Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

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While the Queenstown name rather intrigued me, with its New Zealand connection, everything I ever heard about the place led me to believe that it was way too seafood for me. I do seem to remember it getting rather good reviews though, and thus was a little surprised when I drove by a week or two ago and noticed that it was gone. Judging from their sign, the new operation Mayflower Bistro (just given as Mayflower in the phonebook) also seems seafood heavy for my tastes.

Before Queenstown this spot was Fatz Cafe ("Our secret sauce? Mayonaise!") a totally generic or worse place that I have never been able to warm up to despite its SC origins.

This little strip mall, Colonial Villiage across Bush River Road from Dutch Square and on the access road (Colonial Life Boulevard [which used to have a different name, I think]) for I-126 has never really seemed to thrive with about the only constant being the stalwart Melting Pot fondue restaurant.

UPDATE 20 July 2011: Added Garfield's to the post title based on the comments.

UPDATE 31 August 2020: Update tags, add map icon.

Well, another of the old-style "southwestern" Taco Bell locations has bitten the dust. This one is on Decker Boulevard sort of across from Dent Middle School and next to the old Popeye's / Aloha / Best China/ etc location. While I like the look of this older Taco Bell, the lot and building did have the disadvantage that the drive-through was done through the passenger side window, which is not optimal.

I also like that the manager (or whoever was assigned to do it) was apparently a gardener, taking care to put the "what variety is this" stakes out by the flower plantings.

With the closing of this building, the Taco Bell franchaise moves down towards Two Notch several blocks, setting up shop in a new building at the corner of Decker and Trenholm Road extension on the lot formerly housing Grandy's (whose forlorn building was finally torn down to make way for the new one).

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I have a weakness for mermaids, but Hoof 'n' Finz in Murrells Inlet was not somewhere I ever ate.

What makes this closing notable for me is that it opens up a Murrells Inlet restaurant space for the return of the much missed Rosa Linda's.

This note from the Weekly Surge, along with this one make me hopeful, as the Favata family was involved with the original restaurants. Apparently the current plan is to be open for Cinco de Mayo, though I have to say, after looking over the work going on at the place, that will be pushing it.

This property listing notes some of the plusses and minuses of the location. Apparently the building is "majestic", but Suck-Bang-Blow is right across the street (spun as a positive in the listing "If this restaurant was ran correctly"..). Of course that only makes it difficult to deal with a couple of weeks a year.

Looking forward to it!

(Hat tip to commenter Buddy)

UPDATE 14 May 2011 -- Well, they are open! (And did make their Cinco deadline):

This building, on a Columbia Mall outparcel facing Two Notch Road, was built as a Don Pablo's Mexican restaurant. By the time I did a closing for Don Pablo's, in March of 2008, the building had been a Charleston Crab House (they list in the phonebook as "Charleston Crabhouse" for some reason) for a couple of years already.

Like lobsters and shrimp, I consider crabs "sea bugs" and don't want anything to do with them so I never checked the place out. I do know that they used to have another Columbia store somewhere out by Columbiana Mall and they still have three locations in the Charleston area. Interestingly The State quoted the owners in a story about business taxes back in Jan 2011:

Charleston Crab House owner John Keener is fuming.

“We’re getting taxed on future growth of our business,” said Keener, whose three Lowcountry restaurants employ about 220 workers during the busiest time of year.

Keener said the tax increase, which will cost him more than $4,000 this year, caught him off guard. He warned his colleagues of the increase in an e-mail blast he sent out earlier this week.

That text suggests that the Columbia store was already closed on 15 Jan 2011, so I am putting the closing date as "late 2010". At any rate I don't think it could have been too long given the equipment still inside the place.
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I first became aware of Ship-A-Hoy in Augusta Georgia. The restaurant has changed owners since then, but when I started working in Augusta, the Athens Restaurant & Taverna at the foot of the Bobby Jones Expressway was run by a man who had some family connection to the Columbia Ship-a-Hoy and he had several black and white photos of the interior posted by the cash registers.

Given that it had closed before I was born, I had never heard of Ship-A-Hoy, but the pictures showed a really elaborate interior, someplace that very much said "fine dining" rather than "fish camp".

As near as I can figure, the restaurant would have been about where the parking garage in the NBSC building now is. Certainly the Ship-A-Hoy building itself is gone, as currently NBSC is 1221, and the next building is 1241. The phonebook ad (from 1959) lists the address as 1235, but the postcard lists it as 1235 - 1237 suggesting Ship Ahoy was a pretty big place.

Welcome to visitors from the www.city-data.com forum! If you want to see more grand strand area memories and pictures, click this link. There are posts on The Pavilion, Waccamaw Pottery and a number of other Grand Strand institutions -- Ted

[22 Jan 2010]

[12 Aug 2010]

Oliver's Lodge (pronounced as one word Oliverslodge) is the first seafood restaurant I can recall eating at.

Now, if you've read this blog for a while, you'll know I don't like seafood and never have. Nonetheless, as a kid I was always eager to go whenever we were at the beach. At that time (the late 1960s), they served a lunch menu until 5pm, and that menu had spaghetti, something I would always eat, so my folks usually tried to arrange for us to arrive just before 5 so I could have my spaghetti and the grownups could have "supper". The timing was usually touch-and-go since the place drew tremendous crowds, and getting there before 5 was no guarantee of being seated before 6.

Waiting for anything with kids is always dicey, and if there were cousins as well as my sister and me, things could very easily get out of hand, but the location worked towards letting kids "free range". As you can see from some of the pictures, Oliver's sits on a large lot fronting on Murrells Inlet itself. There were several huge trees (which are still there) and a derelict john-boat or two (now gone) as well as a dock going out into the marsh where the fresh fish were brought in each day during the time when the place was a working lodging house. In addition, the lot next door was a church which was generally vacant on weekday afternoons, so there was plenty of room to race around, and plenty of things to fool with. Best of all, the lodge's big back porch always had a low-country "joggling" board -- a long flexible plank suspended between two rocker-edged saw-horses. You could get a crowd of cousins on that going back and forth and up and down until the grownups would eventually get alarmed and tell us to take it easy.

My memory is that when we first started going, dining was mostly on the back porch which was, at that time, screened, but not air-conditioned. Aside from my spaghetti (or baked-potato or whatever I ended up having ot get if we missed the 5pm deadline), the food was basic Calabash Style fried seafood with piping hot delicious hush-puppies.

The building was always a bit ramshackle. I don't know when it stopped being a boarding house and went to restaurant only operation, but the big upstairs area was largely unused in my memory. When we started going, there was still a customer restroom available upstairs, and I always liked going up there and looking around -- by the 1970s I believe the upstairs was wholly closed to customer access.

Also in the 1970s, the owners tacked up plastic sheeting over the screen porch. And I do mean "plastic" and not plexiglass or anything solid. Whenever anyone would open a door or the air conditioning kicked in, the sheeting up over all the walls would billow in and out.

It seems to me that as the 70s went on, we went to Oliver's less and less. It's not that anyone stopped liking it, but more that other options became available as the coast commercialized. The last time I recall going with a large party of cousins was probably in the late 1970s just as my generation was heading to college. We ate inside rather than on the porch, and my cousin Mike stuck his nose in a big sawfish nose hung on the wall -- a picture that I'm sure will surface eventually. I think we also played name-that-drink charades with the bar menu.

After that, I believe the next time I ate there was the last. I think it was the early 1990s, and I was either alone or with a very small party. We (or I) was on the back porch, and I noticed that the plastic sheeting had been replaced with plexiglass. The menu was also radically different, and it was evident that Oliver's had undergone a change in ownership. The defining moment for me was when they brought out the huspuppies and I found they were served with raspberry butter. That might be good, but it wasn't Oliver's.

After that, and after I started spending a lot more time at the beach I thought of going back a number of times but somehow never got around to it. Last winter I actually made the effort, but it never worked out. I would find that it wasn't open weekdays during the off season, or that it was only open for lunch, or not open Mondays or -- that it was apparently never open.

That last was a conclusion I flirted with, but never quite committed to. After all the website was still up [try this archived version once that link goes dead] , I could see the tables set through the window, and there was no note on the door..

Finally I went back on 12 August this year, and this time it was obvious that the place was closed: There was a big bar across the front doors, Coke had put a sticker claiming the fountains inside and the place was seriously overgrown. All these photos except 2, 3, 4 & 5 come from that visit.

So when did the place actually close for the last time? That's hard to say, but look at photos 2, 3, 4 & 5. These were taken on 22 Jan 2010. In particular, look at the place settings on the back porch table. Although a chair has been moved, it is clear to me that the napkins, plates and silverware in the 22 Jan photos are exactly the same as in the 12 Aug photos. So, sometime before 22 Jan, the bus staff laid out all the place settings -- and never came back.

As I was taking these photos on 12 Aug, two different cars pulled into the lot looking to eat, and both parties took their own pictures and shared stories of eating there as kids as well.

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I've writen before about The Shrimper on Knox Abbott Drive. This was the chain's other location, on Two Notch Road in front of Atlantic Twin Theater and more or less across the street from Dick Dyer Toyota.

The Southern Bell ad is from 1974 -- I'm not really sure when The Shrimper closed; 1980s is just a guess, but it seems like quite a while ago to me. The building was split into two storefronts after that. I'm not sure about the one farther from Beltline, but the end towards Beltline has been a copier store at least since 1998, and probably before (though it looks to have had some trouble lately).

I note that the ad offers Calabash Style seafood. It seems to me that that's a selling point I see mentioned less and less in recent years.

UPDATE 9 June 2010: Added "Lum's Restaurant" to the post title base on comments (and the 1970 Yellow Pages).

UPDATE 18 September 2020: Here is a Shrimper cup I found at my sister's house:

Also updating tags and adding map icon.

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.

The Shrimper was a lontime seafood restaurant on Knox Abbott near The Charleston Highway. If you've read many of these closings, you'll know I'm no fan of seafood, so I never actually ate at The Shrimper though I was certainly aware of it.

Apparently not aware enough though, as I didn't really notice its passing until quite recently. I don't have a date, but it was recently enough that many online sources still list it at this address.

The new operation is Brunches which appears to bill itself mostly as a breakfast place. I like breakfast in principle, but not enough to wake up early and it it, so I've never eaten there either. (If I'm going to do breakfast, it's usually pancakes and grits at 2am..)

UPDATE 9 June 2010: Added the 1974 Southern Bell Yellow Pages ad.

UPDATE 9 June 2010: Added "Lum's Restaurant" to post title based on comment and 1970 Yellow Pages.

UPDATE 18 September 2020: Here is a Shrimper cup that somehow came to be in my sister's cupboard:

Also updating tags and adding map icon.