Around eleven-thirty on a Tuesday, the lunch crowd at Sofra Mediterranean Kitchen starts filtering in from the office parks along Glenwood Avenue, and the owner, Bill Smith — not the one from Crook’s Corner, a different Bill Smith entirely, which he finds perpetually amusing — is already behind the counter doing two things at once. He’s spooning hummus and answering a question about whether the lamb is halal. The answer, for the record, is yes.
Sofra sits in a strip of storefronts off Glenwood near the North Hills end of things, which is the kind of location that could doom a restaurant — too suburban-feeling, not enough walk-by foot traffic — but Smith has been defying that logic for going on a decade. He opened the place after working in restaurant kitchens across the Triangle and getting genuinely tired of menus that treated Mediterranean food as a vague, interchangeable category. His version is more specific than that.
The menu skews Turkish and Levantine, with a few Egyptian touches that show up if you know to look for them. The köfte platter — ground lamb shaped onto skewers, grilled to the point where the outside has just a little char — comes with a bright tabbouleh and a smear of yogurt that has enough garlic in it to keep people honest. The falafel here is fried to order, not sitting under a heat lamp, and it holds together without being dense. Smith is quietly insistent about both of those things.
He’ll tell you, if you ask and sometimes if you don’t, that the reason the hummus is good is just that they make it fresh every morning and they use enough lemon. There’s no elaborate story about heirloom chickpeas. He seems almost suspicious of elaborate stories about heirloom chickpeas.
Lunch runs somewhere in the twelve-to-sixteen dollar range for a full plate, which is reasonable for the portion size. Dinner is slightly more involved — the lamb shank shows up on the evening menu and is worth the trip on its own — but the place is fundamentally a lunch spot by temperament. It’s bright, modestly decorated, and loud enough at peak hours that you probably shouldn’t try to have a serious conversation. The regulars seem fine with this.
There are a handful of tables inside and a small patio that works well from March through November, assuming Raleigh cooperates with the weather, which it sometimes does. Parking is straightforward, which sounds like a low bar but matters more than people admit.
Smith is not especially interested in expansion or a second location or becoming a brand. He mentions this with the mild contentment of someone who has thought it through and reached a conclusion he’s comfortable with. The restaurant has a small catering operation that keeps him busy enough. He knows most of the regulars by order if not always by name, which is its own kind of competence.
If you go on a Friday, get there before noon or be prepared to wait. The line moves, but it moves at whatever pace Smith decides it moves, and that pace is unhurried in a way that suggests he’s been doing this long enough to know that rushing the hummus doesn’t help anybody.
