If you live here, you already know Clemmons is easy to describe wrong. The interstate signage still reads like a fuel stop between Winston-Salem and Charlotte, and the Village keeps getting lumped in with "west Forsyth" on regional roundups. That framing is a summer behind. Between Stratford Road turning over two restaurant addresses this spring, the Village's free event slate stretching from June into October, and Tanglewood quietly running the busiest 1,100 acres in the county, the Clemmons summer calendar has more density than most residents give it credit for.
This post is a working guide to that density. What opened, what's on, where to go on a Tuesday night when you don't feel like driving to Trade Street.
The Stratford Road Turnover
Two of the more interesting food stories in Clemmons this year are happening in buildings that used to belong to somebody else. Both sit on South Stratford, the corridor that functions as the Village's practical restaurant row.
Hawgfish Shack is taking over 3260 South Stratford Road, the former Cimarron Steakhouse space on the edge of Clemmons, with a seafood and barbecue menu targeting a spring 2026 open. That address has been dark long enough that most residents had stopped noticing it. A barbecue-and-seafood concept is a swing at a specific gap: no direct competitor within the Village line runs both smokers and a raw bar.
Miam Breakfast House, the Greensboro-born breakfast concept, is opening its third Triad location in Clemmons this spring, taking the former Cagney's Kitchen building at 828 South Stratford Road. Cagney's had regulars going back decades. Miam is a different animal, closer in style to a modern all-day breakfast house than to a diner, and the arrival gives Clemmons a real breakfast option that isn't already booked out on Saturdays.
Add these to the incumbents worth keeping on the short list: Full Moon Oyster Bar at 1473 River Ridge Drive, Village Square Tap House, Bodine's on Cephis Drive, and Clemmons Kitchen for the homestyle-menu weekday nights. The point is not the list. The point is that within a six-month window the Village's dining bench got measurably deeper without a single new-build shopping center to explain it.
The Free Summer Slate
The Village of Clemmons has stopped treating events as one-offs. Most of what's coming this summer is free, family-friendly, and clustered at the Jerry Long Family YMCA campus on South Peace Haven Road, which has effectively become the Village green until a permanent venue gets built adjacent to Village Point.
Here is the calendar worth putting on the fridge:
| Date | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Sat, June 6, 2026 | BASH Triples Volleyball Tournament | Jerry Long Family YMCA |
| Sat, June 7, 2026 | Summer Shindig (5–8 p.m., free, live music, food trucks, kid zone) | Jerry Long Family YMCA |
| Sun, June 14, 2026 | The Piedmont Boys at Bodine's | 6353 Cephis Drive |
| Tue, July 7, 2026 | Salem Band Stars & Stripes Concert (7:30 p.m.) | Clemmons First Baptist Church |
| Sat, Aug 15, 2026 | Food Truck Festival and Car Show (4 p.m.) | Jerry Long Family YMCA |
| Sat, Sep 12, 2026 | Dirty Dozen 5K Obstacle Mud Run | Jerry Long Family YMCA |
The Summer Shindig is the tent-pole night. The Village of Clemmons runs it, AM Erectors sponsors, and the format is simple: bring chairs and a blanket, park at the Y, eat off the food trucks, drink from the beer tent, let the kids loose on Rockstar Bubbles and Mobile Arcade USA. It is the closest thing the Village has to a town concert.
Two smaller-scale traditions are worth folding into the same calendar. Movie Night in the Village runs at the Jerry Long YMCA campus with films starting at sunset. It's alcohol, dog, and tobacco free, which is worth knowing before you pack a cooler. And the Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County brings its free Parks Concert Series to Tanglewood every summer, with local and national musicians, food vendors, and interactive art.
If you moved here in the last three years and haven't hit the Summer Shindig yet, this is the year. It's the fastest way to run into every neighbor you meant to introduce yourself to.
Tanglewood, Read Correctly
Most Clemmons residents visit Tanglewood the same way tourists do: Festival of Lights in December, maybe a wedding in the fall, done. That is a waste of a 1,100-acre park you effectively co-own as a Forsyth County resident.
The warm-weather version of Tanglewood is a completely different property from the drive-through light show version. Some anchors worth working into a routine:
- The Arboretum and Rose Garden. 26 gardens on the estate grounds, including an 800-bush Rose Garden on the Manor House lawn originally planted by Kate Reynolds and shaped over sixty years by master gardener Frank Lustig. Free to walk. Peak bloom is May through July.
- Mallard Lake. Paddleboats and fishing. Bring your own tackle. Reasonable place to kill a hot afternoon with kids.
- The Aquatic Center. Four pools, $8 per ticket, open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Cheaper than a country club membership and far less crowded than the public pools closer to town.
- The golf. Two 18-hole courses plus a Par-3. The Championship Course was designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and hosted the 1974 PGA Championship, won by Lee Trevino with Nicklaus one back. That history alone makes it one of the more publicly accessible golf pedigrees in the state.
- The RV Campground. 44 full-hookup sites on asphalt pads, tucked into old forest right off I-40. The 2026 season runs March 1 through December 5. Locals underrate this: it is a legitimate option when in-laws visit and you don't want them in your guest room for a week.
The single most Clemmons-specific move here is treating Tanglewood as a Tuesday-evening park, not a special-occasion park. Pack sandwiches, walk the Rose Garden, feed the paddleboat crowd's leftover crackers to the geese, be home by 8:30.
The Greenway You Should Be Using
Village Point Greenway and Pier is the piece of infrastructure that most residents have heard of but haven't actually walked. It sits south of the Y campus and connects to future Village land the town is acquiring specifically to expand its outdoor event footprint. In practical terms, that means the greenway is about to become the spine of a much larger civic space, not the isolated trail it currently reads as.
Two lower-key spots to know while you're on that side of the Village:
- Be Kind Coffee Co. is hosting the Wandering Shire Book Market on September 12, 2026. Independent bookseller pop-ups are rare in the Triad outside of Winston-Salem proper, and this one is worth the drive from anywhere in west Forsyth.
- Little Creek Recreation Park runs the PFS Annual Brunch Run on Saturday, June 6, 2026. A brunch run is a low-commitment way to see whether you actually want to join the local running community before signing up for the Dirty Dozen in September.
The Underlying Point
If you've lived in Clemmons for a decade, the pattern is easy to miss because you've absorbed it slowly. The Village used to be a bedroom community with Tanglewood on one edge and a strip of restaurants on the other. What has shifted, quietly, is that the Village now programs its own calendar with the density you would expect from a small city. Free concerts. A summer festival. A movie series. A food truck festival. A land acquisition adjacent to Village Point that signals a permanent outdoor venue is coming.
That is not a marketing spin. It is what the schedule actually says. Whether it changes how you spend a Saturday is up to you.
If your Clemmons summer looks like driveway-to-Harris Teeter-to-driveway, the fix is on this page. Pick one Shindig, one Tanglewood Tuesday, one Miam breakfast, and one Movie Night in the Village. That's four evenings between June and September. You'll know your neighborhood differently by Labor Day.
If a summer in Clemmons has you thinking harder about staying rooted here or finally trading up inside the Village, Gray France Realty Group knows this map street by street. Buy with confidence. Sell with strategy. Invest with insight.
