Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Taps was for sale a couple of years ago, and I took a picture then in anticipation that I might need it, but of course now that they actually have closed, I can't find it. If you google "taps bar columbia" it will point you to a nice google streetview picture..

At any rate, this little bar was tucked in next to the Big Lots plaza on Two Notch behind Dunkin Donuts and when I was at Big Lots the other day, I noticed that it had been reflagged as R & B Bar & Grill which is rather more '&'s than usual.

The last review I see is from 10 August 2016, so I'm putting the closing as "Summer 2016".

Soul food purveyors Kiki's Chicken & Waffles have left their old, cramped, digs in Fortune Square, and have moved into the old Sticky Fingers location at Columbia Mall.

Judging from the parking lot Sunday 6 March, they will have no trouble filling the larger building..

Kwagga is apparently the Afrikaans name for the Quagga, an extinct South African Zebra, and the place itself is now extinct as well.

This was the followup operation to The Puddlin' Duck, and commenter Joelc who notes that it was a nice place, but suffered the same problems as The Duck with the location.

It wouldn't hurt Fortune Square to buy some light bulbs.

(Hat tip to commenter Joelc)

This little Irish pub was tucked away at the bottom of the hill in the little strip mall fronted by Dunkin' Donuts. In fact, it was so tucked away that while every time I saw it, I meant to try it out sometime, it would always slip my mind completely when I actually was looking to go somewhere.

I noticed recently when I was looking at Golden City, that it had, so to speak, changed its stripes and is now Kwagga.

The first time I went to Tandoori Grill I recognized one of the staff from the Broad River Road location of Delhi Palace (or I should say he recognized me), and the food was quite good. I went there probably four or five times and it continued good, then I went there a final time, and I didn't think it was good at all, and I don't think the original guy was there anymore.

I was recently passing by during hours when the place should have been open, and noticed the sign wasn't on, so I turned in to check it out. The sign on the door is a bit unclear, but I think the gist of it is that the restaurant became "available" on 15 January 2012.

The little strip that it sits in, Fortune Square has not seen great success in quite a long while (the main store is Big Lots), but that makes it attractive to smaller operations, a number of which have come and gone over the years, including notably La Pizza Cucina.

UPDATE 18 September 2012 -- It's now Kiki's Chicken and Waffles:

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.