Bone-In Barbecue, Bull Street’s lone restaurant, ends daily meal service
Bone-In Barbeque, the only restaurant to have opened in the massive BullStreet development in downtown Columbia, will no longer operate as a traditional restaurant.
Chef Scott Hall, who opened Bone-In as his first brick-and-mortar restaurant after running successful food truck and catering operations in Columbia, is returning his focus to catering and special events, according to a news release Tuesday.
Bone-In will no longer serve daily meals in the historic Ensor building at BullStreet, next to the Segra Park minor league baseball stadium. Instead, it is transitioning to an events venue that will host and cater private and occasional public events, including several this week.
“My original passions are event design and catering, which are a confluence of the theater and the culinary arts,” Hall said in the news release. “Our special events are where our team is able to be most creative, so this is a natural progression for us.”
Starting this week, the restaurant-turned-venue will host Trivia Night on Tuesdays, Karaoke Night on Fridays, Drag Brunch bimonthly on Sundays, and a monthly game night, with the first on Monday, Feb. 10.
Bone-In also plans to serve buffet meals with a full bar on days when the Columbia Fireflies baseball team has home games, beginning in April. An inaugural “Bone-In Baseball and BBQ Buffet” will be on Saturday, Feb. 29, when the ballpark hosts the University of South Carolina vs. Clemson baseball game.
“There is a growing trend across the country in which chefs have a restaurant space and host regular, ticketed public dinners and events, but they don’t necessarily have traditional, regular meal service hours,” Hall said in the news release. “It is a model that has been very successful in markets across the country, but it is a relatively new category here in our region. We are excited to explore and grow that model here at Bone-In Barbeque.”
Bone-In was highly touted when it became the first restaurant — and only retail or restaurant business — to open in the long-labored BullStreet district in 2018.
BullStreet, heralded as one of the largest development ventures in the Southeast, has been slow nail down commercial tenants, which has bred some criticism. It is home, though, to several hundred employees of businesses that include a law firm, a bank, an international tech company, a nonprofit and several start-up companies that share a co-working space.
But construction has ramped up in recent months at the former state mental hospital campus.
A handful of residents have moved into the first high-end townhomes, with more being built. Construction is well underway on an active senior-living community, Merrill Gardens. Work is soon to begin on the transformation of the iconic Babcock Building into more than 200 apartments. And demolition began this week on a portion of the massive Williams Building, which is to become 262 apartments and mixed-use businesses.
And the district will soon welcome its most high-profile business yet: A 20,000-square-foot REI Co-op store, which is slated to open this spring.
A Starbucks, the only other national retailer announced in the district, will follow it in 2021.
This story was originally published February 4, 2020 at 12:34 PM.
