For nearly two decades, the wing joint at 1331 Military Cutoff Road was where you went if you wanted a booth, a pitcher, and a Pirates game on the television. Wild Wing Cafe opened in 2005 and built the kind of regular crowd that comes with staying in one spot that long. Then, in February 2023, it closed for good, part of a run of Wild Wing shutdowns that also hit Spartanburg, Charlotte, and the brand's own flagship location in Hilton Head, according to Port City Daily's reporting at the time.
What has happened to that pad since, and to the storefronts around it, tells you more about where Landfall Center is headed than any simple list of who's open and who isn't. Follow the last three years of leasing news in order and a pattern shows up: this shopping center has been spending its restaurant vacancies on plumbing, not menus.
A Wing Joint Becomes a Bank
The Wild Wing space wasn't small. It ran more than 6,300 square feet of dining room plus a roughly 1,200-square-foot covered patio on a 1.2-acre outparcel zoned for regional business development. In March 2025, JPMorgan Chase filed a formal site application with the city to build its first Wilmington-area branch on that exact footprint, a roughly 3,300-square-foot building at 1331 Military Cutoff Road, according to WilmingtonBiz. A Chase spokesperson confirmed at the time that the location would be the company's first in the area, though the project still needed regulatory approval.
Whatever your feelings about wings versus banking, notice what kind of tenant this is. A national bank branch doesn't compete for dinner traffic. It doesn't need a happy hour crowd or a game-day promotion to hit its numbers. It's the kind of tenant a landlord signs when the goal is steady rent, not restaurant buzz.
The Six Tenants That Filled In Around It
The bank filing wasn't an isolated move. In the months leading up to an August 2024 WilmingtonBiz report on the center, six new tenants had signed on: Animal Eye Care Associates, CheeseSmith, Gameday Men's Health, Stretch Zone, Wild Birds Unlimited, and Fun Bowl Poke, according to the same coverage. Line them up and only two are food concepts, and both are counter-service, not sit-down. The rest are a veterinary eye clinic, a men's health practice, a stretch and recovery studio, and a specialty pet store. None of them needs a liquor license or a dinner rush to survive.
The property changed hands in August 2022, when Cameron Management, Trask Land Co., SHP Acquisitions, and Charlotte-based Collett Capital bought the center for more than $30 million. The new ownership group described its plan in a statement to the Business Journal as one built around lowering vacancy and "strengthening the tenant caliber through a mix of tenants that align with community needs and preferences." That phrase is doing real work. It's landlord language for a deliberate shift away from the restaurant-heavy roster the center used to carry.
The Common Thread Nobody's Naming
Put the bank filing next to the six-tenant list and the direction is hard to miss. Landfall Center isn't losing retail. It's trading dining-destination tenants for errand-run tenants. A wing bar with a patio and live music becomes a bank teller line. A vacant storefront becomes a stretch studio or an eye clinic instead of another restaurant concept.
Part of this is simply age working in the center's favor and against it at the same time. Landfall Center was built in the 1980s, well before Mayfaire Town Center's first store opened down the road, per WilmingtonBiz. That head start gave it decades as the default stop for anyone living around Landfall. But it also means the center's original tenant mix, heavy on full-service dining like Wild Wing, was built for a different retail moment. The current ownership group's leasing strategy since 2022 reads like an attempt to modernize that mix for how people actually run errands now: quick, service-based, in and out.
Why Landlords Can Afford to Pick a Bank Over Another Restaurant
None of this happens in a vacuum. Wilmington's retail vacancy rate sat at just 1.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, according to CoStar data cited in WilmingtonBiz's April 2026 commercial real estate roundup. That's tighter than the five-year average of 1.8 percent and well below the ten-year average of 2.2 percent.
A market that tight changes what a landlord has to accept. When vacancy is scarce, property owners get to be selective, and selective usually means picking the tenant with the strongest credit and the most predictable foot traffic over the one with the best wing sauce. Restaurants, even good ones, carry more turnover risk than a bank branch or a health clinic, a lesson Landfall Center already learned once when a chain that had operated in Wilmington for nearly two decades folded within weeks of cutting its hours. In a market this tight, owners don't have to gamble on another restaurant concept to fill a hole. They can wait for a tenant like Chase.
What's Still Anchoring the Center
None of this means Landfall Center has stopped being a place to eat. Food Lion and Havertys Furniture remain the two big anchors, unchanged through the ownership transition. Lovey's Organic Market & Cafe is still there for a health-focused lunch, Calico Coffee still handles the daily coffee run, and Big Thai is still serving dinner, all confirmed on the center's own directory map. A short walk from the old Wild Wing pad, CheeseSmith, Terrazzo Trattoria, El Mariscal Mexican Style Seafood, and Fun Bowl Landfall round out a food lineup that's still real, just built around counter service and quick turns instead of a dinner-and-a-show model.
Mark Johnson Custom Homes also keeps an office in the center, a small but telling detail. Even the builders doing business in the neighborhood have found it worth their while to plant a storefront here rather than a standalone office elsewhere.
What This Actually Means for Your Errand List
If you've been wondering whatever happened to the wing place, now you know: a Chase branch filed the paperwork to take over that footprint back in March 2025, though the project still needed to clear city approval at the time of that filing and the shopping center's own directory has not yet listed it as open. If you've noticed a stretch studio or an eye clinic where a restaurant used to sit, that's not a fluke, it's the leasing strategy playing out one signed lease at a time.
The practical version for anyone running errands around Landfall looks something like this. Food Lion and Lovey's cover groceries. Calico Coffee covers the standing order. CheeseSmith or Big Thai cover lunch and dinner without much of a wait. And soon, instead of driving to Mayfaire or downtown for basic banking, there may be a Chase branch a few doors down from where the wing sauce used to be.
That's a small, specific way to watch a neighborhood change shape without anyone ever putting up a sign that says so.
Austin Kenyon and the team at Kenyon Realty Group pay attention to these tenant shifts for the same reason we track closing prices: both are early signals of where a community is headed. If you're curious what changes like these mean for the value of a home near Landfall, or you're ready to talk through a move within the neighborhood, schedule a private consultation with our team.
