Iconic Columbia pizza restaurant faces biggest challenge yet on its 30th birthday
What could be tougher for a small business than simply surviving 30 years? In 2020, the challenge is making it to year 31.
For decades, Village Idiot has been just as loved by college students who pack into the bar on late nights as it is by families gathered around their everyday dinner tables. It’s a stalwart business, one of the city’s longest-operating, that’s served Columbia in ways far beyond serving up its signature New York-style pizzas
Now 30 years in, Village Idiot is facing its greatest challenge yet. The worldwide coronavirus pandemic has taken a particularly hard toll on restaurants, redefining nearly everything anyone once knew about dining out.
“We started last year talking about a 30th anniversary, and then all of a sudden, bam, you get into this and start thinking, are we going to make it to 31?” said Brian Glynn, who’s co-owned the iconic pizza restaurant with his wife, Kelly, for the past 17 years.
This week, Village Idiot reopens its flagship location on Devine Street in Five Points — the cozy, slightly grungy, sports bar-y, attic-like home of some of Columbia’s most recognizable pizza slices — in time to bring a slice of normalcy back to an abnormal football season, and perhaps hope to a terribly uncertain year.
The original village idiots
Until this March, the biggest challenge the Glynns and Village Idiot faced was expanding the business from one restaurant to three, striving to keep the same food quality and hold onto their identity as they grew.
That’s an identity the Glynns helped build for the better part of three decades, since they met there as employees in the 1990s.
Village Idiot’s original owners came to Five Points from New Jersey, “and they kind of felt a little bit like the outsiders and the village idiots of the village neighborhood,” Kelly said.
She worked as a bartender and Brian as a cook. “It was just a really fun, quirky restaurant for USC students to go to,” she said.
Kelly asked Brian out on their first date, and theirs was one of several marriages born out of the Village Idiot.
In 2003, the couple purchased the restaurant — they were running their own Five Points Diner at the corner of Greene and Harden streets at the time — and they dove headfirst into turning the place that had meant so much to both of them into a business that would mean the world to Columbia.
“Now our only source of income is two small businesses in an industry that doesn’t have a very good success rate,” Brian said. “We had confidence in ourselves and seeing how we could make something bigger than what it was.”
Building an iconic brand
In the coming years, they honed the Village Idiot pizza recipe to perfection; they got the restaurant working on a computer system; they got their name out on college campuses and they threw their support behind dozens of community festivals and events.
“We’ve always wanted to have a face to the restaurant, to be approachable for the community to know that we’re here to be a contributing supporter and not just suck sales out of the neighborhood,” Kelly said. “We’ve supported over 100 local nonprofits, over $100,000 donated back to the community. That’s been important for us.”
Their presence and popularity continued to grow in Columbia. Village Idiot was where University of South Carolina athletes would hang out, where Olympic star Michael Phelps would slip in through the back door when he was in town.
In 2009, the Glynns took their brand on the road to Forest Acres, where they opened a more family-oriented second location — “conceptually different, but the food the same,” Kelly said. Six years later, they opened their third location, in Columbia’s Olympia neighborhood.
“We were aiming toward … being a come one, come all kind of place,” Brian said. “To have a place where people away at college will go there because they think it’s a cool place, but in the same respect, a mom and dad can come down with their 10- and 12-year-old and sit down and have a pizza. … It’s not a crazy bar atmosphere; it’s just a fun atmosphere.”
They’ve been celebrating their story all year long by inviting the community to look back with them through social media and highlight the good times. That’s not, of course, the 30th birthday celebration they would have planned if they could have helped it.
“We did not want (the pandemic) to take the wind out of our celebration sails,” Kelly said. “I hoped (the anniversary) would give people some good feelings. ... We can celebrate this and hope for the future. I just don’t know what the future holds.”
Worst-case scenario
Everything the Glynns had built over the past 17 years came crashing down in March, when the coronavirus pandemic upended everything from group gatherings to shopping and eating out.
“It was scary, because there was nothing in our past we could lean on to figure out what we needed to do to get through this,” Brian said. “None of our mentors had been through this. There was no one to get advice from.”
They were days away from celebrating the St. Pat’s in Five Points festival and gearing up for the annual NCAA basketball tournaments and the start of college baseball season, when sports fans would flock to the Five Points restaurant to watch games around the bar. It would have been their busiest time of year, if restaurants across the state had not shut down in a desperate effort to slow the spread of the dangerously unknown COVID-19 virus.
“Everything was falling apart. How are we going to do this?” Brian wondered.
The Glynns, like most small business owners, spent the next weeks and months trying to anticipate the unknown and trying to stay afloat.
As a pizza business, they were perhaps better equipped than many typical restaurants to adapt to the “new normal” of takeout-only service. But that was a problem for their flagship restaurant, the heartbeat of the business in the heart of Five Points, with its narrow stairway and windowless upstairs dining room.
While the Forest Acres and Olympia restaurants eventually reopened for carryout service, the Five Points location closed indefinitely March 23.
“It wasn’t an easy thing to do to shut down the original location when you’re in the early stages of planning a 30th anniversary,” Brian said.
After six months, they’ll finally reopen the flagship restaurant — which benefited from a few upgrades during its closure — on Wednesday. They’ll bring back the restaurant’s signature trivia contest the same night, and they’ll be open for the first weekend of Gamecock football, a time when Five Points normally thrives.
“That is our most challenging footprint,” Kelly said. “Can I serve half my occupancy? Will people come into an attic to eat pizza? It’s nerve-wracking for sure, but it’s important for that location to get back open and safely figure out how to make it work.”
They don’t know if things will work out in Five Points or at any of their restaurants, in the long run. This far into the pandemic, business and life aren’t necessarily getting easier; the challenges are different each day.
“Is this going to be a couple weeks? Couple months? Or a couple years? There’s no way to tell,” Brian said. “Seeing how we were able to adapt, I … have confidence of, yeah, we are going to be around as long as we want to be around.
“Worst-case scenario,” he mused, “we shut everything down to one location, and Kelly waits tables and I make pizza. And we’re back to where we started.”
