The Five Restaurants on Center and Broad Street That All Have the Same Two Owners

Walk two blocks of downtown Statesville and you'll pass Twisted Oak American Bar & Grill, Broad Street Burger, The Quarter, and the newer breakfast spot Gracie Rae's. If you've eaten at all four and assumed you were supporting four different local success stories, you weren't wrong exactly, but you were missing the bigger one. All four came from the same two people.

Jason Cole and Andi Chadwick opened Twisted Oak in December 2013. More than a decade later, they're still opening restaurants in the same three or four blocks, and the newest one just started serving breakfast this year. That's not a coincidence of downtown being a good place to open a restaurant. It's a pattern of two people reinvesting in the same handful of storefronts over and over, which tells you something different about how this particular stretch of downtown actually grew: not through a wave of new operators taking a chance on Statesville, but through one partnership that kept doubling down on the blocks it already knew.

The Timeline Nobody Points Out

Here's what that reinvestment actually looked like on the ground.

Cole and Chadwick both grew up around restaurants before they ever owned one. Cole and his father had run the Statesville KFC. Chadwick's family had owned The Capri in Canton, Ohio for decades. Chadwick has told Iredell Free News she wanted a restaurant of her own, and that Cole simply wanted out of franchise food. That's the whole founding logic. Everything since has been the same two people building out variations on that idea within walking distance of each other.

The early days weren't smooth. Cole has described their first stretch running Twisted Oak as barely getting to the end of each week intact, and Chadwick has been just as candid about how rough the learning curve was. What followed wasn't a straight line either. Unwined, their second concept, didn't last, and the space it left behind became Smokin' Southern Cantina in December 2020, a pandemic-era pivot toward Cuban and Hawaiian flavors and a colorful outdoor patio that's since become one of the more recognizable seating areas downtown.

That's worth sitting with for a second. This isn't a story where every bet paid off. One restaurant failed outright. What makes the pattern interesting isn't a perfect record, it's that the partnership kept its footprint in the same few blocks even after a loss, rather than retreating or relocating. When Broad Street Burger opened in a former drug store at 111 E. Broad Street, Cole and Chadwick described a renovation that touched everything from the electrical to a new staircase to a full HVAC replacement. That's a real investment in one specific building, not a low-risk test of the market.

The One That Almost Opened Somewhere Else First

The Quarter came next in 2023, a casual New Orleans-inspired concept the pair developed after a four-day research trip to the city itself. It landed near Twisted Oak rather than as a standalone bet elsewhere, continuing the same geographic logic: build where you already have foot traffic and name recognition, not where the real estate might be cheaper or the concept might be trendier.

Gracie Rae's is the most recent addition, and its path to opening says something too. When Cole first announced the concept to What Now Charlotte in late 2025, the plan was a space adjacent to Twisted Oak on North Center Street, sharing a building with their flagship. By the time it actually opened this year, the address that stuck was 108 West Broad Street, a breakfast and brunch concept serving the morning crowd that none of their other four restaurants had really claimed. Plans shift between announcement and opening day for all kinds of ordinary reasons. What didn't shift was the decision to stay in the same downtown core they'd already spent a decade building.

Asked years ago whether they'd ever take the concept outside Statesville, Cole and Chadwick have said they'd turned down invitations to open elsewhere more than once, and that if they ever did leave, it would be for the coast, not another inland town. For now, five restaurants and one closure, all within the same few blocks of Center and Broad.

What's Actually New Downtown

None of this means downtown Statesville's food scene belongs to just two people. Two of the more recent additions arrived completely independent of that partnership.

The Social District opened in August 2025 at 240 West Broad Street, in the space that had been Pasta Amore, run by general manager Vinny Bulgarino under a different ownership structure entirely. It leans into North Carolina's social district law, letting patrons carry a drink between participating storefronts, and it programs a rotating calendar of open-mic comedy, poker nights, and Latin dancing on top of a menu of pizza, pasta, and wings. Bulgarino has talked about wanting it to feel like the neighborhood version of a show where everybody already knows your name, which is a different pitch than anything Cole and Chadwick have built. Their restaurants are destinations. The Social District is trying to be a living room.

Delightful Donuts had its grand opening on August 15, 2026, at 835 North Center Street, next to the existing Hidden Gem Variety Store. It's a small, single-location addition rather than part of any larger footprint, and it fills a gap that didn't have much competition: an actual donut shop in the downtown core.

Put the two stories side by side and you get a clearer picture of how this stretch of downtown actually works. Part of it grows through one partnership reinvesting in the blocks it already knows, absorbing a closure along the way without leaving the neighborhood. Part of it grows through entirely new, independent operators filling gaps that partnership never tried to fill, whether that's a donut shop or a bar built around North Carolina's open-container social district rules rather than a sit-down menu.

Why This Matters If You Already Live Here

If you eat downtown regularly, this changes how you'd read the next announcement. A new Cole and Chadwick concept isn't really a new bet on downtown Statesville, it's the same two people extending a track record they've already built over a decade, in a location they've already proven out. A restaurant from someone new, the way Delightful Donuts or The Social District arrived, is the actual test of whether downtown can support an idea nobody's tried there before.

It also explains why Center and Broad feel like the gravitational center of downtown dining rather than any single block having it all. Cole and Chadwick's five concepts sit close enough together that a night out can move from dinner at Twisted Oak to a coffee and pastry stop at Gracie Rae's the next morning without leaving a few hundred feet of sidewalk. That kind of density doesn't happen by accident. It happens because two people kept choosing the same blocks for over a decade, and because a handful of newer, unrelated businesses decided those same blocks were worth joining rather than avoiding.

None of this requires a decision from you today. But the next time a new name shows up in a downtown Statesville storefront, it's worth asking which story you're watching: another chapter from Cole and Chadwick, or someone new testing whether these blocks have room for one more idea.

If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of downtown is actually worth, or thinking about what walkable access to a corridor like this means for resale and rental demand, that's a conversation Seema Jay has with buyers, sellers, and investors across Statesville and the greater Lake Norman area every week. Let's Connect.