Trophy Five Points and Ajja Are About to Share a Backyard

Godfrey Cheshire, the Triangle-born film critic who came back to Raleigh this September to sign copies of his new book at The Rialto, put it plainly: "It's a great Raleigh institution." He meant the theater. He could have meant the corner it sits on.

The Rialto has occupied the same spot on Glenwood Avenue since 1942, when it opened as the Colony before taking its current name in 1983. It sits at the literal intersection that gives the neighborhood its name, where Glenwood Avenue, Fairview Road, and Whitaker Mill Road all meet. Cheshire's stop there was one line in a busy season for a corner that has spent decades being the reliable, unchanging part of Five Points. This year, everything within a few blocks of it is moving at once.

A 1959 Warehouse Learns to Pour Beer

Walk two minutes from The Rialto and you land at 207 Bickett Blvd, where Trophy Five Points opened last fall inside a building that used to sell electrical supplies. The company that ran it, Electric Supply Co., left decades ago, but the structure, built in 1959, is still recognizable by its shade of blue. Trophy's team gutted and reopened it as their seventh Raleigh location, a mix of craft beer, pizza, cocktails, and games built around a covered, heated front patio that seats 80, with four outdoor fire pits adding room for another 20 people beyond that.

Seven locations is not a small operator testing a neighborhood. It is an established Raleigh brewing and hospitality group that already runs a taproom, bottle shops, bars, and an event space downtown, choosing Five Points as the spot worth a warehouse renovation rather than new construction. That choice mattered enough to the neighborhood that the building's history made it into Trophy's own signage: the space is billed as a restaurant, bar, and community hub built inside a piece of the block's industrial past rather than instead of it.

The Restaurant Next Door Wasn't Waiting to Be Discovered

The building Trophy shares a fence line with is Ajja, chef Cheetie Kumar and Paul Siler's Mediterranean-leaning restaurant, already one of the most written-about kitchens in the city before Trophy ever broke ground next door. When Ajja opened, Esquire named it one of the best new restaurants in the country. Kumar has picked up seven James Beard nominations for Best Chef Southeast since, the most recent earlier this year. When the inaugural MICHELIN Guide to the American South came out in 2025, Ajja was one of the restaurants widely considered to have deserved a spot and didn't get one, which in Raleigh food circles has become its own kind of credential.

None of that is new information if you already eat there. What is new is what Trophy is building behind its own dining room. The plan calls for a backyard patio with skyline views that will connect directly to Ajja's patio next door. Two restaurants that opened years apart, under different owners, with different reputations, are about to share one continuous outdoor space. The fence that currently separates a craft beer garden from a James Beard nominee's back patio is coming down.

Two More Storefronts Are Mid-Change

The corner isn't only rearranging what already exists. A second La Victoria, part of the Chido restaurant group's growing footprint in Raleigh, is projected to open in Five Points this fall inside the former Mandolin space at 2519 Fairview Road, bringing Mexican classics and a full drink menu to a building that spent its last chapter as a different kind of restaurant entirely.

A few doors down, Stellar has opened as a new bar built around BYO vinyl nights and weekend live music, with winemaker dinners and community events already being planned. It is a smaller opening than a restaurant taking over a landmark building, but it adds another reason to walk the block after dark rather than just after lunch.

The Festival That Runs Without a City Budget

None of this restaurant activity is what fills Fairview Road on the second Saturday of October. Fall For Five Points, the neighborhood's fall festival, returns on Saturday, October 10, and it operates on a structure most visitors never think to ask about. The organizers say plainly on their own site that the event receives no funding from the City of Raleigh. It runs entirely on what the neighborhood raises itself, through a donor program called Friends of Five Points that asks residents for direct contributions to cover musicians, permits, and the kids' area.

That funding model shapes what the day looks like more than most attendees realize. In past years the festival has drawn dozens of local vendors and artists, live music, and food trucks, with the walk itself passing directly by the same small businesses that anchor the neighborhood the rest of the year: Hayes Barton Cafe, the retro-style café known for its cakes, Lilly's Pizza on Oberlin Road, and Lola's Beach Bar among them. It is a neighborhood event paid for by the neighborhood, staged along the same sidewalks where Trophy, Ajja, La Victoria, and Stellar are all trying to earn a regular spot in someone's week.

Where the Foot Traffic Actually Goes

Five Points has always had a built-in reason for people to be outside walking rather than driving between destinations. Roanoke Park sits close enough to the restaurant row that it functions as the connective tissue between errands, dinner, and whatever is happening at The Rialto that night, whether that's a film revival, a comedy set, or, this month, a critic signing his own book about the place he used to program.

What's different this year isn't that people are out walking. It's how much more there now is to walk to. A warehouse that used to store electrical conduit now shares a patio plan with one of the most decorated kitchens in the city. A shuttered Mexican-fusion space is about to become a second location for a group already running several restaurants elsewhere in Raleigh. And the festival that pulls the whole strip together every October still runs on the same volunteer funding model it always has, unconnected to any of the new construction around it.

If you're already circling October 10 on the calendar or just trying to figure out where to eat before the La Victoria build-out finishes, Eric and Dorothy Rainey at DDR Realty keep a close eye on this stretch of Five Points and are happy to talk through what's opening next, no transaction required.