Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This local soul food restaurant apparently opened in 2015 and was active at least to June 2017. This stretch of Percival is on my route between home and the new Panera on Forest Drive, and I started wondering about the lack of cars at the place recently. Taking a closer look reveals no closing signage, but there is definitely work going on inside. I don't know if this is in preparation for a new tenant, or is an upfit for this restaurant.

This little home-cooking restaurant had been on this corner since 1991. (Before that, the place was a sandwich shop, and before that, a pharmacy). According to this article in The State, the owner decided, with regret, that it was time to retire.

By the time I got around to taking these pictures, I was surprised to find the place setting up as a new restaurant, the Hampton Street Diner. In fact, I was surprised enough that when there were actually people inside, I could only think of a few words to introduce myself and ask a few inane questions about the opening date and format, not even getting a web site or menu. There's a reason I take pictures of empty buildings rather than talking to people..

Luckily, The Free Times has it covered here: The place is now open, has a '50s' theme, and is serving breakfast & lunch with local delivery available.

And, if you are ever get too comfortable with using google as a source, just google "nathan's hampton street":

Brooklyn-born fast-food chain offering signature hot dogs, fries, burgers & more.

Wow, there's "remodeling", and there's "tear out everything down to the bare walls, and some of those too". This is the latter.

The State says:

Once renovations are complete [in fall 2017], the location will include increased parking, new exterior siding, state-of-the-art kitchen equipment and a remodeled dining room with new booths, Wi-Fi access and USB chargers.

Somehow Lizard's Thicket has never seemed like a USB charger kind of place to me..

Read the rest of this entry »

I don't eat at Lizard's Thicket that often, but it's good Southern comfort food. I recall working in Kansas for about a month once, and being so glad when I got back, drove out of the airport here and saw the Liz on Airport Boulevard. There are times when only field-peas-over-rice will do.

Someone described Lizard's Thicket here in the comments of some post or another as a "hermit crab restaurant", ie: one that likes to let another restaurant build the building and fail and then moves into the empty shell. It strikes me as a sound strategy, but that being the case, I can't speak to what was in this building before Liz. This particular store was a bit unusual in that it was one of the two Lizes closest together of all those I am aware of (the other is just a mile or so down Two Notch towards Spring Valley). It was also the closest Liz to our house, and the one we went to most often. I remember two things in particular about it. First, they had a pot-plant by the register which was connected to a lamp. Through some sort of capacitance effect, if you touched the leaves of the plant, the lamp would turn on, cycle through dim, normal and bright and then off again. Second, once when we were eating there, the waitress subtracted the cost of our drinks from the bill rather than adding it. I've had days like that..

The building sat empty for a bit after Liz left (to go down to a new location [and building!] near Sandhill) and then the current tenant moved in. From the amount of time it was taking, and the car I often saw parked there, my impression was that the new owner was doing most of the work him(?)-self. I think too, that when it first opened, the "Korean" rubric had not been added. I haven't eaten there, but it seems to draw a good lunch crowd. I doubt there's peas-over-rice though.

UPDATE 17 June 2025: Updating tags and adding map icon.

I first became aware of this building when it was "Po Folks", and I think that was the original tenant. Po Folks was, the name suggested, a sort of fauxy-down-home type of place where they served "country cookin'", served the drinks in mason jars and wrote the menus in misspelled "Southern" dialect. That's not really a criticism; there's a place for that type of thing, and I remember the food as being pretty good. Certainly my parents liked it a good bit, and we ate there fairly often. I don't know exactly what happened to Po Folks -- they are still around as a chain, but apparently they have contracted a great deal and no longer have any locations in South Carolina. I do know that they continued to have a Myrtle Beach location for a while after the Columbia location closed, but it's gone now as well. Today the chain seems to be largely a Florida operation with a few other restaurants in Alabama, Arizona and California.

After Po Folks left, the building went through a long period of "musical concepts". I think next it may have been the original Fran's location (Fran's later opened "Little Fran's" on Forest Drive as a smaller second store, which became simply "Fran's" when the original Fran's closed and which itself recently closed). After Fran's closed, the building was vacant for a while prompting some distruntled former patrons to put up a "Bring Back Po Folks" sign on the property. I lose track after that, but at some point it was one or possibly two different night-clubs and then an urban-comedy club. The Jim Moore used car dealership has been there a couple of years now, so possibly the site now has a stable tenant, though it's doubtful they can supply you a Blue Ribbon Chicken Dinner.

UPDATE 22 June 2009:

Well, not that stable! Moore For Less is now gone. (Also added the street addres to post title above).

UPDATE 13 March 2011: The building has been knocked down. See the Moore For Less link for pictures.

UPDATE 29 June 2021: Updating the post title with more former tenants of this building thanks to commenter Paul's research and adding tags & map icon.

UPDATE 17 June 2025: Updating tags.

Fran's was a small meat-and-three on Forest Drive almost across from Trenholm Plaza. They always appeared to me to do a good business though I only went there a few times myself. My opinion is that they tended to run out of most items very early in the evening. If you weren't there by 7pm, there was probably no point in going (seniors found it ideal..). Combining that with the fact that the layout was very crowded and that they had no booths, I decided years ago that Lizard's Thicket was preferable when I wanted down-home cooking.

The new restaurant going into the location will be called Zoes Kitchen (but with the little European dots above the "e" in "Zoes"). Looking at their web site, it appears that they are a regional chain and will be serving a "healthy" Greek-inspired menu. To be frank, I didn't see anything there that really looks appetizing to me.

UPDATE 6 Oct 2010 -- Well, Zoe's is open, and has been for a while. As I said above, the menu doesn't appeal to me in general, but the Greek salad is good (if pricey), and with the closure of Zorba's on Decker I do visit here for that every so often. The patio is nice in the spring and fall as well.

UPDATE 1 September 2022: Change date year from '08' to '2008' in title. Update tags and add map icon.