Rob and Angie Bell are opening The Hive Eatery at Evenbrooke Marketplace in Lexington, turning their overflowing honey and gift shop into a full sit-down café with soups, sandwiches, salads and dozens of loose-leaf teas. The soft opening is set for Friday, with a grand opening planned for Halloween, October 31.
The new eatery is an expansion of HoneyBell's Old Country Store, the Bells' shop inside Evenbrooke Marketplace that has simply outgrown its space, according to The Dispatch. Angie Bell told the paper the store had become so crowded that customers could barely move. Rob Bell said he and Angie, along with Evenbrooke, wanted a place where shoppers could eat lunch without ever leaving the marketplace.
Evenbrooke Marketplace itself has grown considerably since it opened. Brad McCullough launched the complex at 15 Murphy Drive in April 2019 with just 12 vendors in a single showroom called Ruby Road, and according to Evenbrooke Marketplace, the business has since expanded across two buildings totaling roughly 30,000 square feet. The marketplace now houses about 250 vendors spread across those two buildings off U.S. Highway 64, per the same Dispatch report.
From a Vendor Booth to a Brick-and-Mortar Café
The Bells' journey at Evenbrooke started small. They began with a modest vendor booth in 2018 featuring homemade honey products and bee-themed gifts and novelties drawn from their own beehives, the Dispatch report notes. By 2022, that booth had grown into HoneyBell's Old Country Store, and in the years since, the Bells also ran occasional food pop-up events featuring chicken stew, smoked turkey legs and smoked sausage sandwiches.
Those temporary food setups would have required their own local health department permits under North Carolina rules governing pop-up food operations at events, per G.S. 130A-248(d), before a business can transition into a permanent, inspected food service operation. The Hive Eatery will now operate under the same statewide system that requires North Carolina retail food establishments to post visible letter grade cards, with a score of 90% or higher earning a Grade A rating, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
What's on the Menu
The Hive Eatery will open with eight sandwiches, three salads and a rotating soup of the day, the Dispatch reports. Sandwich options include grilled cheese, ham and cheese, fried bologna, BLT, chicken salad, pimento cheese, a banana fluffer nutter, and a grilled peanut butter and jelly. Sides will include chips, potato salad and pasta salad, alongside bottled beverages and hot tea.
The signature salad comes loaded with spring mix greens, cashews, croutons, pepperoni, fried onions, craisins, sunflower seeds, tomatoes and cucumbers — what Angie Bell described to the Dispatch as having all the works. For dessert, there's a salted caramel brownie topped with salted caramel ice cream and caramel sauce. Angie Bell said the menu will start with these initial offerings and expand later if needed.
The eatery is leaning on regional suppliers for its bread and soups. White bread comes from Sweet Em's Bakery, a family-owned kitchen on Welcome Arcadia Road in Welcome, while sourdough is supplied by Get It To Go Bakery & Country Store on Thomasville Road in Wallburg. Soups rotate between A Full Measure, which operates storefronts in Advance and Mocksville after winning a Moravian chicken pie competition in Old Salem according to the Davie County Enterprise Record, and Mrs. Pumpkin's, a Winston-Salem veteran-owned, USDA-inspected kitchen that traces back to a 1985 home bakery specializing in scratch-made Moravian chicken pies, per Mrs. Pumpkin's.
Tea, Tinctures and a No-Screens Philosophy
Beyond food, The Hive Eatery will stock 30 varieties of loose-leaf teas, 40 raw herbs and tinctures, which are concentrated herbal extracts, the Dispatch reports. Customers will be able to buy loose-leaf tea blends to take home. Angie Bell told the paper she turned to holistic remedies after watching medication make her mother sicker, a personal history that shaped the eatery's wellness-minded offerings.
One deliberate choice: there will be no televisions inside The Hive Eatery. The Bells want customers talking with one another instead of staring at screens, and Angie Bell said her goal is simple — she wants people to leave in a better mood than when they arrived.
The eatery's debut also lands amid a broader shift in Lexington's retail and food landscape. The opening follows the expansion of small retail and food service businesses at Evenbrooke Marketplace even as the city absorbs major industrial losses, including the July 2026 closure of Vitacost's fulfillment center, which cut 130 jobs, and the June 2026 shutdown of Parkdale Mills' yarn plant, which eliminated 68 positions. Evenbrooke's owners have also planned a dedicated event space between the marketplace's two buildings for live music, farmers markets and other public gatherings, a project that could eventually bring more foot traffic to food vendors like The Hive Eatery, according to Evenbrooke Marketplace.
