I had visited Durham, North Carolina, several times before, but my trips had mostly revolved around Duke University. This time, I was ready to discover the city itself – and I quickly understood why Durham has become such a popular destination. During our three-day visit, we stayed at the colorful Durham Hotel, explored the historic American Tobacco Campus, ate our way through an impressive restaurant scene and wandered through the beautiful Duke Gardens and campus.
We also mixed cocktails at Durham Distillery, created a custom fragrance at Bright Black and discovered art at the Nasher Museum. Durham surprised and delighted me.
Durham is part of Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, the largest research park in North America, which also includes Chapel Hill and Raleigh. (See our related story on Raleigh.) The city is also known as the home of Duke University, its historic ties to the tobacco industry, as a hub for Black entrepreneurship and the Durham Bulls baseball team.
You may remember the minor league team made legendary by the movie “Bull Durham,” which featured the famous monologue by Crash Davis to Annie Savoy that included his belief in “long, slow, soft, wet kisses that last three days,” sparking major league crushes on Kevin Costner.
My previous visits to Durham had been brief and centered around Duke when my daughter went to school there. I was ready to explore the city that had undergone so much change in recent years.
Where to stay in downtown Durham for a walkable location, best rooftop bar
We stayed in downtown Durham at The Durham Hotel, a former mid-century bank building that was converted to a hotel in 2015. Forget the subdued grey and off-white palettes of many modern hotels – bright colors are dominant throughout the hotel.
The exterior, restored during its conversion, has large concrete columns and floor-to-ceiling windows with gold panels. A vertical sign with the hotel’s name is perched on a cylindrical stair tower.
The two-story lobby and restaurant has a beige, red and black geometric rug and large hanging pendant lights. With a definite “Mad Men” vibe, I expected dark-suited men with slicked-back hair to stride in any moment to order martinis at the bar.
Our room, one of 53 in the hotel, was decorated in shades of navy blue and gold, with a red accent chair. It had a mini fridge, coffeemaker and desk.
Despite advice against doing so, I use a coffeemaker in a hotel room unless it’s covered in slime. (One thing I don’t do is drink out of glasses without washing them myself. Have you seen the disgusting videos about that?)
But here we had the option for complimentary tea and coffee delivered to our room every morning. I filled out the card, left it on our door handle and was happy to receive pots of hot beverages at our selected time to start our day.
The Coffee Bar, open all day, serves an AM and PM menu with breakfast items in the morning and snacks, salads, sandwiches and burgers in the afternoon. You can also grab a cocktail in the evening and brunch on the weekends.
It also hosts several events a month with local businesses, like speed dating, Mahjong and a silent book club. I’m intrigued by a silent book club. Mine, which has been going strong for close to 40 years, is decidedly a very loud book club.
My favorite feature of The Durham Hotel was the amazing rooftop bar, The Roof at the Durham. The views are spectacular and it’s open year-round serving cocktails, fresh raw bar and seasonal small plates. We saw several groups hanging out, some playing cards and board games. The Roof also hosts events like weekly rooftop yoga and stargazing.
The location of The Durham Hotel was fantastic and we could walk to the American Tobacco Campus and almost all of the restaurants we visited. The Duke campus is about two miles away.
Where to eat in Durham to experience the city’s celebrated restaurant scene
Pizza, Indian, seafood, lamb, quiche – we ate it all and more during our three-day visit. Apparently, the restaurant scene in Durham has really upped its game in the past 15 years, becoming more of a food hub. Bon Appetit called it “America’s Foodiest Small Town.”
Here’s one issue I have with traveling: I often find a favorite new restaurant, but it’s hundreds of miles away from home so a return visit is not logistically easy. That happened with us when we dined at Cheeni. Located right across from hotel, this Indian restaurant served us fantastic dishes of lamb vindaloo, fish curry, fried chicken and South Indian vegetables.
The garlic naan was so good we got two orders of it. We were too full for dessert but ordered some of their delicious cookies to enjoy later.
Owner and Chef Pretti Waas has been a finalist for James Beard Awards for three years. A return visit to this restaurant will be at the top of our list when we get back to Durham.
Seraphine is at the top of many best restaurant lists in Durham. This relatively new restaurant serves Louisiana-style food and was recently named to the inaugural Michelin Guide to the American South. The patio was inviting, but it was far too hot to eat outside, so we retreated to the cozy, intimate interior.
The menu includes favorites like oysters, beignets, gumbo, fried catfish and shrimp and grits. We enjoyed a scallop special, fried artichokes and tuna and lobster crudo. We always listen to dessert options but generally turn them down. In my experience, they usually look better than they taste and are NWC – not worth the calories. But we couldn’t resist the banana pudding and, wow, are we glad we didn’t. It was fantastic and definitely WTC.
The restaurant is located on the American Tobacco Campus, which was established in 1890 and was once one of the busiest industrial areas in the country.
After the tobacco industry went bust, the factory was redeveloped into a large campus with the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, Durham Performing Arts Center, shops, restaurants, offices and residences. It’s worth a visit even if you just stroll through to see how the industrial architecture has been preserved.
Burt’s Bees headquarters are here and you can see the small cedar shake cabin where founder Burt Shavitz lived in Maine, now moved to the entrance to its headquarters.
Also on the campus is Press Coffee, Crepes & Cocktails, a European-inspired coffee café where we had crepes and bagels for breakfast one morning.
While we waited for our room to be ready, we headed to Queeny’s for lunch, just steps away from The Durham Hotel. In addition to a restaurant in the 1914 historic building, Queeny’s has a bookshop, reading nook and a sound-proof podcasting studio available for no charge. The LGBTQ-owned space encourages people to hang out and hosts drag shows and a bake-off. The menu includes salads, burgers, sandwiches and nachos. The décor included our first encounter with hanging disco balls.
Also close to the Durham Hotel was Pizzeria Toro where we met up with a boarding school buddy of Chris’s. He’s a judge in Durham and regaled us with some fascinating stories while we shared delicious wood-fired pizzas and kale salad.
One afternoon we escaped the heat with a drink at Velvet Hippo where the décor also included disco balls hanging from the ceiling, a shrine to Dolly Parton and flamingo wallpaper in the ladies’ room. Along with gin cocktails, we enjoyed a delicious crab cake from their Hanger Management menu (love that name) that also included flatbreads, tostadas, and other snacks.
I loved the laid-back environment of Monuts, one of the only restaurants we drove to as all the others were walkable from our hotel. It started as a donut stand at the Durham Farmer’s Market and is now a busy restaurant where everything is made from scratch. The menu includes bagels, quiche, sandwiches and grain bowls. I had the pimento cheese scallion quiche, a special that day, with roasted red pepper and tomato soup. Really yummy. We tried to leave a tip at the counter, but we were told that it’s a tip-free environment. That’s definitely bucking the trend of tips expected everywhere. I bought an item at a kisok in a store at the airport and was asked how much tip I wanted to leave. Who exactly was I supposed to be tipping?
Our last meal was delicious fried seafood at Jean’s By the Sea. If you know your North Carolina geography, then you know that the closest sea is about 130 miles away. But I’m okay with creative license in naming your restaurant. Have you ever seen an olive tree at an Olive Garden?
The upscale fish shack serves sandwiches, salads, ceviche and seafood. Of course, we were going for the baskets of Calabash seafood, a lightly battered and fried style of cooking from Calabash, North Carolina. Choices were shrimp, catfish, oysters, scallops and market fish served with fries, hushpuppies and cole slaw.
The food was perfectly cooked, and yes, worth the calories.
Things to do in Durham: Cocktail classes, gardens, scents and museums
Cocktail Class at Durham Distillery
A friend told me recently that her husband banned her from drinking gin because, “Gin makes me mean.” Fortunately, for Chris and me, gin just makes us happy, so we were excited for our cocktail class at Durham Distillery, which specializes in combining traditional gin-making methods with modern-day chemistry. Is it a surprise that the effort is led by scientists, Melissa and Lee Katrincic?
Our small group sat around a table while Carl showed us some techniques, such as how to shake a drink without spraying someone and how to make a smoke bubble on top of a cocktail, while we made two gin cocktails. We also enjoyed a generous spread of charcuterie during the session. Classes are on Tuesdays and Sundays, but if you can’t make one of these, you can visit the Conniption Bar & Lounge for a delicious cocktail
Wander the magnificent Duke Gardens
One of my favorite things to do when we visited my daughter was to stroll through these beautiful gardens, 55 acres right on Duke’s campus. The gardens recently completed a $30 million project that included a new entrance and the addition of the Barnes Welcome Center, which features a visitor lobby, café, gallery spaces and outdoor gathering spaces.
The Gardens are spectacular and we took our time wandering through the four major areas over the five miles of pathways, past terraces, Asian gardens, ponds and meadows.
From the gardens you can access the gorgeous Duke campus, definitely worth a visit as it’s known as one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country. We admired the Gothic architecture and had to visit the heart of the campus, the Duke University Chapel.
View contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art
Also on the Duke campus, the Nasher Museum of Art is a little gem with eight galleries of contemporary art and a cafeteria. Admission is free here and at the Gardens.
Create your own signature scent at Bright Black
I had a blast mixing, testing and remixing oils to create my own scent. We were at Bright Black, a fragrance design studio owned by Tiffany M. Griffin, PhD, and her husband Dariel Heron. While we mixed, Tiffany told us the goal of their business – to use their scents and candles as a platform for sharing positive narratives about Blackness.
The studio does a lot of online business, selling their scented products, and also works with groups.
For more about Durham, please visit Discover Durham.
– Text and photos by Jan Schroder, Editor-in-chief