‘Connection to your past.’ When longtime Columbia eateries close, more than menus are lost

When it comes to restaurants, we often don’t want to let go. Sometimes we can’t let go.

That’s because restaurants and bars — the good ones, the ones that find their way into our hearts — become more than places to get a meal.

Certainly, we are initially drawn in by the prospect of a juicy cheeseburger; or the lure of a cold, locally brewed beer; or a plate of hibachi chicken with a mountain of fried rice. But the appeal of long-lasting spots stretches beyond just the culinary.

It’s the pizza place your parents took you to after soccer practice. Or the college dive bar where you met the guy who would be come your husband, and where you still go for special dates. Or that fried chicken joint where the lunchtime rush crowd represents the whole spectrum of the town’s socioeconomic scale, from lawyers with ties loosened around their necks to utility lineman with names sewn above their shirt pockets.

As noted by John T. Edge, the well-known Southern food author and writer/host of SEC Network’s Emmy-winning series “TrueSouth,” restaurants can become an almost inextricable part of a city.

“Restaurants do more than serve up sustenance,” Edge told The State in a recent interview. “They are kind of vessels of memories for patrons. So, when you cross the threshold of your family’s favorite restaurant, you reignite memories of dinners past. You rekindle stories about birthdays and anniversaries and regular old Tuesday night dinners. Restaurants are this place of activation for our memories.

“It’s not just that you are going to get a great plate of shrimp and grits or the melt of the pimento cheese is going to be perfectly draped across your burger, it’s that these restaurants promise you a connection to your past.”

Across the last half-decade in the Midlands, some of those connections to the past have become strained, or even severed, as a number of eateries that hosted us for decades have closed up shop.

Take, for instance, the iconic Yesterdays Restaurant and Tavern, which closed in 2020 amid the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic after a 43-year run in Five Points. Ruby Sunshine, a chain brunch restaurant, now occupies the former Yesterdays space on Devine Street.

Or there was the venerable underground dive bar The Whig, which closed its space at the corner of Main and Gervais streets in Nov. 2022 after 17 years. The building where it was located is now a Marriott Moxy brand hotel.

There was the 2023 closure of Al’s Upstairs Italian restaurant in West Columbia after a 44-year stay on Meeting Street.

And 2024 saw a raft of closures of institutional favorites across the Midlands. That included the shuttering of famed burger and beer joint Rockaway Athletic Club on Rosewood Drive after 42 years, and the closure of Yamato Japanese Steakhouse, which had a 49-year run Columbia at multiple locations, including on Columbiana Drive. A new Japanese place, Sukiya, is planning to move into the Yamato space.

Last year also saw the closure of the Main Street location of Hunter-Gatherer, which opened in 1995 as Columbia’s first microbrewery. The University of South Carolina’s Foundation has purchased the H-G Main Street property, and future plans for the site have not yet been announced. And in December, the Forest Acres location of Zesto closed up shop amid the retirement of its owner. The burger and fried chicken joint had been open since 1949.

To be absolutely certain, the restaurant and dining scene in the Columbia area has remained vibrant. Midlands restaurants have received a total of seven prestigious James Beard Foundation Award nominations in the last three years, and Main Street’s Lula Drake won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program in 2024, a first for Columbia.

And The State reported on more than five dozen new restaurants that opened across the Midlands in 2024, from locally owned bakeries and lakeside family restaurants to pizza-and-beer spots and chain biscuit franchises.

But even as the dining scene grows and evolves, there is often a longing for the restaurants we’ve lost, one that can’t simply be satiated with something new.

Beyond buildings and meatloaf

Columbia’s Will Green stands on both sides of the region’s restaurant fates, both the emerging and the lost. He is a co-owner of The Hoot, the creative vegan bar that opened on Rosewood Drive in 2023. And he also was a co-owner of The Whig, the subterranean watering hole that exited Main and Gervais in late 2022.

On a bedrock level, Green notes that, when a longtime restaurant closes, the flavors it offered are often scattered to time. Noting that “taste and smell are some of the fundamental building blocks of memory,” Green said that patrons often connect a specific flavor to a place, and a place to other touchstones in their lives.

“So, if I say to you, ‘Hey, do you remember how the meatloaf at Yesterdays tasted?,’ people who had that meatloaf will say ‘Yes,’” Green told The State. “You can literally go back and recreate that thought in your mind. Whenever you have places that have that distinctive flavor, when they are lost, that flavor is lost, except in memory. It kind of only exists in the minds of people who experienced it at the time.”

At the same time, Green is quick to note that it is not only the flavor that is lost when a longtime haunt closes. Nor do we simply mourn the physical space that is vacated.

The restaurateur points to the historic nature of the building at 900 Main St. where Hunter-Gatherer was located, a building that was originally constructed in 1913. But he also points out that the people and experiences he encountered at the microbrewery helped shape the aura of the place.

“Hunter-Gatherer was iconic not just because of the building, but because of the things that happened in the building,” Green said. “The fact that it was the start of beer culture in Columbia, to a certain extent. The fact that it was a centerpiece for weird jazz and punk rock shows, as well as being a place for a ton of interesting people to work.”

The Hunter-Gatherer Hangar location, which debuted in 2018, remains open off Jim Hamilton Boulevard.

Edge has spent a career exploring restaurants across the South, research that has been on open display in the documentary-style series “TrueSouth,” which has now enjoyed seven seasons on SEC Network and Disney-owned streaming platforms.

He lovingly remembers many Southern restaurants that have come and gone, including Deacon Burton’s Grill in Atlanta, or Helen’s Bar-B-Q in Brownsville, Tennessee. And when those places go dark, Edge notes it is more than lunches and dinners that are lost.

“For me, the losses I mourn are the people who run the restaurants or the waiter or waitress who worked there 40 or 50 years and retired or passed,” Edge said. “Yes, it is the restaurant, but it’s also the place.”

Preach Jacobs is a well-known Columbia rapper and DJ, and the co-owner of the Vista’s Soul Haus art gallery. He also was a noted fan of the now-shuttered Zesto location in Forest Acres. In 2020, he penned a column for The Post & Courier, detailing how Zesto brought him a sense of normalcy during the worst of the pandemic, and how the restaurant was a favorite of his family.

He already misses the familiarity of the restaurant that closed in December.

“When I would go into Zesto, they knew my order before I walked in there,” Jacobs said. “There’s something about that.”

The longtime musician and Columbia mainstay notes that customers develop deep connections to local restaurants, and develop a sense of belonging in the community.

“When you have these fixtures of Columbia for so long, these mom and pop owned restaurants, these local small businesses that are here, it feels like ‘They’re mine,’” Jacobs said. “And when you lose that, or you get more chains in the community, it’s not mine anymore, it’s something that becomes a plug-and-play. It becomes a paint-by-numbers.”

Reinvention, new classics and inevitable change

While some of the longstanding restaurant titans in the Midlands have exited the scene in recent years, there are many classics that are hanging in there, winning new generations of fans and reinventing themselves in ways big and small.

Drake’s Duck-In has operated in various locations and forms in Columbia for more than 100 years. For the past three decades it has been a fixture at 1544 Main St., where it became known for its fried chicken and sandwiches. The restaurant underwent a complete renovation in 2024, gutting the dining room and reemerging with a look that blends modern amenities with nostalgic touches.

While fried chicken remains a centerpiece, the menu was overhauled with new hand-cut fries, smash burgers, cold beer and expanded breakfast offerings. Co-owners Daniel Boan and Matthew Bridges brought on James Beard Award nominees Sarah Simmons and Aaron Hoskins, of the City Grit Restaurant Group, to consult on the initial phases of the reopening last year.

Boan noted that Drake’s has, across more than a century, always been a restaurant that has changed. He points to old menus, now displayed in the current iteration of Drake’s, that show the restaurant used to serve steaks and Mexican chili, items that have long since left its repertoire. He said last year’s overhaul of the Main Street space was done with the future — and the past — in mind.

“We changed to be more competitive,” Boan told The State. “We wanted to to take something that had a history and look toward the future. We want Drake’s to be on Main Street in Columbia for as many decades as it has in the past.”

The truth is that cities change, like the seasons. And many of the restaurants that are emerging on the Midlands scene now will become new classics. They’ll be the ones people will still be talking about in decades to come.

“There’s so many people doing really great work,” Green said. “It is encouraging. I think of Transmission Arcade. I think of Lula Drake. It isn’t brand new, but I think of The War Mouth. ... I love The Dragon Room and Coa. There are plenty of places that are doing the thing and doing it in interesting ways. I’m pleased by that.”

Jacobs said he is watching firsthand as new favorites emerge. A couple nights a month he helps host a karaoke night at The Hoot, and said he can see bonds being formed between people and the place.

“All of the sudden, I see reoccurring people coming into this space where it’s an open space for people that might have been too shy to get on the microphone,” Jacobs said. “It’s a space where the queer community is performing and has a space. It’s where Black and BIPOC people are coming. And all of the sudden I’m seeing these younger people who may not have been old enough to go to The Whig, because they are in their early 20s, but they are creating their own new memories, and I’m seeing that in real time.”

Boan, the Drake’s co-owner, noted that the exit of longtime restaurants, the emergence of new ones, and the reinvention of classics are all part of a ever-gestating season of change on the dining scene.

“I do think restaurants have a parallel with community and nostalgia and things that you grow up with, or you worked nearby and you went there for years,” Boan said. “I think there is a connection with those types of places that is long-lasting. Therefore, any change to that is a little bit scary. It represents change overall, which I think is difficult sometimes, particularly in a town the size of Columbia.”

This story was originally published February 20, 2025 at 5:00 AM.

Chris Trainor

The State

Chris Trainor is a retail reporter for The State and has been working for newspapers in South Carolina for more than 21 years, including previous stops at the (Greenwood) Index-Journal and the (Columbia) Free Times. He is the winner of a host of South Carolina Press Association awards, including honors in column writing, government beat reporting, profile writing, food writing, business beat reporting, election coverage, social media and more.