FOREST LAKE: Schiano’s reopened quickly after flood, still winning back business

When Tina Dillard and Larry Mitchell sit down at Schiano’s Old Tyme Pizza Restaurant almost every Tuesday evening, it’s like nothing has changed.

The photos on the wall are the same. The large booths still seat their friends who meet them for happy hours. The hand-tossed pizza is still top-notch.

“We’ve had pizza all over the country, and we keep coming back here,” Dillard said.

And yet, Schiano’s hasn’t quite returned to business as usual in Forest Acres, the way things were six months ago, before historic floodwaters swept through the building and devastated the community around it.

But Schiano’s is leaps ahead of some of its small-business neighbors in the Forest Lake shopping area, off Forest Drive and Trenholm Road, in rebounding from the flood.

On either side of Schiano’s are Zoe’s Kitchen and Coplon’s clothing store, whose owners anticipate reopening but are still in the midst of restoration work.

Other nearby businesses are renovating as well. But some, including Four Paws Animal Clinic, which has temporarily relocated to Devine Street near Five Points, and the three-decades-old Sakura Japanese restaurant, are still vacant, in limbo.

Other neighbors, including the Pavlovich Dance School, Forest Lake Gardens and Ed Robinson Laundry and Dry Cleaning have incrementally found their way back to the largely local-character business corner.

Frank Schiano always felt optimistic that his restaurant would make a comeback after the flood. But for about a week afterward, he wasn’t sure what he would do.

“Now we’re back at first base,” Schiano said. “But we’re still in the ballpark. We’re still in the game. You look at the positive side and just keep going.”

Schiano’s has been serving its “fast-casual” Italian food for more than 30 years in Columbia, opening its first location at Columbia Mall. It later expanded to a second location on Two Notch Road near Spring Valley High School, then left its original Columbia Mall location a little over two years ago to open on Forest Drive.

Early last year, about nine months before the flood, Schiano purchased the Forest Drive property he had been renting. But when he took on the responsibility of ownership, he couldn’t have foreseen the burden that would fall on him months later.

On Oct. 4, Gills Creek, which peeks through the side-window views of the small family-style restaurant, overwhelmed the building with about 4 feet of water that rushed in from upstream.

That Sunday morning, after the historic rains moved out, Schiano rushed to Forest Drive, passing destruction along Interstate 77 and Trenholm Road. He could only get as close as the Trenholm Plaza parking lot across the street, where he stood looking at the creek water that had swallowed his own parking lot and lapped at the green door of his restaurant.

The community’s help in the aftermath – including customers who offered him money to help with the renovation process – encouraged him to move forward, he said.

“That just gives you strength you didn’t know you had,” Schiano said. People were telling him, “‘We want you to survive. We want to keep you here.’”

Schiano’s reopened two months after the flood, and customers are slowly finding their way back to the restaurant, Schiano said.

Sean Sanderson took a lunch break at Schiano’s last week while doing restoration work on a flood-damaged home in a neighborhood off South Beltline Boulevard. A Northern transplant, Sanderson knows Schiano’s is the place he’ll find as close to a New York-style pizza as he can locally.

“If it would not have reopened, it would affect not just (Schiano), but us, the community as a whole,” Sanderson said.

Customer traffic at the restaurant has not yet rebounded to pre-flood levels, Schiano said. He’s still working on winning back the business customers took elsewhere while his restaurant was out of commission.

But just as he has high hopes for the community, Schiano expects the restaurant to end up “better than ever.”

“I’m not going to say we’re there, but we’ll get back to where we were,” Schiano said.

This story was originally published April 9, 2016 at 7:37 PM with the headline "FOREST LAKE: Schiano’s reopened quickly after flood, still winning back business."