How Porters Neck Beat Wrightsville Beach for Wilmington's New Coffee Bar

Drive past 8121 Market Street today and you would never guess it spent years as a car wash. The tunnel that used to spray down sedans on their way to the beach now holds a private jet cabin built for forty people, with screens that scroll through a sunset takeoff filmed right here in Wilmington. It is called Concorde Espresso Bar, and the detail that matters most about it has nothing to do with the coffee.

The owners almost put it somewhere else.

The Espresso Bar That Almost Left for the Beach

Concorde already had a following downtown, tucked inside the Front Street Inn on South Front Street, known for espresso martini flights and a menu that leans into the aviation theme without taking itself too seriously. When Ace and Jamie Alfalla of Alfalla Hospitality Group started scouting a second location, Wrightsville Beach was the first place they looked.

They ended up in Porters Neck instead, buying the old car wash property for more than $1.8 million and spending months turning a 2,500-square-foot building on a 1.3-acre lot into something closer to a boarding gate than a coffee shop. The old car wash conveyor became the jet cabin. Creative Media Group, the same company that handles jumbotron technology for NBA arenas, built the screen system that makes every seat in the room feel like it is watching the same in-flight footage, whether you are up front or in the back of the plane.

Jamie Alfalla described the vision as bringing "elevated aviation vibes" to the corridor, with the same coffee-to-cocktails transition the downtown location built its name on and, in her words, "something we know Porters Neck locals will love." The bet paid off fast. The Porters Neck location's opening weekend this summer drew roughly 1,200 people, according to reporting from Port City Daily.

If you have not stopped in yet, a few practical notes:

• Open Wednesday through Sunday, closed Monday and Tuesday
• Sunday hours run 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., with Friday and Saturday stretching to 11 p.m.
• All ages are welcome until 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, after which the bar shifts to 21 and up
• The jet cabin seats 40 and fills its reservation slots quickly, especially after 4 p.m.

The bigger point stands on its own. A hospitality group with a proven concept and a choice of beachfront visibility looked at Porters Neck and decided this was the better bet.

MeMa's Didn't Rent Here. They Bought.

A few doors down the corridor, a different kind of commitment played out with less fanfare. Myra and James McDuffie built MeMa's Chick'n & Ribs into a Burgaw institution starting in 2017, smoking meats from recipes passed down through James's mother, Mary, the "MeMa" the restaurant is named for. When their Burgaw lease ended, they had options. Pender County land they already owned along NC Highway 53 was one of them, a spot they had planned for a multi-million-dollar shopping center years earlier before permitting delays and rising interest rates got in the way.

Instead, they closed on a 7,600-square-foot building at 8232 Market Street in Porters Neck, the same week they wrapped up their final year in Burgaw, and paid $2.5 million for it. The building had spent its previous life as J. Michael's Philly Deli. The McDuffies gutted it for something bigger, including a commercial production facility for their barbecue sauce that customers can watch from the dining room.

Myra McDuffie called it a space large enough for everything they wanted to do, with room for tours, private events, and the kind of destination dining experience a strip-mall lease could never support. That is a family choosing to root a twenty-plus-year recipe permanently into Porters Neck rather than simply finding the next available storefront.

Your Golf Course Was on National Television, Twice in Three Years

Not every sign of momentum in Porters Neck involves a storefront. In April 2026, Porters Neck Country Club hosted the ACC Women's Golf Championship for the second time in three years, a distinction that says more about the course than any marketing copy could.

The club's Tom Fazio design, built in 1991, stretched to 7,132 yards from the championship tees for the tournament, with a course rating of 74.9 and a slope of 140. Fifteen programs competed, seeded from top-ranked Stanford down through Notre Dame, with Duke, North Carolina, NC State, Clemson, Wake Forest, and Boston College all in the field. ACC Network Extra carried the semifinal and final rounds.

The Atlantic Coast Conference does not choose championship venues based on how close they are to a highway exit. It chooses them because the course can handle the traffic, hold up to four days of competitive play, and give fifteen of the best programs in the country a fair test. Porters Neck Country Club has now cleared that bar twice in three years.

None of These Businesses Needed Porters Neck

Line these three stories up and a pattern shows itself that a single headline would miss. A hospitality group with beachfront options chose a Market Street car wash instead. A barbecue family with land already banked in Pender County chose to buy here instead of building there. A conference with dozens of Carolina coastal courses to pick from came back a second time in three years.

None of these decisions were made by people who live in Porters Neck. They were made by people evaluating it from the outside, against real alternatives, and choosing it anyway. That is a different kind of validation than a chamber of commerce brochure or a "best places to live" list. It is the kind that shows up in deed records and tournament schedules rather than press releases.

Market Street has functioned for years as the road residents use to get somewhere else, toward the Intracoastal Waterway, toward Wrightsville Beach, toward downtown Wilmington. The corridor itself rarely got credit as a destination. The last twelve months suggest that is shifting. A jet-cabin cocktail lounge, a barbecue family's permanent home, and a nationally televised golf championship do not happen in a place people are only passing through.

Next time you are waiting on an espresso martini flight in that old car wash tunnel, or pulling into the parking lot for a plate of ribs, or hearing that the ACC is coming back to the club down the road, it is worth remembering that somebody with other options looked at this exact stretch of Porters Neck and picked it on purpose.

If you already call this corridor home, keep watching Market Street. It is not finished changing. And if you are thinking about what a neighborhood like this means for your own next move, whether that is buying in or selling out, Jennifer Farmer knows this stretch of Wilmington block by block. Open Your Door on the Coast.