For nearly a century, the corner of Chatham and Academy streets has been Cary’s original crossroads, a spot where, long before parking decks and pimento cheese festivals, travelers pulled off the road to fuel up and townspeople stopped to swap stories.
This summer, that same corner found a new reason to draw people in: Lloyd’s Full Service, a restaurant housed inside and around a filling station that has anchored this intersection since 1934.
The building’s bones do most of the talking before you ever sit down. Walk in past the host stand, and you’re standing where customers once bought cans of oil and waited on a tune-up. An original window, re-paned with mirrors, hangs behind the stand. To the right, a long bar runs beneath a tongue-and-groove wood ceiling that once soared over the service bays, now exposed after decades hidden beneath drop ceilings and layers of paint.
“A lot of those design elements had been covered over the years,” says Craig Spitzer, the energetic founder and CEO of Early Bird Night Owl, the Durham-based hospitality group behind the project. “Whenever we started peeling away the layers, we discovered a lot of the architectural features that had been incorporated into the original design, and we went back to that.”
The building that once stood on this corner was constructed in 1934. In 1951, owner K.M. Lloyd rebuilt and modernized it into a stucco-sided Amoco station, complete with the green stripe accents that were an Amoco signature at the time. Sometime in the 1960s, it became a Shell station, and “Service Is Our Business” was mounted on the exterior, where it stayed for decades. Most recently, and for 47 years, it operated as Gurkan’s Downtown Auto Repair, run by a Turkish immigrant who, before ever repairing a car in Cary, had owned restaurants back home.
That layered history became the blueprint for both the eatery’s identity and its name. Digging through old newspaper archives and yearbooks with local historians, the Early Bird Night Owl team turned up a 1934 Cary High School yearbook ad for the original service station. Its tagline: “the cheerful looking place on the corner.”
“The timing of discovering that could not have been better,” says Craig, “because we really were motivated to create a beacon of energy for this corner.”
The restaurant takes its actual name, though, from Lloyd himself, whose 1951 grand-opening ad in The News & Observer promised a “warm welcome to all who come in.”
The phrase became more than marketing copy. “Every decision we’ve made since has been through that lens,” Craig emphasizes. “The décor, the colors, the uniforms, our chef’s approach to cooking. We wanted it all to feel bright and vibrant, creating a cheerful energy that radiates to our customers and out into the greater Cary community.”
Lloyd’s spacious bar invites patrons to pull up a seat, whether for a full meal or just a cocktail.
Craig notes the restaurant has worked to pass that history on to its staff, so they can serve as historians and ambassadors for what this space has always been: a throughline of hospitality running from Lloyd to the Gurkan family to Lloyd’s today.
The renovation reflects that same instinct to preserve rather than erase. Roughly 1,280 square feet of the original service station remains intact, now joined by a 2,300-square-foot kitchen and dining addition and a 1,200-square-foot covered patio, the result of a two-year project.
The garage bays are still there, along with the exposed brick and wood ceiling. The new wing, painted forest green, incorporates upholstery in an avocado-green plaid pulled from a 1972 Chevrolet Highlander pickup, its ceiling lined with tin tiles salvaged from Cary’s Rogers Building.
Along one wall, “Service is Our Business,” the old Shell-era slogan, has been hand-painted back to life at its original size and font. Joseph Giampino, owner of Raleigh’s SPCLSIGNS (Special Signs), repainted it, and he also laid the striking gold-leaf lettering on the front door. Outside, a retro 1930s Divco delivery truck will double as a satellite bar and café with its own seasonal menu.
Smelt and pickles put a spin on a Southern favorite.
Charlotte-based Cluck Design, known for adaptive-reuse restaurant projects, handled the interior architecture. The result seats 75 guests indoors and up to 100 more on the expansive covered patio.
Dining room reservations are limited to parties of up to six, though walk-ins are always welcome, particularly in the bar area and on the patio. “We want this type of neighborhood place where you can walk down the street and pop in for dinner, rather than having to book a table in advance,” Craig says.
The kitchen is led by Florida native Dennis Bernard, an unpretentious executive chef whose résumé includes 15 years, on and off, with Chicago’s James Beard–winning One Off Hospitality group — Publican, Blackbird, Big Star, and Dove’s Luncheonette among them. He built the brunch program at Publican, later named the city’s best by the Chicago Tribune, and helped Dove’s earn a Michelin Bib Gourmand during his run as chef de cuisine. After a few years away from restaurants working in sales, he’s back where he wants to be.
“I told myself if I was going to come back, I was going to return to a unique neighborhood spot,” Dennis says with a smile. “I’m so happy. Sales is not for me.”
His menu leans on lively, approachable flavors rather than heavy or overwrought selections. “We want people to feel good when they walk out the door, not weighed down,” he explains.
That intentionality shows up in dishes like the Seafood Louie, centered on little gem lettuce, a crumble of fried crab cake, chilled shrimp, avocado, and a refreshing lemon dressing. It also appears in the inventive linguine and clams entrée, featuring a broth of turmeric, orange, and house-made ginger powder, served with handmade pasta.
Chef Dennis’ current favorite — and the Cary Magazine team’s as well — goes to Breakfast for Dinner: honey-glazed pork belly and a potato pavé standing in for bacon and hash browns, topped with an old-school poached egg and a frisée salad. “I think the name makes it really approachable for people,” he says. “If we’d called it something more elevated, people probably would have run away from it.”
Feta-flecked beets bring a seasonal, colorful touch to the menu’s rotating sides.
Other menu fixtures include The Full Plate, a grilled protein with rotating sides, and The Corner Dog, an all-beef hot dog paying tribute to the lunch counter at the now-shuttered Ashworth Drugs, once located just across the intersection. A salt-and-vinegar fish fry starter pairs smelt, a small, mild freshwater fish, with pickles and a bright herb remoulade, offering the chef’s creative spin on a Southern staple.
Among the desserts, the chocolate tres leches cake stands out. This nontraditional rendition is piled high with ricotta-mascarpone mousse, chocolate crumbles, and a dusting of powdered sugar. The cake itself combines sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, cocoa powder, and heavy cream. “We cook it with a little cinnamon so it tightens up,” Dennis adds.
He expects the menu to keep evolving, describing it as a living thing that stays flexible enough to shift with the seasons even as a handful of favorites remain constant.
For Craig, the restaurant also speaks to the block it sits on. With Downtown Cary Park a few blocks one way and Bond Brothers Beer Company a few blocks the other, he sees a gap that Lloyd’s aims to fill. “We’re trying to create a magnet in the middle of town,” he says. “We hope it will radiate out to everybody else.”
More than nine decades after a filling station first opened on this corner promising a cheerful welcome, Lloyd’s Full Service is carrying that same idea forward. Motor oil has given way to olive oil, service bays to dining tables, but the spirit Lloyd and Gurkan built their reputations on remains the same: a warm welcome, on the same corner, for whoever walks through the door.
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