The Dilworth room on Scott Avenue, the Charlotte original of a wood-fired pizza company that now runs twenty locations across four states and still keeps its corporate office on East 7th Street in Charlotte. It publishes a kids menu and a separate gluten-free menu as downloadable PDFs, along with an allergen sheet.
Dilworth Neighborhood Grille is a bar and grill on East Morehead Street that is open until 2 a.m. every day of the week, which makes it one of the few genuinely late kitchens in this part of the city. Wings and pizza are the signature items alongside sandwiches, burgers, salads and barbecue. The room calls itself family friendly and has outdoor seating.
A grill and taphouse whose own line is that it makes non-pretentious menu items and pours beer selections that cannot be found just anywhere. It runs a kids deal that changes by location: one free kid's meal per $12 of adult purchases, dine in only, one child per adult, on Wednesdays at the SouthPark and Rea Farms rooms.
Flower Child serves bowls, wraps and salads at The Bowl, with clearly marked vegan and gluten-free choices. The menu also has a Healthy Kids section with a choice of protein and two sides. This is the Bowl Street branch in Ballantyne.
BellyUp! Charlotte / Family
7 spots
Dilworth Neighborhood Grille is a bar and grill on East Morehead Street that is open until 2 a.m. every day of the week, which makes it one of the few genuinely late kitchens in this part of the city. Wings and pizza are the signature items alongside sandwiches, burgers, salads and barbecue. The room calls itself family friendly and has outdoor seating.
A New York style pizza room on East 7th Street in Elizabeth, established in 2004. The company's own site invites guests onto the patio, calls the restaurant family and dog friendly, and publishes a kids menu with pizza, chicken, pasta, ravioli and macaroni and cheese. Its current specials page does not publish a kids-eat-free offer, so this profile does not treat the older Tuesday promotion as current.
Mellow Mushroom's Ballantyne restaurant serves stone-baked pizza with a draft beer and cocktail selection. Its own branch menu offers vegan and gluten-free pizza choices, and the location has a patio. This is the Ballantyne Village Way restaurant.
Come for shepherd's pie and a pint, then stay for the music. Nora Mac's brings a traditional Irish pub to Ballantyne Corners, with live music on Friday and Saturday nights and a rooftop patio for an outdoor drink. The menu reaches beyond burgers: try the Irish spice bag with curry sauce or a full Irish breakfast with black and white pudding. Kids have their own menu, including smaller fish and chips and shepherd's pie. Co-owner Dominic Kennedy opened the pub in the former Blackthorne space in late December 2024. Football is shown on TV too, so the same room can suit a family meal, a match or a lively music night.
Optimist Hall fills the 1892 Highland Park Gingham Mill on North Brevard Street between Optimist Park and NoDa. The long brick mill and its 1895 smokestack now hold more than 25 food stalls, dine-in restaurants, a full-service bar, a brewery and shops. It is the kind of place where a group can split up for tacos, dumplings, barbecue, pizza or Ethiopian food and still eat at the same table.
The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery opened in 2009 and calls itself Charlotte's oldest standing independent brewery. It brews German-style beer to the Reinheitsgebot, using only water, malt, hops and yeast. Its LoSo home sits on a one-acre biergarten shaded by mature oak, pecan and hickory trees, which the brewery calls the largest biergarten in the Southeast. A second room opened in Ballantyne.
Vaulted Oak opened on 9 June 2021 inside a refurbished BB&T bank building on Monroe Road in east Charlotte, which is where the name comes from. Outside there is a large patio, covered seating and lawn chairs around a fire pit, plus cornhole. There is no kitchen; food trucks run Wednesday through Sunday, Sal's pizza is across the street, and people are told they can bring their own food.
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