Providence Road Sundries opened in 1933 as a drugstore with a soda shop attached. When a new Eckerd Drug Store moved into the nearby Myers Park Shopping Center, the pharmacy side couldn't compete and shut down. The soda shop stuck around into the mid-1970s, when then-owner John DeRamus converted the space into a bar and deli — and it's been some version of that ever since.
Meredith and Paul Bell own it now, and Meredith's connection to the place goes back further than the deed does. Decades before she and Paul took over in 2016, she walked in for dinner with a friend and, as she tells it, that's where her own story with the place actually started. A regular named John Tomlinson, who says this bar is what first inspired him to draw, painted the mural on the wall himself — a gift to the restaurant, not a commissioned piece.
The food's built around the kind of bar menu that earns actual loyalty: hand-cut fries, scratch-made guacamole, chipotle honey wings people specifically drive across town for, and onion rings good enough to get called out by name in nearly every review.
With Green's Lunch gone, Providence Road Sundries is now Charlotte's oldest restaurant, full stop — 1933, Myers Park, still slinging wings and pouring drinks to the same neighborhood it started serving nearly a century ago.
1522 Providence Rd, Charlotte. Kitchen open daily, 11am to 9 or 9:30pm depending on the night.
