Café Root Cellar in Pittsboro will serve its last regular meal on September 19, as chef-owner Sera Cuni and business partner Susan White shift their focus from running a restaurant to feeding a county where roughly one in six residents struggle to put food on the table. The café, tucked along Suttles Road inside the sprawling Chatham Park development, served its final lunch on Friday, and dinner and brunch service will continue through the closure date before the space transitions to a new purpose entirely.
The decision is not a story of a restaurant failing. As reported by Chapelboro.com, White said the closure will not touch the pair's original Root Cellar Café & Catering location in Chapel Hill, which will keep operating as normal. Instead, the Pittsboro kitchen will temporarily shift to preparing food for Feed-Well Fridges, the nonprofit Cuni and White started in 2023 to combat food waste and food insecurity across Chatham County.
Cuni and White's culinary partnership dates back further than either of their Root Cellar locations. The pair purchased Sara Foster's well-known Foster's Market in Chapel Hill in 2013 and relaunched it as The Root Cellar Café & Catering the following year, according to Chapelboro.com. They opened the Pittsboro café in 2017, expanding into the Penguin Place retail corridor that would later become part of Chatham Park's initial commercial footprint, a development that Hoodline has reported is projected to eventually bring tens of thousands of new residents to the county.
A Chef With a National Following Turns to Hunger Relief
Cuni is not a low-profile figure in the food world. She won Season 5 of Food Network's Supermarket Stakeout in May 2023, taking home $10,000 in prize money after two earlier runner-up finishes on Guy's Grocery Games, per Tabletop Media Group. She is also a founding member of the North Carolina Chapter of Les Dames d'Escoffier and holds a Signature Chef designation with Sterling Silver Premium Beef, credentials that have raised her civic profile well beyond the restaurant industry.
That visibility is now being funneled into Feed-Well Fridges, which places free, 24/7 community fridges at accessible spots across the county. The nonprofit's first fridge went up outside Countryside Collectibles and Antiques in Siler City in August 2023, followed shortly by a second unit at CORA Food Pantry in Pittsboro, according to the same Tabletop Media Group report. The organization now maintains fridges in Pittsboro, Siler City, Goldston and Chapel Hill.
The name itself is a nod to local history. Feed-Well Fridges takes its name from the old Feedwell Cafe, a Siler City institution earlier in the 20th century known for its rabbit dinners and neighborly, home-style atmosphere, according to the organization's own account on its website.
The Numbers Behind the Need
The scale of the problem in Chatham County is significant. Feeding America reporting and county health assessments put food insecurity in the county at roughly 13 to 16 percent of residents, and data from the North Carolina Budget & Tax Center, cited by 5 West Magazine, shows about 11 percent of county residents living at or below the federal poverty line, with 27 percent classified as low-income. That reality sits uneasily alongside Chatham Park's growth, a reminder that rapid development has not erased rural poverty in the same county.
Feed-Well Fridges has already made a dent. The nonprofit has saved and redistributed more than 350,000 pounds of food since 2023 and has prepared more than 90,000 meals, according to Chapelboro.com. Its capacity for fast action was on display earlier in August, when the organization intercepted 3,000 pounds of cheese from a disabled tractor-trailer in Siler City and redistributed it across CORA Food Pantry, PORCH Chapel Hill-Carrboro, and its own community fridges.
Building a Bigger Kitchen
To keep up with demand, Feed-Well Fridges has launched a fundraising campaign to build a dedicated 8,000-square-foot commissary kitchen in the area, with a goal of raising $400,000. The organization has already earned grants to help with operations, and the new facility is expected to boost meal preparation, food rescue, community-fridge support and regional reach.
Once built, the group plans to double the amount of surplus food it rescues from partnering stores, farms and restaurants, and to increase meal production from roughly 3,000 meals per month to 5,000. Feed-Well Fridges also hopes to expand its fridge network statewide by partnering with other nonprofits and organizations working on food insecurity. The nonprofit operates with an advisory board that includes leadership from Love Chatham and CORA Food Pantry, along with faculty from the UNC School of Social Work, lending institutional weight to its expansion plans.
For now, Café Root Cellar in Pittsboro will keep its doors open a little longer. Dinner service runs Thursdays through Saturdays from 5 to 9 p.m., and Sunday brunch continues from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., both through September 19. White has described the café as a place that gave people a reason to gather around food and feel connected — a mission its closure is meant to redirect, rather than end, toward the county's hungriest residents.
