The State Club

Absolutely BEAUTIFUL! !!! Wendy and the entire staff are FANTASTIC! The food is OUTSTANDING! Please book your next event or meeting with The State Club.

A super classy venue with great service! Our company has their holiday party here yearly and I always enjoy my time there. The space is decorated nicely every holiday, and is kept rather clean. The servers keep the tables cleans and the food areas stocked. The food is also pretty impressive, we tend to have both savory and sweet (including a room full of cakes!) and there are very few things I don’t enjoy.
The only thing I don’t particularly enjoy about events here is the fact that we always have only one bar open for a couple hundred guests. The line can take up to a half hour which is annoying when you’re trying to have a good time. I’m not sure if there’s only one bar set up available in the venue or if it’s a company decision, but either way boo!
I hope to enjoy many more events here! It’s always a good time!

Not normally the type of place I frequent, the State Club, or the Alumni Center, is a members only place.
I had the fortune to be with a group of people, one of whom is a member, who had a reservation for our group for lunch. It’s a very nice building, set near the trees and Lake Raleigh not far away. The inside was what I’d expect a private club to look like, with the open atrium and wide curving stairways leading up to the banquet rooms. Straight ahead was a separate room with large windows looking out to the trees beyond.
The restaurant had a dozen or so tables but it wasn’t overcrowded. There’s a buffet in the bar area but that’s not visible from the dining room. It’s a nice setup in some respects, it’s less like a cafeteria that way.
The buffet appealed to some in our group, but a few of us chose from the menu. The menu had an sizable mix of appetizers, entrees, and salads with chicken, fish and beef and all were reasonably priced. Most everything had a southern spin. The staff was nice and did a reasonable job keeping up with our large table.
The few who tried the buffet came back with a mix of pasta, chicken fingers and a beef patty that looked like a large mushroom cap and some fresh-​made potato chips. The buffet comes with a dessert bar and that sold the deal for some.
For lighter choices, there’s also a a soup and salad option. The Cobb salad had a couple of large slices of pecan-​fried chicken. The flat-​iron steak entrée was a little sparse but that made it a good lunch-​size portion. Everything looked good, but that’s about the only consensus.
For me, I had the BLT made with fried green tomatoes. There were two slider-​size sandwiches and a generous portion of the sweet potato tots. The tots were the real surprise — about the size of a cheese cube, crispy on the outside, and lightly salted. The sliders, though, were just okay. The bacon was good and there was a lot of it. The bun was on the dry, tasteless side and had it not been for the sole tomato slice, would have been nearly impossible to eat. This sandwich is not something I’d order again. Not that it was bad, it was just not memorable.
Overall, I’m not sure I’d consider the food here so good that it would justify a membership solely for the dining option, but since it’s not something I’ll have to worry about, I can just enjoy it for what it is: A nice spot to get together for meetings, conversations, and parties, where food is not the main focus.