From the ashes: Maurice’s Piggie Park’s main location reopens after fire. What to know
On Friday afternoon, Paul Bessinger could be found doing what he has been doing for decades at 1600 Charleston Highway in West Columbia: cooking pork barbecue at Maurice’s Piggie Park.
But this Friday was more monumental than many others. It was, in many ways, the opening overture in a comeback for the decades-old barbecue company.
The main Maurice’s location in West Columbia has reopened just days after a raging, 3-alarm Oct. 26 fire destroyed the company’s distribution center, food prep area and administrative offices. The blaze led to the temporary closure of Maurice’s eight locations across the Midlands, as owners grappled to begin the recovery from the incident.
The main West Columbia Maurice’s location quietly reopened on Thursday evening. When a pair of reporters from The State stopped by early on Friday afternoon, customers were enjoying meals in the dining room and cars were lined up at the drive-thru, with residents ordering ribs, Little Joe sandwiches and more.
Paul Bessinger, co-owner and pitmaster at Maurice’s, was posted up outside the restaurant Friday, tending to two large smokers. One of the smokers was salvaged from inside the portion of the complex that was ravaged by fire. Aqua Seal Roofing was able to use its crane to lift the smoker from its previous spot in the complex and set it down in the parking lot. The second smoker in use Friday was borrowed from Paul Bessinger’s cousin, Michael Bessinger, from Charleston.
Other Midlands Maurice’s locations were still listed on Google as temporarily closed as of Friday, but Paul Bessinger hinted at quiet reopenings of some of them with a “scaled back” menu. The Elmwood Avenue location in downtown Columbia, for instance, was open early Friday afternoon with limited offerings.
Paul, who is the son of late company founder Maurice Bessinger, noted the current temporary setup for cooking barbecue doesn’t come close to the scale of normal operations. But he said it’s a start.
“We are just trying to keep it open over here, to keep people happy and the customers here, and to do a little bit of business,” Paul said. “We are testing what we are doing and trying to see what the future is going to hold and how we are going to operate.”
The co-owner and pitmaster said the company is exploring the possibility of renting another space in the area to temporarily scale up cooking, but noted that “doesn’t happen overnight.”
Paul said he was at his new home at Lake Murray — it was his first night at the house— on Oct. 26 when he got word of the fire at the Maurice’s West Columbia complex.
“I came running back here,” he said. “Of course, I’m 45 minutes away, and I was breaking every speed limit to get back here and find out what was going on.”
Cody Bessinger is Paul’s son, and is the plant manager at Maurice’s facility in West Columbia. On Friday, as he watched over ribs cooking on a smoker, Cody said it was harrowing to see parts of the complex destroyed in the Oct. 26 blaze.
“It was a lot of years of hard work gone in an instant,” Cody said. “Your mind goes to how big of an uphill climb we are going to have to climb to get back into (a production facility) like that, to provide for eight locations.”
Cody said it was heartwarming to see customers coming back in West Columbia.
“We’ve got a big community following,” the plant manager said. “We’ve been here forever, and a lot of people have been eating here since they were children.”
As a reporter from The State was talking to Paul Bessinger near the temporary smoking station in the Maurice’s parking lot on Friday, a customer drove up and excitedly asked whether the restaurant was open. When informed that it was, the customer whipped his vehicle around and went to the drive-thru speaker to order.
The restaurant co-owner said he has appreciated customers’ enthusiasm about Maurice’s getting to a spot where they can reopen.
“The few days we were closed in [West Columbia], there were people walking up all day asking if we were open,” Paul said. “People were coming from all over.”
Paul asked for customers to be patient as Maurice’s in West Columbia begins to find its footing again, though he noted with a bit of a nervous laugh that he knows people might be a bit “high-strung” on Nov. 2 as Texas A&M comes to town to face South Carolina at Williams-Brice Stadium.
While long a popular brand, Maurice’s has a complicated legacy in the Midlands. Founder Maurice Bessinger once stocked white-supremacist literature and audiotapes at the restaurants, and flew the Confederate flag outside the eateries after the symbol was moved off the State House dome in 2000. However, his children have stripped those elements from the business, pushing to escape those lingering associations.
“As a family now, we don’t dabble any in politics, in a negative light,” Paul Bessinger told journalist Jordan Lawrence during a 2023 conversation. “We just try to serve the world’s best barbecue, and that’s all we try to do.”
This story was originally published November 1, 2024 at 1:34 PM.
