After 15 years, a Hillsborough Street restaurant in Raleigh will close for good
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After 15 years in one of the most memorable buildings on Hillsborough Street, a beloved Raleigh restaurant will close.
David’s Dumplings & Noodle Bar, the last Raleigh restaurant opened by legendary chef David Mao, will permanently close July 13. The restaurant announced its farewell Wednesday night on social media.
“We’ve had a phenomenal 15 year run and we’ve been honored to serve the local community,” manager Chilton Sheppard wrote in a post on the restaurant’s Instagram. “We owe gratitude to the original chef David Mao, our cooks, dishwashers, managers and all of our front of house staff that we’re proud to say have been majority NC State students who have worked hard all while maintaining their academics.”
Mao opened David’s Dumplings & Noodle Bar in 2010 in a former Red, Hot & Blue space. The building is best known, though, for being one of the most popular Darryl’s locations.
To open David’s Dumplings & Noodle Bar, Mao came out of semi-retirement. The influential chef and restaurateur launched his first Raleigh restaurant, Mandarin House, in 1976, four years after immigrating to Raleigh from Vietnam. When it opened Mandarin House was among the first handful of Chinese restaurants in Raleigh.
David Mao’s Raleigh legacy
In a 2009 story in The News & Observer on the American Dream, Mao shared how he changed his name from Khi to David.
“’When I was studying English in the ‘60s, I gave myself the name David because I saw in a textbook that David slew Goliath, the giant. It means you don’t have to be a big one or strong, but you have to depend on yourself and have character. Sometimes you can be small, but you have patience and ingenuity to do things. So I gave myself ‘David.’”
When Mandarin House closed in 2001, Mao opened perhaps his best known restaurant, Duck & Dumpling on Moore Square, partnering with real estate developer Greg Hatem. While Mandarin House was a traditional Chinese-American restaurant, Duck & Dumpling offered an upscale pan-Asian menu, serving the flavors of Vietnam, Malaysia and China and was best known for Mao’s handmade dumplings.
Mao sold his share of the restaurant to Hatem in 2010 and ostensibly retired from cooking, only to open David’s Dumplings & Noodle Bar on Hillsborough Street just a few months later.
“When I retired it felt really good the first couple weeks,” Mao told The News & Observer in 2010. “Then after that I’m kind of bored.”
Former News & Observer dining critic Greg Cox found lots to love in a 2011 review, noting the restaurant gave a new stage for familiar dishes, notably those dumplings.
“To say that the new restaurant’s menu is a downscale rehash of the old one, however, would be an oversimplification,” Cox wrote. “It’s more accurate to say that the menu is a culinary encore performance serving up a medley of dishes spanning David Mao’s career, interspersed with a few new compositions.”
Situated close to NC State, David’s Dumplings has been popular with college students craving dumplings and drinks.
Mao sold the restaurant in 2017 and retired for good.
In his closing announcement, Sheppard spoke to the legacy of David’s Dumplings.
“Personally the experience has meant a lot to me by continuing a great immigrant legacy of culinary prowess and building personal relationships with the local business/social media community, NCSU community and all the regulars whose friendly faces I kept seeing year after year,” he wrote. “I’ll treasure the time for the rest of my life. Thank you all!”
This story was originally published July 10, 2025 at 1:33 PM with the headline "After 15 years, a Hillsborough Street restaurant in Raleigh will close for good."
