Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

According to this press release Baker Brothers American Deli came to South Carolina on 29 November 2007, with the opening of the Lexington store. That was to be the first of three stores in the Columbia market. I believe this store, beneath the upscale Adesso condos (themselves built on the site of the former mini-mall housing Pappy's and Robo's Video Arcade) was the second Columbia location. A google search suggests the third store was at 1730 Main Street, but I can't bring that one to mind without driving by.

At any rate, according to the franchaise map here all the South Carolina stores are now gone. The map is actually rather interesting in that persuing a Texas, Iowa, Indiana and Kentucky stragegy seems a bit unusual. Things could apparently be going better though, since apart from Texas (which is the home state and has 12 locations) each other state has only one. I never ate at Baker Bros. From the menu and web site, it seems sort of like another McAlister's Deli, a restaurant I never really warmed up to.

As mentioned by commenter Dave, the next business in this slot looks to be a yogurt operation called Yog Hut. My impression based on peering in the corner entrance is that Yog Hut will not be using the full Baker Bros space though.

UPDATE 21 May 2010: Commenter ChiefDanGeorge says the Yog Hut entrance is a different space, so I've added a picture of the Main Street doors. He also suggests that the Yog Hut opening is stalled.

UPDATE 8 July 2010 -- Well if it was stalled, it's unstalled and open now:

(Hat tip to commenter Mike)

UPDATE 28 June 2019: Add tags, map icon.

Actually, I don't remember this place as a Caribbean restaurant at all, but that's what google is turning up for it. Apparently it was an attempt at doing well by doing good, as this 1999 ABC permit hearing decision notes:

The permit was granted despite some misgivings by a neighbor business, but as far as I can tell, the restaurant did not last long at all. I have not verified that by any phonebook research, but note that the only "Five Points Association Member Sticker" in the window is for 1999. The building certainly has not seen much if any work since then, and appears to be in a fairly advanced state of disrepair.

Now, despite not finding any online evidence for it, what I remember this place as is some sort of night club which used the roof as a deck. You can see the hutch that presumably terminates a staircase from the ground floor, and the roof is also directly accessible from the side street as the building is more or less cut into a hillside. I can remember thinking that it was pretty neat though I never visited the club.

I did find this 1998 zoning board minutes which implies that the place was some sort of restaurant in 1990 which was forclosed on at some later point, but no other details are offered..

I think I also remember some sort of drumming studio here as well.

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We never ate at The Whale's Tail growing up. I wasn't a big seafood fan (which is to say I refused to eat the stuff), and my parents didn't push the issue too often (in fact we used to go to Oliver's Lodge before 5pm because I could get spaghetti before 5 but not after. (Which really sounds odd to me at this remove, but I'm pretty sure thats right..).

Anyway, while I never went there, I used to see the billboards from time to time, and I decided to go looking for it today. The old phonebooks (the above ad is from the 1977 one) never give a real street address for it (it was pretty far out in the boonies back in the day) but I took exit 97 both ways and didn't see anything that looked probable. There's certainly a lot of new construction in the area, and I suspect the building must have been torn down long ago. Can anyone confirm or refute that? The only possible place I saw was Little Pigs barbecue which looked to be the right vintage, but I always imagined The Whale's Tail as a bigger building.

UPDATE 27 May 2010: Added shots of Little Pigs which turns out to be the old Whale's Tail building.

UPDATE 15 February 2012: The Italian restaurant was Rubino's Italian Restaurant and I have added it to the post title along with the full Broad River Road street address.

I just thought this one was a little odd. The ad is from the 1985 Bellsouth phonebook. Sometime between then and now, the name of this backgate restaurant at Fort Jackson Boulevard & I-77 was changed from Saki to Saky. If you look at the photo, you can see how the 'I' was replaced by a 'Y' in the mural (which is very similar, though not identical to the Yellow Pages art).

The only reason for something like this that I can think of is that the ownership changed at some point, and the new owner didn't have permission to keep using the same name, but was able to keep something very similar..

Well, it is a bit sad to see their street sign proclaiming their first anniversary and then to have them closed 16 days later, but that's how it happens sometimes. (Though they apparently still have an operation in Florence).

I wrote about this building first in a closing for Cancun / Little Mexico, so the building has been at least three different Mexican restaurants. Loopnet says the place was built in 1980 and is a "Spanish Style" restaurant, so it probably has been Mexican restaurants since it was built. Notice also the fundamental tension in the Loopnet write-up (apparently left over from 2007 or so) between keeping something secret and posting it on the Internet..

I did not yet notice any "for sale" signs on the building last week, but I suppose it will be another Mexican restaurant someday.

(Hat tip to commenter IrmoJeff)

UPDATE 29 Sep 2010: The restaurant is being converted into a Wata Wing -- or maybe not.

Commenter Matt found this PDF of a legal action in Maryland against Wata Wing which seems to basically indicate that while there may be legit WW restaurants, the franchaising operation is pretty much a scam. The work being done on the Mi Teirra building matches the description in the PDF pretty much to a tee, right down to the work on the floors and the note on the door indicating that it was started without getting the proper permits. To me, the oddest thing in the PDF is that apparently none of the people in Maryland investing in WW franchaises ever asked to visit an operating WW, or at least that's the implication I'm getting. The Taco Bell on Knox Abbott seems to be in a similar state of Wata Wing stall-out.

Although I've never eaten at a local Quiznos, I believe I did eat at a DC area location once, and recall it as pretty good. Of course that may be partly because one of the other guys I was eating with was a nice guy but had an interesting personality quirk such that he was never completely satisfied with anything, so at least I liked it better than he did! I find it a little bit interesting that the name they use in their signs has no apostrophe and has the singular, "Sub", not "Subs". You almost have the image that if you were the second guy to get there, the sub would be gone.

This Quiznos, the latest of a number of the chain's outlets to close around town, was at the intersection of Airport Boulevard with the Charleston Highway, across the street from Piggy Park and at the edge of Airport Square with the closed Food Lion. The building looks to have been some other type of fast food outlet before the Quiznos.

I think the door note in this case is pretty straight-forward and classy.

The main Airport Square building is like two sides of a square, with one side parallel to the Charleston Highway and the other parallel to Airport Boulevard. While I was taking these pictures, I noticed a family picking some sort of fruit from trees growing at the end of the building that comes closest to Airport Boulevard. I can't think what is in season now, and I didn't want to bother them by heading towards them and maybe make them think I was some sort of Airport Square guy coming to say "stop that" -- I'll have to go back and see what that was.

(Hat tip to commenter Tom)

UPDATE 4 Feb 2011 -- It's now open again as Best of China restaurant:

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

This closing has been talked about long enough that I actually got these photos last year, knowing I would have to deploy them eventually. This Hardee's has been a fixture in the old Five Point's Sears parking lot for years. I think it may even date back to when Gene's Pig & Chick across College Street would have been its competition. (It certainly does not date back to Hardee's original space-age designs such as at Silver City or The Eggroll Station though).

This story from The State last year tells how the Hardee's is going to be replaced with a Chick-Fil-A, and how it will all be carefully landscaped in accordance to the new Five Points streetscaping guidelines. Color me unimpressed. You have only to compare US-17 as it passes through Mount Pleasant where everything is set-back so far and blends in so blandly that you can't even tell you are passing stores that want to sell you something with US-17 in the Myrtle Beach area where even failed and vacant storefronts are exuberant to see how guidelines can suck the life out of a road. Not to mention this quote:

"Chick-fil-A is a business of high quality and we anticipate this development will add great character to the already diverse and eclectic makeup of Five Points," she said.

Of really? Replacing one national fast-food chain (which is actually currently on the rebound) with another national fast-food chain will add character and diversity to Five Points? I guess character and diversity aren't what they once were..

(Hat tips to commenters Tom, Mike D, Larry & Jim)

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Let's Dish was a take & bake operation in Sparklebery Crossing at the intersection of Sparkleberry and Clemson Roads. It's a regional chain, but I believe this was the last location in South Carolina. Personally I don't really understand the appeal of the concept. I can certainly understand not wanting to actually cook at home, especially involved dishes, but it seems to me that take & bake still leaves you with dishes and silverware to clean up, plus you don't get out of the house. Of course I realize not everyone actively dislikes eating at home as I do, but it still seems a minimal benefit. Steak Out seems to have failed with a similar concept, but as far as I know, Piggly Wiggly's "Dream Dinners" take & bake is still going.

I think Sparklebery Crossing seems to have dodged the bullet of perceived failure -- so far. They have had Coldstone Creamery, D's Wings, Al Amir, and Za's Pizza all go under, which is a lot for such a new development, but to date they have managed to get reasonably top-tier replacements (though D's was vacant for quite a wihle).

(Hat tip to commenter Jason)

Columbia Northeast Drive is the official name of the easternmost little access road from Two Notch back into the Big Lots / Dunkin' Donuts plaza on Two Notch Road just west of Spring Valley. Both the main plaza and this little side strip-mall have been down at the heels for years though they have generally avoided vacancies. Aside from having the only Peurto Rican restaurant in Columbia (that I know of anyway), the strip also has the only Indian Restaurant in the Northeast.

La Pizza Cucina was, I think in the storefront now occupied by San Juan (which itself used to be at the bottom of the strip parallel to Two Notch at one time). A, personal web calendar (apparently not updated since 2004) describes La Pizza Cucina thus:

La Pizza Cucina

Serving gourmet pizza pies and over 100 beers and wines to choose from, this quaint little pizza parlor offers you the infectious hospitality of a "Cheers" styled pub. Come eat here once, and you're a friend for life. "There's edible and there's Incredible" - La Pizza Cucina.

I suspect the restaurant supplied the text to the performers as I think it is pretty close to how they used to advertise. I'm saying the place closed in 2007 because it is not in the 2008 phonebook but it was still in a newspaper restaurant listing (which are notoriously slow to fix closures) in February of 2008.

I had only two problems with La Pizza Cucina:

1) I expected "gourmet" pizza to be, you know, good, and instead found it pretty mediocre.

2) The staff, at least on shift the one time I went, was rude. In particular, there was a table of teenage boys -- being teenage boys. They weren't thugs, they weren't trying to create a disturbance, they were just having a good time. One of them rocked his chair onto the back legs, and the manager came down on him like a ton of bricks. I thought it was totally inappropriate. No, it's not good for the chairs, but your restaurant chair is not going to be handed down to your grandkids. If something absolutely had to be said, it could have been said politely.

Anyway, I never went back.

I don't get onto Farrow Road that often, and in some cases it surprises me when I do since my mental geography for that corridor is pretty vague. It's another one of those streets that seems to have seen better days, with bygone restaurants like The Fountain Bleu Club that are fixtures in phonebooks year after year, but are now long gone.

Here's another form that era. The first ad is from the 1970 Southern Bell phonebook, but the second one from the 1985 edition is almost exactly the same, except for the change in phone number, and the ominous reduction in the number of open days from "7" to "6".

I don't know exactly when the Farrow Road Drive Inn closed, but the building is still in service as a restaurant, now operating as The Paper Moon Cafe, and is apparently going to be annexed into Columbia proper:

This annexation is part of the City’s initiative to bring in those parcels of land that are part of another jurisdiction, but are surrounded by the City of Columbia. These are known as Donut Holes. These areas pose a number of challenges to the City that can be addressed through annexation. They can often cause inefficiencies in the delivery of services due to confusion about jurisdiction. Also, if the land is in a jurisdiction with a different approach to code enforcement, these areas can negatively impact the quality of life for adjacent City residents. Such inefficiencies and the costs to taxpayers are germane to City and County property both, which results in a greater impact to City residents since they pay City and County taxes.

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Recommend Approval. This property is commercially zoned within Richland County and is currently being utilized as a restaurant with frontage on Farrow Road. The property is contiguous to the City Limits north across I-277 with RS-3 (Single-Family Residential) zoning and east by single-family residences and offices that are zoned RS-3 and C-1 (Office and Institutional). In that the property is occupied by a restaurant which is a permitted use within the C-3 zoning classification, the C-3 zoning is appropriate at this location.