Old Five Points Durham Restaurants: Little Bull Moves, Melao Prepares

Walk down Mangum Street past the old Five Points intersection this week and you'll find brown paper still taped inside the windows at 810 Mangum. Peek through the gaps and you'll see a dining room mid-transformation: fresh paint, a wall stacked with empty glass jars waiting to be filled with Colombian candy, a kitchen half torn apart and half rebuilt. For three years this building held one of the most talked-about restaurants in Durham. Now it's about to hold a different one, and the story of how that happened says more about this corner of the city than either restaurant does on its own.

The building is 810 Mangum Street. From 2023 until this August, it was Little Bull, chef Oscar Diaz's modern Mexican restaurant, the one that pulled in a Michelin Guide recommendation, a spot on the News & Observer's Top 50 Restaurants in the Triangle, and a run on Top Chef: Carolinas for Diaz himself. Now it's becoming Melao, a Colombian restaurant from three friends who are opening their first business. Same address, same brick walls, an entirely different kitchen coming to life inside them.

Leaving Wasn't A Retreat

The easy read on a beloved restaurant vacating its original address is decline. That's not what happened here. Little Bull didn't fold or get priced out. It moved five blocks away to a bigger space at 301 East Chapel Hill Street, in the middle of downtown facing CCB Plaza, and reopened there on Monday, August 3.

Diaz was blunt about why. The original Mangum Street building never had the infrastructure for the live-fire cooking he'd wanted from the start. "We decided we had to move it," he said. The new space, which the restaurant group had actually been renovating since 2024 with a steakhouse in mind before those plans shifted, finally gives him the setup he couldn't fit into the first building. In November 2025, Little Bull had already been named one of 19 Triangle restaurants to earn Michelin recognition. The move wasn't a restaurant running from a struggling block. It was a restaurant that had outgrown its own kitchen.

That distinction matters if you live near Old Five Points and you're wondering whether this corner is losing momentum. It isn't. It's producing something bigger than the space could hold, which is a different problem entirely.

The Address Has Done This Before

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only heard about the swap secondhand: this is the second time this exact address has handed off a beloved local business in three years.

• Jetplane Coffee, a neighborhood coffee shop, occupied the space first.
• Little Bull took over in 2023, when Jetplane closed, and built a national reputation from a converted coffee shop on Mangum Street.
• Melao is moving in now, aiming to open by the end of this month.

Three tenants, three completely different concepts, one building. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's a pattern of a specific kind of commercial real estate in Durham: modest brick storefronts on a quiet block that are cheap enough and small enough for a first-time or scaling concept to take a real swing, then get outgrown once that swing connects.

Why Melao, Why Now

The people moving into 810 Mangum aren't restaurant industry veterans looking for their next location. Sebastian Salinas, Miguel Cantor, and Diego Baron are three friends who came to the United States six years ago, working construction and cleaning jobs in Raleigh and New York before deciding to open a restaurant together. None of them had run one before.

Their reason for choosing Colombian food specifically is the kind of detail that explains a business better than a menu description does.

"There was not much Colombian culture or Colombian restaurants in North Carolina."

That's Salinas, describing the gap he noticed while working odd jobs and missing home. Melao's menu is built around that gap: arepas, empanadas, Colombian-style ceviche served with plantain chips, steak, and more than a dozen house cocktails built around aguardiente, the anise-flavored sugarcane liquor that anchors Colombian drinking culture. As of late August, the build-out was already visible through those papered windows, walls freshly painted and a section already stacked with the glass jars meant to hold Colombian candy as a nod to home. The restaurant is targeting an opening by the end of September, which puts it, as of this week, somewhere between "any day now" and "any week now."

It's worth sitting with what this means for the block. Melao isn't a chain filling a vacancy because the rent was manageable. It's three people who spent six years wanting exactly this kind of restaurant to exist somewhere in the Triangle, then decided to build it themselves, in the same building that just proved a Mexican concept could go from neighborhood spot to Michelin recommendation in three years.

What's Still There If You Walk By Today

None of this happened in isolation. Mangum Street in Old Five Points has held onto its other anchors through the entire transition. Zeitgeist Bar & Gallery is still hosting local art and drag programming a few doors down. Night School Bar is still running its cocktails-and-humanities format. Durham Beer Garden is still the dog-friendly, kid-friendly patio spot with local live music. And directly across the street, Hatch Burritos, the New Mexico-style spot with the cult breakfast burrito following, has been open barely a year itself, having landed on Axios's list of the best new restaurants to open in the Triangle in 2025.

That last one is worth watching. Hatch arrived on Mangum Street the same way Little Bull once did: small footprint, immediate local following, the kind of buzz that tends to precede either an expansion or a landlord conversation about a bigger space. Nobody's announced anything. But if you've lived near this block long enough to remember when Little Bull was the new name on the strip, the shape of the story feels familiar.

Old Five Points sits just outside the edge of downtown Durham proper, close enough to walk to Durham Central Park in about ten minutes, close enough to feel connected to the city center without being swallowed by it. That in-between position seems to be exactly what makes this stretch of Mangum Street function the way it does. It's central enough to get noticed, small enough to stay affordable for someone testing a first concept, and close enough to downtown that graduating out doesn't mean leaving the neighborhood behind. Little Bull didn't move to Raleigh or Chapel Hill. It moved five blocks.

So if you're walking your dog past 810 Mangum this week and the windows are still papered over, that's not a sign the block is struggling. It's the same building doing what it's done twice before: handing a concept enough room to prove itself, then making space for whoever's next. By the time you're reading this, Melao may already have its doors open. Either way, the corner isn't emptier. It's mid-transition, which on this particular block has turned out to be a pretty good place to be.

If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood by what's opening on the corner and not just what the listings say, The Cedeno Group spends the same amount of time paying attention. Find Your Dream Home. Habla con nosotros.