A swan song for a sandwich shop: Fans flock to beloved Boondini’s in its final days
It’s T-minus eight days for Boondini’s and the line to order stretches to the door. A stack of menus sits untouched by the register; everyone already knows what they want.
The North Raleigh sandwich shop will close for good Dec. 12, after 42 years, the last 33 in the same Six Forks Road shopping center.
Owner Billy Williams said his lease was not renewed as a way of making room for a new anchor tenant in the strip mall. It is a bittersweet end for a much beloved shop, but it’s no secret. Williams said he hung up a sign on Jan. 2 that 2019 would be it for Boondini’s, hoping to pass the hoagie on to someone else.
There were talks, he said, but a successor was never worked out. Either way, it’s retirement for the soon to be 69-year-old Williams.
“I’m ready to go,” Williams tells a customer asking if he’ll be sad to close the shop.
Williams leaves sentimentality to the many fans of Boondini’s. The thought of Boondini’s closing brought longtime regular Sandra Williams to tears over a bowl of chicken and rice soup. Her office is nearby, and she’s been stopping in two or three times per week for 25 years.
“You do the math,” Williams said, noting she is not related to the Boondini’s owner. ““I love the fresh food, the fact that he doesn’t have french fries or hamburgers. You can get that anywhere.”
Boondini’s ‘a real neighborhood place’
The restaurant is busiest as lunchtime, filled Sandra Williams said, by a rich swath of Raleigh, of construction workers and tax attorneys, firefighters and police officers, bankers and accountants.
“I see everybody here,” Sandra Williams said. “It’s a real neighborhood place making really good food,”
Williams opened the first Boondini’s in Buies Creek near Campbell University in 1977 and later moved to North Raleigh, where’s he’s outlasted two Quizno’s and a Jersey Mike’s, building a legion of regulars that he knows nearly all by name.
If the line is long, Williams is all business, rattling off questions in quick succession: “Here or to-go,” “Hot or cold,” “Mustard or mayonnaise.” If the line is short, he’ll chat it up, asking a few familiar faces if they want to buy the shop.
Fans always say the food is what brings them back to Boondini’s, but they also say Billy is what makes the place an institution.
“The place has character,” said 20-year regular Dave Babson. “There are National Geographic maps on the wall. My kids learned geography here. Where else do you see that?”
That famous cucumber dressing
At Boondini’s, Williams built a menu spanning sandwich shop favorites, cold cuts piled high on Italian subs, pastrami and swiss, housemade chicken and tuna salads and a weekly rotation of soups.The single most revered menu item at Boondini’s is a cucumber dressing that some customers add to sandwiches. Williams promises it contains zero cocaine, but it is addictive nonetheless.
Flipping through the menu will give you away as a newcomer, perhaps drawn in by the potential FOMO of never trying an institution.
“My coworkers all said this was the best place for lunch,” said first-timer Crystal Carr.
Others encounter a growing list of items Boondini’s has run out of, scrawled on a corkboard by the door. The most painful of all, it seemed, was the loss of meatball subs.
“There are no more meatball subs, forever,” Williams declares. “I knew meatball subs would go fast.”
Sandra Williams expects to be back in at least four more times in these last days of Boondini’s and sincerely wondered where she’ll find a comparable lunch. She wasn’t alone.
“Where else can you find a grilled sandwich?” Babson said. “No, really, I’m asking.”
This story was originally published December 6, 2019 at 11:45 AM with the headline "A swan song for a sandwich shop: Fans flock to beloved Boondini’s in its final days."
