Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This post is a companion of sorts to the last one, at least as far as age and location go. This defunct deli sits catty-cornered from the defunct bank that was the subject of that post. Its location is actually rather interesting as it has changed without the building ever having moved.

I've given the location as the corner of Decker Blvd and Trenholm Road Extension, but of course when the building was built, there was no Trenholm Road Extension, and it wasn't on a corner lot at all. In fact , though I may have my dates off a bit, I think the building predates most of the land around it! At one time what is now the Staples/Goodwill plaza across from Dent Middle School wasn't a plaza, or even woods: it was a lake. It wasn't a very good lake -- it was rectangular and obviously artificial, but it was a lake, and the deli building was more or less on the lake bank. Given all the empty retail space on Decker, they probably should have left it a lake.

I never ate at the deli, and don't recall the owner. My sister thinks it was an "Andy's Deli", and I have no reason to think she's wrong. As far as I can tell, it's not an awful location, and I don't really have any idea why it went under. However, unlike the bank, the lot owner still has some hope for the property, and a for sale sign hopefully beckons passers-by. I don't know if the owner rents the lot, or if it is extra-legal, but various road-side sales set up there from time to time. You know the kind of thing: velvet paintings, cheap sofas, cyprus knee art..

UPDATE: This post was originally titled "Deli". Everyone seems to agree that I was wrong and it wasn't a deli, but a Grandy's restaurant. I've changed the post title to reflect that. Here is a working Grandy's in a very similar building.

That plan's so crazy it just might work!

Or not.

Crazy Buffet was on Knox Abbot Drive in Cayce just down the hill from Krispy Kreme (and on the other side of the road) in a building which has seen several restaurants come and go. In the beginning I think it was a Western Sizzling steakhouse. After that I'm a bit hazy, but think it became some sort of seafood operation. That was followed by an independant Mexican-run Mexican restaurant. I stopped there once and am afraid I found it pretty dreadful. When it too had had its day in the sun and passed, the place became an Asian buffet.

When the end came, it came quickly: If you click on the last picture you may be able to make out the soy-sauce and other condiments still sitting on the tables. I'm guessing the end came in 2006 since the Free Times issue sitting on the table is not from 2007 or 2008 (I checked their cover gallery), and I remember the closing as "recent".

I'm not sure why the place failed, but it certainly wasn't from lack of parking!

UPDATE 4 December 2009: Added full street address to post title.

UPDATE 21 July 2010 -- Added "Western Sizzlin" to the post title, and this ad from the 1974 phonebook:

also this note: The follow-on operation to Crazy Buffet Hot China Buffet has opened and closed.

What can I say about Denny's? Well, if you are working until 2AM, it's the only place other than The Waffle House that you can eat at, and the food in the pictures on the menus looks really good!

No matter which location of Denny's I stop at, I have invariably found that the service is both slow and poor, and that the food, while edible, rarely looks nearly as good as the pictures on the menus. I recall an incident in the news some years ago where a couple of Secret Service agents, who happened to be black, were suing the chain for discrimination. I remember thinking at the time:

Well, it certainly could be discrimination, but it's also possible that they got the standard Denny's service and couldn't believe something that bad was not on purpose..

At one time, Denny's had three locations in Columbia that I can think of, this one, one on Airport Blvd and one on Harbison Rd. I think at this point only the Harbison location is left. I recall this location in particular as one to which my father, aunt, sister and I went once when we had the urge for pancakes. My father was the nicest man in the world, and would put up with anything, but even he commented on how bad the service was. After Denny's failed in this location, it was a sports bar for a while, and is now a carpet and floor store -- but I bet they could still get you a plate of pancakes faster than Denny's could.

Then:

And Now:

Don't panic: The Egg Roll Station (also known as Egg Roll Chen) is not closed. I just thought that I should note the loss of the original building here. I understand why they might have wanted a newer building, but the old one (which I believe started as a Hardee's) had a unique "space-age" look.

I think that with the demolition of this building Silver City (the comics store) on Knox Abbot Drive in Cayce is the only remaining structure of this type in the Columbia area.

UPDATE 30 April 2010: I've corrected the street address in the post title. Also, I've found they have their own web site which has a good picture of their old building.

D's is a local (I believe) chain of casual restaurants with an unusually large menu. They have a little something for everyone, and are the only restaurants in Columbia (that I know of) which fry their own potato chips ("raw fries" they call them). They have a number of locations; I can think of Clemson Road, Parkland Plaza, and Beltline Blvd. They now have one less.

This particular building on St. Andrews Road appears to have a restaurant curse attached to it, as I have seen a number of operations go into it over the years, and none of them have lasted very long. More prosaically, it may just be that while it is easy to exit I-26 to eat there, it is difficult to get back on the Interstate because a left turn out of the parking lot is almost impossible when traffic is moderate or heavy.

UPDATE 24 Feb 2010: Added a bunch of previous names to the post title based on the comments. Also see here (Baja's Southwestern Grill) and here (Delmonico Diner) for the next two operations in this building.

UPDATE 31 Jan 2011: Added the full street address to the post title, finally.

Eating at Moes on Main today, I was struck by the sign at University Corner (the small strip mall at the corner of Devine & Main), and how it harked back to an earlier era. Of the businesses listed on its directory

Carolina's
Stuffy's
Bits & Pizzas
Smoothie King
Varsity BIlliards

only Varsity Billiards is still actually there (and to my memory has been there forever). Apparently the wi-fi coffee shop that was there last year didn't last long enough to make it onto the sign, and apparently they are holding off on putting Firehouse Subs up there..

UPDATE 8 Feb 2010: Took the opportunity tonight to take some pictures of the lighted Varsity Billiards sign as it's a classic design (From the same school as the old Redwing Roller Way sign).

Ponderosa Steak Barn,
Meet Your Friends There!
Where Good Eatin' is a Family Affair!

Ponderosa was in Trenholm Plaza more or less where Holey Dough & Heavenly Ham are now, and was one of the first wave of steakhouses (that I can recall) to come into Columbia. We went through a period of eating Sunday dinner there more often than not. They had a Western theme, both in the names of the menu items and the decor. The Western motif extended to the seating. I think there were booths around the walls of the restaurant, but the seating in the middle of the place was polished wood benches and tables. They weren't quite "picnic" tables because the benches were free-standing, but it was pretty rustic. Aside from the standard steak and burger offerings, they also had a salad bar, which was something I hadn't seen before. As an 8 year old, I had no interest in it, but I think it impressed my mother. They also had "Texas toast" which did impress me, and since it didn't come with anything I ordered, I was always angling to beg it off of my mother or father.

As I said, all of the menu items had Western themed names, and I invariably orded the "Buckboard Burger", which was simply a hamburger (you could get it with cheese as well..). This item led to a 30 year misunderstanding between my father and me. Since I would always get the same thing (and since he would be doing the ordering), he would always ask in that way parents have of kind of "deviling at" their kids:

So, are you going to get the Buggy Burger again?

and then watching in amusement as I got all worked up about it:

It's the Buckboard Burger!

When we were reminiscing about it years later, we finally came to a mutual understanding. My father, who was born in 1915, knew very well what a "buckboard" was -- a type of horse-drawn buggy. I had no idea. He thought I was just being "prissy" about wanting to call the burger by the name it was listed under on the menu, while I always thought he was implying that the burger was made out of bugs!

Unfortunately, Ponderosa burned down sometime in the late 1960s (I think), and never came back to Trenholm Plaza. I believe there was another one in Cayce where we used to go sometimes (and ask to go to the Giant Slide), but that was a long drive, and it didn't seem as good.

Years later, I ran across a Ponderosa chain in the Kansas City area, but the menu items had different names, and I was never able to tell if it were the same operation or just a common choice of a Western name. It was OK, but nothing out of the ordinary. That chain came very briefly to Myrtle Beach (to the parking lot of the Surfside Kroger actually), but folded after a very short run.

This one is not a "real" closing, but I thought it was kind of odd, so I'm going to note it.

I had noticed Bruster's Real Ice Cream in a few locations before ever stopping by, and it seemed to me that there was always a crowd standing around outside for some reason. When I finally did stop by, I found that the reason is that there is no "inside", at least for customers. All the business is done through walk-up windows, even though the buildings are plenty big enough to have counters inside. The ice cream is pretty good, but certainly not noticably better than Baskin Robbins, Ben & Jerry's, Coldstone or Marble Slab, all of which operations have counters and seats inside. I can't really think of why the chain would adopt such a concept, except to "be different". It's a concept I can see working well in resort areas, but it seems ill-suited to year-round markets. If you get a hankering for ice-cream in November, are you going to go somewhere warm, or stand outside Bruster's?

I noticed a month or two ago that the store on Beltline at Forest had been dark a while, and I stopped by to see what was going on. There were signs in the windows saying that they were closed for "renovations & training" and would be open again early in 2008. Well, it is now early in 2008, and they are still closed. Since it is a brand-new building, and I have seen no work trucks at the site, the renovations angle is puzzling, and I have to wonder what kind of training the staff at this store needed that isn't needed at their other locations, especially since it was a going operation. If I were to speculate, I would say that their business model just doesn't work in the winter at non foot traffic sites. But I would never do that.

UPDATE 27 March 08: Looks like the place is for sale, but for sale as a Bruster's franchise, not as just a building:

I wish him(?) luck, but those "loyal customers" the "for sale" sign references have had half a year to find other creameries..

UPDATE 31 March 09:

Well, they backed a truck up to the place and loaded all the equipment and took down the signs. That was in January I think and so far nothing has gone in there.

UPDATE 8 June 2010 -- Well, it's going to be a Hibachi Express "soon", though it seems like the "soon" sign has been up a month or so, and there doesn't look to have been any interior work done..

UPDATE 23 Dec 20-- Hibachi Express is open:

UPDATE 30 August 2021: Updating tags, adding map icon.

Well this was a bit unexpected. I had been planning for a while to do a closing on Quncy's, but when I went there today to take the picture, I found the successor business, Stiletto's strip club had just closed down as well.

Quincy's Family Steakhouse was part of the second or third wave of steakhouses to hit Columbia, and at its peak, the best of breed in my opinion. The first wave consisted of places like Ponderosa Steak Barn about which I mean to do a post someday, while the second wave (or late first, I haven't decided) was places like Western Steer & Western Sizzling.

Quincy's was a very appealing operation for family Sunday lunches, and we ate there almost exclusively on Sunday for a number of years. You would go in, get in line, pick out your silverware and make your order which would be brought out with reasonable promptness. I thought they had a very good burger (which fewer places do well than you would expect), and their salad bar was unquestionably the best in Columbia. The waitresses were all friendly, and came to know and greet "the regulars". The only fly in the ointment was that whatever mechanism they used to wash the silverware wasn't very efficient, and you always ended up having to go through several knives and forks before coming up with unspotted ones.

I liked Quincy's well enough that when my employer started sending me to various cities around the South East, I would take the little list of "Our Other Locations" that used to be in a stand by your way out, to have somewhere familiar to eat when I travelled. (In practice, it would usually work out that either I didn't get to pick where we ate, or we would end up working so late that it was Denny's or nowhere..). I started noticing too that all Quincy's were not alike. The one on Two Notch was definitely the best one in Columbia, much better than the one on Forest Drive, and a bit better than the one off I-26 & US-378. The one in Surfside Beach was very good, the one in Florence, not so much.

Naturally like any chain with a generally winning concept, they started to tinker with it. First, the salad bar started to decline. They took the large wedges of chedder and pepper-jack cheese off, and would start skipping very basic things, like onions, more and more often. Then they decided that the "honor system" had to go. The initial concept was you got your ticket and paid on your way out. The new system was that you had to pay at the end of the ordering line. I suppose it reduced shrinkage some, and obviated the need for another employee and register stand at the door, but it also slowed up the line, and made it seem that you weren't quite trusted to pay for your food. Real decline set in after this, and the chain obviously realized it with their somewhat desperate ad campaigns for The Big, Fat Yeast Roll. The rolls were actually pretty good, but you want to think several times before launching a restaurant ad campaign in which the words "big" and "fat" play prominent roles.

I think the Forest Drive location was the first in Columbia to go, with Two Notch being the last. I believe the chain is still in business and has a few stores left, but I haven't seen one in several years.

I forget what moved into the Two Notch building after Quincy's, but it didn't last too long, and I think the building sat vacant a while before becoming Stiletto's. That brief-lived operation had a sign with a very shapely set of legs, the feet adorned with the aforementioned footware. I'm pretty sure I saw the sign as recently as last week, but I can't say for certain. The sign also mentioned that, like Quincy's, they had steaks on the menu, but I suspect "the sizzle" was more their stock in trade.

UPDATE 9 May 2008: New construction is going on at the old Quincy's/Stiletto's

Looks like it will be a "Harbor Inn", which either means that there will be two Harbor Inns within a mile or so of each other on Two Notch, or that the one in front of Bi-Lo (in the old Ryan's building) will be moving here.

UPDATE 22 March 2010: Added full street address (and some tags)

In principle, I should like Rising High, since it is sort of a local version of The Atlanta Bread Company or Panera Bread, and I like both of those operations (in general, but see my post about ABC at Sandhills..). In practice I never really found the sandwich or other food item that could make this place a regular stop for me. The sandwich which came closest, The Sundrenched was a bit too artichokey. The deck was a nice idea in principle, but I found that when it wasn't too hot, or too cold to use it, I tended to get panhandled by passers-by.

I'm unsure if the building was built for Rising High. I remember The Villa being in about that location before it closed. At any rate, I think a combination of things did in this location. First and foremost was the interminable Harden Street revamping which also cost us The Parthenon. I believe that, combined with the fact that the chain was at the same time trying to establish a new location on Beltline Blvd (where Shane's Ribs now is) just put too much stress on the operation.

The building now hosts The Congaree Grill, an operation I have yet to visit.