On January 3, 2025, a restaurant called Rada opened for dinner service in the old littleSpoon space at 2820 Selwyn Avenue. There was no balloon arch, no influencer preview, no ad campaign announcing the arrival of chef Callan Buckles and owner Eloy Roy. Many people who live within walking distance found out it existed only after someone posted about it on the neighborhood Facebook page, days after the doors were already open.
Nine months later, the New York Times named it one of the best restaurants in the country. The following month, Michelin put it on the inaugural recommended list for the American South, alongside Charlotte veterans like Kindred and Customshop. A 46-seat room with a half-page menu and no marketing budget had become one of the most talked-about tables in a city with far bigger dining rooms and far bigger publicity teams.
That sequence only makes sense if you understand what Rada actually sits on top of. It isn't just Selwyn Avenue. It's the Booty Loop, and in Myers Park, that loop does more for a new business than any campaign could.
The loop, measured in laps, not clicks
The Booty Loop is 2.85 miles: Queens Road to Selwyn Avenue, right on Queens Road West to Hopedale Avenue, then back onto Queens Road to close the circuit. It runs past Queens University, under a canopy of century-old oaks, and it has done this same lap for so long that it functions less like a jogging route and more like a shared calendar. The same runners pass the same walkers most mornings. The same cyclists nod at the same dog owners most evenings. It's also home base for 24 Hours of Booty, the overnight cycling fundraiser hosted by the 24 Foundation that pulls in hundreds of riders and thousands of spectators every year, and its wide, tree-lined streets get borrowed regularly for the Charlotte Marathon route and other charity runs.
What that means for anyone opening a business on or near Selwyn Avenue is that foot traffic isn't a one-time pass-by. It's repetition. The same people see your storefront three, four, five times a week, whether they mean to or not. A restaurant doesn't need a billboard on Providence Road if it sits where the loop already sends people every single day.
Why a quiet restaurant became a loud story
Rada's location at Selwyn Avenue and Colony Road puts it directly on that daily circuit, next to the Chop Shop and People's Market. Buckles changes the menu almost monthly. The room seats around 46 people, which by design makes weekend tables hard to get and turns scarcity into its own kind of word of mouth. None of that required a launch strategy. It required being visible to the same few thousand households who already pass that corner on repeat.
Compare that to how a restaurant succeeds in a neighborhood built around car traffic and destination dining. There, you need billboards, reservations platforms, and a publicist. On the Booty Loop, the publicist is whoever ran past your window this morning and told a neighbor about it by dinner.
The studio, the pub, and the theater that never needed a marketing plan
Rada isn't an isolated case. In 2026, a Lagree studio built around high-intensity, low-impact strength workouts opened at 2909 Selwyn Avenue, a few doors down. It's a small enough footprint that it wouldn't survive on drive-by traffic from Providence Road. It survives because it sits inside the loop's daily rhythm, catching runners and walkers who already pass that block on their way to or from a workout of their own.
Selwyn Avenue Pub has been running the same play for years without ever needing to update it. Its porch stays full for college hoops and football on the big screens, and it's well known enough in the neighborhood that Michael Jordan and Dale Earnhardt Jr. have both been known to stop in. A few blocks over, the Manor Theatre has been showing independent films for more than 70 years, an unusually long run for a single-screen house in a city where multiplexes come and go. Neither business advertises the way a new restaurant might. Neither needs to. Both sit inside a loop where the customer base already walks or drives past on a schedule, week after week, year after year.
That's the part of the story that a simple "here's what's new in Myers Park" post misses. The pattern isn't only about 2026 openings. It's decades old. The Booty Loop has been doing this work quietly since long before Rada or the Lagree studio existed.
The one landmark that hides from the loop on purpose
Wing Haven Garden & Bird Sanctuary breaks the pattern in a way that actually proves it. The garden sits at 248 Ridgewood Avenue, tucked between Selwyn Avenue and Westfield Road, a short walk off the loop rather than directly on it. It's fronted by an unassuming brick wall that gives away nothing about the three public gardens behind it. You don't stumble onto Wing Haven the way you stumble onto Rada's window display. You have to already know it's there, or hear about it from someone who does.
This fall, Wing Haven turns 100. The Foundation's Fall Dinner this year is built around that centennial, marking a full century since Elizabeth and Edwin Clarkson began the garden that would later become one of three connected public gardens on Ridgewood Avenue, alongside the Elizabeth Lawrence House and the SEED Wildlife & Children's Garden. The garden runs more than 40 programs and events a year and is open Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The most public-facing of this fall's centennial events is the Fall Plant Sale, running October 8 through 10, with a members-only preview on Wednesday, October 7. Admission to the gardens is free for the duration of the sale, and proceeds go back into Wing Haven's programs and grounds. It's the kind of event that spreads the same way Rada did in its first weeks, not through a storefront window on the loop, but through the same neighbors who circle Queens Road and Selwyn Avenue telling each other where to go once they step off it.
That's the twist the loop reveals. It isn't really about foot traffic exposure on its own. It's about what happens once someone is already inside the daily routine of this neighborhood. Rada got discovered because it sat in the direct path of that routine. Wing Haven gets discovered because it depends on the same people who run that routine to carry the word somewhere the loop itself doesn't reach.
What this means for anyone walking it this fall
Put those pieces next to each other and Myers Park's fall calendar looks less like a list of unrelated updates and more like one system working the way it always has. A hundred-year-old garden is marking its centennial a short walk off Selwyn. A restaurant that opened without a single press release is well into its second year with a Michelin nod already in hand. A new fitness studio picked the same stretch of Selwyn Avenue that already holds a decades-old pub and a 70-year-old movie house. None of them needed to convince anyone from outside the neighborhood to show up. They needed to be visible, or discoverable, to the same few thousand people who already loop this ground on repeat.
If you already live inside that loop, none of this requires a special trip. The plant sale is a short walk from most of Myers Park's core streets. Rada is still taking reservations on Selwyn most weeknights. The pub's porch will be full again the next time there's a game worth watching. That's the actual shape of a Myers Park fall: not a season that arrives from outside, but one that circulates through the same 2.85 miles it always has, picking up whatever opened this year along the way.
If you're weighing a move within Myers Park, curious what a specific block near the loop is really like day to day, or thinking through timing for buying or selling in this market, Rhonda Taylor has spent nearly two decades working these streets and is glad to talk through what you're seeing. Let's Connect.
