Restaurants in Cary, NC

Cary, with 182,659 residents, has 780 places listed in this guide, split into 579 restaurants, 53 quick service spots, 65 cafes and 74 bars. Bars are the largest category at 73, with Coffee shops and cafes at 66 and Pizza at 58 in the listings.

Cary records 42.7 listed places per 10,000 residents, just above the 41.8 median for all cities in this guide. The count reflects this guide's listings, which is a snapshot rather than a full census of the city.

486 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Starbucks (18), Subway (13), McDonald's (8) and Zenshi Sushi (8).

In the Servestack Independent Restaurant Index, Cary ranks #191 of 332 large US cities for the share of places that are independent.

Food in Cary by cuisine

Own a restaurant in Cary?

736 of the 780 places here (94%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in Cary and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.