Chapel Hill’s Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe is reborn as acclaimed chef’s tapas bar: An inside look
In an ancient building best known for waffles, an acclaimed Chapel Hill chef continues to write his homecoming story.
Before he cooked in some of the country’s top kitchens, Brandon Sharp grew up in Greensboro and walked countless miles along Franklin Street as a UNC student. Now he’s opening the town’s latest high profile restaurant, Proximo, a Spanish tapas bar born in the former Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe space.
The beloved former diner has been transformed into a narrow shotgun restaurant space, with a half-dozen bar stools and a collection of cozy booths tucked away in a back dining room. Fans of Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe will find the bones of the space intact and some elements living on — such as the old flattop griddles, which will now be known as planchas, sizzling everything from patatas bravas to pork ribs.
“We’ve had several people tell us, ‘I can’t tell you how many hashbrowns I’ve had from that griddle,’” Sharp said in a phone interview, amid pans clanging in the background. “There’s some good restaurant juju here, being a place so many people remember fondly. It won’t be the same experience, but there’s something to that institutional memory....The soul of the waffle shop is still here.”
Proximo opens its doors to the public for the first time Friday, Sept. 20. The restaurant will be open nightly for dinner, serving a strictly Spanish menu of shareable tapas. The menu is broken into snacks, cold plates and warm dishes. The wine list is mostly Spanish with some Portuguese bottles, and everything available by the glass, a couple dozen in all.
This is the third Chapel Hill restaurant from Sharp, whose previous projects Hawthorne & Wood and the French bistro Bluebird have been two of the Triangle’s best new restaurants to open in recent years. Proximo is owned by Sharp and his wife, Chapel Hill town council member Elizabeth Sharp, who also designed the restaurant, and is led by chef Chad Bourgeois, general manager ElZeel Faust and beverage director Neal Benefield.
While hailing from North Carolina, most of Sharp’s career has been outside his home state, including stints in New Orleans, San Francisco and Napa Valley destination restaurant, The French Laundry. He’s the only chef in the Triangle to have earned and retained two Michelin stars, which he did for seven consecutive years at Solbar, the restaurant of Napa Valley resort Solage.
Tapas on Franklin: ‘The level of food IQ is high here’
Sharp returned to Chapel Hill in 2016 and opened Hawthorne & Wood and Bluebird miles from downtown, where new restaurants have increasingly veered towards the fast casual trends popular with the student population.
Proximo aims to make the argument that Franklin Street can still embrace a tiny tapas bar.
“It was the enthusiasm of our guests at Hawthworne & Wood and Bluebird (that convinced us Proximo could succeed on Franklin Street),” Sharp said. “The level of food IQ is high here and outpaced the level of restaurants we had here, except for a few great standouts. People would eat at those good restaurants and then go to Durham. But there are enough UNC alumni and Chapel Hill locals here who want to see a vibrant Franklin Street.”
There was a time a decade or two ago when tapas were the latest craze in food. Now the format of shareable small plates are a fixture in American restaurants, extending well beyond Spanish dishes, where groups of diners pass around platters and reach with forks, sampling this and that as if a homey dinner party. It’s that communal experience, Sharp says, the keeps tapas trendy.
“It’s that shared experience of enjoying a meal together,” Sharp said. “You’re building even more of a connection, sharing plates, comparing what you like. I think it’s that shared experience we crave; it’s like family-style meals with dishes being passed around.”
The Proximo menu
The opening Proximo menu includes many classic Spanish tapas, often with a few tweaks of personality. At a media preview dinner on Sept. 19 we sampled a few standouts.
- Jamon iberico: Here the most famous Spanish ham is sliced into bite-sized ribbons and served with what is described on the menu as “pan de proximo.” It’s actually a very light cornbread, cooked to order using a modern technique and a microwave, studded with coarse black pepper and toasted crumbs. The move is to drape the ham over the still-warm cornbread, letting the streaks of fat melt like a kind of unctuous butter.
- Patatas bravas: There’s no fryer at Proximo, so crags of par-cooked potatoes are crisped to order on the plancha, served over smoky salsa brava with a healthy dollop of tangy and sharp aioli.
- Charred leeks: These baby leeks are sweet and tender and a bit smoky after a sear on the flattop, served over a roasted, peppery hazelnut romesco.
This story was originally published September 20, 2024 at 3:58 PM.
