes of traffic and converting the space to parallel parking. Only one lane in each direction will remain open, and two roundabouts will anchor the project.

While the streetscape plans look like a nice improvement, I have grave concerns about traffic flow. The concept behind one lane in each direction works in places where there are only traffic circles at the intersections (because the traffic only comes to a dead stop when there is congestion at the circles). I am not a fan of traffic signals clogging up major arteries, and unfortunately the new plan retains traffic signals at the intersections with Pogue and Horne. This will cause enormous backups and invite dangerous maneuvers by impatient drivers in a highly pedestrian-oriented zone. A better plan would be to close these streets to inbound Hillsborough Street traffic, allowing only right-in or right-out activity. Perhaps a Michigan turn (dedicated U-lane) could have been installed near the Pogue intersection where land is available. map it

The traffic circle at Pullen Drive will be a nice gateway to the area, and will afford the chance to showcase a piece of public art later, as well as invite some interesting redevelopment on the north border (where Steve’s and Zack’s were).

A second, unnecessary circle will be implemented at Oberlin and Groveland Streets (access to Groveland, a one-way street, should be closed and the remaining portion of Oberlin, in front of the Player’s Retreat, should be treated as a parking lot.) Without the roundabout and Groveland access, Oberlin would be a straighter, simpler, and safer street. map it

The project is slated to begin next week (on May 20).

Tonight N.C. State went back to the future, as the university’s stately bell tower was struck by lighting. Pieces of the Mt. Airy granite were blown off and the clock stopped working; stuck on precisely 7:55pm.

The bell tower has recently been in the news because of a movement aiming to install real bells. The tower was finished in 1937, but funding has never been in place for the final bell installation.