Roofing in West Columbia, SC

This is Full Under Forty, a three-part series where we walk you through the tastiest and most affordable eats in neighborhoods across the Midlands. The day's total must amount to $40, tax and 20 percent tips included, and consist of a sit-down breakfast, lunch and dinner.

West Columbia and Cayce are known for eclectic retail stores, scenic riverwalks and intimate neighborhood ethos. And among a landscape of fine dining restaurants and rooftop bars are some of the Midlands' most cost-effective — and tastiest — meals.

This week, Full Under Forty heads west with one quest: to eat a filling breakfast, lunch and dinner for under $40. This week's lineup got down to the wire, and you're going to want to see how we were able to pull off this full day of sit-down eats.

Keep reading for guide of how to eat out for a whole day in West Columbia on a budget.

Breakfast: Piecewise Coffee Co.

Location: 2001 State St., Cayce

Hours: M - F, 7 a.m. - 5 p.m.; Sat, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.

What to order: Honey-pistachio biscotti, hot Americano

Meal cost: $6.60

To kick off your morning, stop by Piecewise Coffee Co. for one of their signature sips and rotating varietals of pastries. Their in-season honey-pistachio biscotti is the closest you'll get to a breakfast baklava, and dipping it in a slightly bitter Americano tenderizes and balances its sweetness. Eat it in Piecewise's cozy, wooden digs, or take it to go and savor the portable breakfast during your commute.

Lunch: The Reggae Grill

Location: 901 Holland Ave., Cayce

Hours: M - W, 11 a.m. - 11 p.m.; Thurs, 11 a.m. - 1 a.m.; F-Sat, 11 a.m. - 2 a.m.; Sun, 1 p.m. - 12 a.m.

What to order: Curry Chicken Snack with rice and peas, Ting soda

Meal cost: $15.16

Nestled in Cayce, The Reggae Grill serves up Jamaican cuisine for regulars and the occasional newbie. Notably, the restaurant lists heaping plates as "snacks" on their menu for $9, despite their massive portions. Mix and match your favorite protein and side dish, like tender curry chicken with a gentle heat and well-seasoned rice and peas. Wash down this filling lunch with Ting, a Jamaican grapefruit-based soda with enough tartness and acidity to cut through the richness of the meal.

Dinner: D's Restaurant and Bar

Location: 415 Meeting St., West Columbia

Hours: M - Thurs, 11 a.m. - 10 p.m.; F - Sat, 11 a.m. - 11 p.m.

What to order: Six-piece wings and fries meal with Valhalla sauce and Dr. Pepper

Meal cost: $17.62 (cash)

To round off the evening, head to D's wings on West Columbia's lively Meeting Street for affordable and filling wing combos. If you're looking to branch out past your usual order of Buffalos, order your six-piece combo smothered with Valhalla sauce. The creamy, yogurt-based sauce is seasoned with Mediterranean spices and a healthy measure of dill. Pair with hot sauce for an extra kick, and make sure to dip your flour-crusted fries, carrots and celery in the leftover sauce. A sweet Dr. Pepper is the perfect complement, but you can pick your poison — just make sure to bring cash to avoid extra credit card charges.

Grand total: $39.38

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More than two months after Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeast, a fence still blocks off the West Columbia Riverwalk as it remains closed with little word on when it could reopen to the public.

The half-mile-long portion of the trail that begins near the West Columbia Amphitheater and connects to the neighboring Cayce portion of the riverwalk has been closed since late September when Helene flooded the trail and caused extensive damage to the pathway. Meanwhile, Cayce’s riverwalk fully reopened last month, leading some to question why West Columbia’s section is still closed.

The holdup in reopening the walkway stems, in part, from the city of West Columbia awaiting necessary disaster funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to complete the project. City officials are set to meet with FEMA and S.C. Emergency Management later this month, a spokesperson for the city confirmed. Until then, officials say they will not have an estimated timeline for when the trail will reopen or how much the damages will cost.

“We’re waiting on landscape architects’ and engineers’ estimations and a FEMA site assessment,” city spokesperson Anna Huffman said.

After Hurricane Helene clobbered South Carolina, residents across the Midlands began to assess the damage in the early morning hours of Sept. 27. Public works trucks and utility line workers cleared the roads of fallen trees and downed power lines. Thousands across the state went days before power was restored.

Three days later, as upriver water from the Upstate and western North Carolina flowed down the Congaree River after historic amounts of rainfall, the river crested at 30.5 feet, fully immersing the West Columbia and Cayce riverwalks in water.

It took about a week from when the massive storm battered many parts of South Carolina for Lexington County to receive a disaster declaration from FEMA allowing West Columbia to submit a formal request for funds. The city submitted paperwork to FEMA on Oct. 14, Huffman confirmed.

But the city has only begun the process with FEMA, which requires site assessments and planning meetings before funding is given. It’s one of two key issues leading to the lengthy delay in opening. The other issue has been the extent of the damage caused to the trail by the storm. When flood waters receded, city officials found themselves stuck with a hefty task.

“Lots of times when you have storms come through, we go through and clean everything off and make the minor repairs, but when you have extensive damage from natural disasters you have to go through a different process,” West Columbia Mayor Tem Miles said.

So far, debris removal of things like fallen tree limbs is done and the city has reopened the parking lot, amphitheater and a very small portion of the trail. The rest is on hold until the city meets with FEMA.

The city leaned on FEMA’s disaster funds previously following the the historic flooding in 2015, which caused an estimated $2.2 billion in damages across the state.

The closure has thus far lasted a month longer than that of the Cayce riverwalk’s, which fully reopened Nov. 7. City park staff and hired contract workers cleared out fallen trees and dug the trail out from under a few feet of mud.

“[The water] stayed up for about a week,” Parks Department Manager James Denny told The State in October. “During that time, it deposited anywhere from 6 inches to a foot of soft silt and debris onto the parkway. Trees and stuff came down across the pathway.”

The damages on the Cayce side were significant and comparable to the historic flooding of 2015, Cayce spokesperson Ashley Hunter said. After Helene, Cayce had to replace one of its boardwalks, among the fixes that contributed to the city paying at least $100,000 to independent contractors for repairs related to the storm, Hunter said.

But officials from both West Columbia and Cayce have been quick to point out differences that allowed Cayce to move more efficiently on reopening the trail. West Columbia’s portion had more extensive structural damage, Miles said. And Cayce repaired its issues with its own money and has applied for reimbursement from FEMA, according to Hunter.

“It’s such an important part of our recreation and who we are as a city,” Hunter said. “Getting that reopened was something we knew we had to really focus on and do.”

Cayce’s quick cleanup is a bit of an anomaly. It’s more common for the cleanup process following a storm or flood to be a lengthy one. Following damages caused by the flooding in 2015, the Cayce Riverwalk didn’t fully reopen until 2018, and West Columbia’s section didn’t fully reopen until the previous year, according to previous reporting done by The State. Following other major hurricanes, a 2017 study found recovery efforts typically take about three months to begin in earnest and can take upwards of a year to complete.

“Even though it has been two months since the hurricane hit, that’s not that unusual if you’re thinking about these major projects that are rebuilding and so forth,” FEMA spokesperson Gerard Hammink said.

West Columbia officials are set to meet with FEMA before the end of December to get a clearer idea of the timeline for reopening.

This story was originally published December 7, 2024, 6:00 AM.

West Columbia wants to limit where vape and smoke shops can open and how they can advertise in a move similar to Midlands neighbors Forest Acres and Columbia.

The city is considering an ordinance that would restrict where vape and smoke shops and hookah lounges can open – barring the businesses from opening within a certain distance of residential areas, other smoke shops, schools and churches. The rule received unanimous initial approval from City Council on Tuesday and must pass through a second reading before it goes into effect.

The ordinance aims to prohibit the use of LED accent lights and also restrict how the businesses can advertise. It would ban the use of words or images of “illicit substances” on business signage.

It’s not the first time the issue has come up at City Hall. An astronaut mural on the side of Planet Vapor, a smoke shop along Sunset Boulevard, drew the ire of council members in the summer as they discussed setting up a program to fund the creation of more public art in the city.

The new West Columbia rules would require the businesses to be at least 1,000 feet away from residential areas, schools, libraries and playgrounds. And the shops couldn’t be within 500 feet of another vape or smoke shop.

“It’s a quality of life issue,” Councilman George Crowe said, adding that the effort is meant to preserve the city’s commercial space and encourage a variety of business types.

The city council is considering adding provisions to the ordinance to require ID card checks for entry in an effort to curb the use of vapes among kids. Nationally, around 6% of middle and high school students reported using e-cigarettes in 2024, an almost 2% dip from 2023.

“One of the biggest things I’ve seen with these businesses is a lot of underage individuals coming in with nobody checking [their] IDs,” Councilman Jimmy Brooks said.

The ID requirement isn’t on the proposed ordinance, but with the newly proposed rules moved to a second reading, the City Council could amend or add additional rules later down the line.

Other council members said passing an ordinance like this is important to them so the city doesn’t get overrun with vape shops. Some said they’d seen as many as eight shops pop up in a one-mile radius.

“It was a joke for a while where someone would say, ‘Oh, there’s a new business opening. Oh, wait, it’s another vape shop,’” Councilwoman Sarah Mattern said.

The rule is also meant to combat the practice of vape shop owners targeting West Columbia, since neighboring municipalities have tightened regulations, making it harder to open stores.

“I just want to make sure we’re in line with those other cities around us and not be the outlier,” Brooks said.

The move would make it more difficult to open a new vape or smoke shop in West Columbia, but as the rules stand, already existing businesses would be grandfathered in. The ordinance follows close behind the one in Forest Acres, which passed in November, and the one in Columbia in early 2023. This year, Columbia’s city council considered adding provisions to restrict how vape and smoke shops advertise, but has not come to a consensus on the issue.

The city likely won’t take up the measure for a second reading until the beginning of the new year, staff said during the meeting.

This story was originally published December 4, 2024, 8:56 AM.

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, 1:34 PM.

The State

Chris Trainor is a retail reporter for The State and has been working for newspapers in South Carolina for more than 20 years, including previous stops at the (Greenwood) Index-Journal and the (Columbia) Free Times. He is the winner of numerous 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.

A fire at Maurice’s Piggie Park in Cayce damaged its headquarters, sparking a multi-agency investigation as the small BBQ restaurant chain plans its recovery.

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CAYCE, S.C. — The West Columbia Fire Department continues investigating the cause of the fire at the Maurice's Piggie Park BBQ headquarters in Cayce.

"Shock. I mean absolute shock, and then you know sadness, because anybody who has grown up in this area, everybody recognizes the piggy park and the pig sign," Lisa Harmon said.

That's how Harmon said she felt when she saw flames coming from the buildings on the property on Saturday night.

“From our vantage point last night and how big the fire was, it was really difficult to tell whether or not the restaurant was also involved so just the general reaction was just shock,” she said.

Authorities later said the restaurant on the property was not damaged.

RELATED: West Columbia fire chief provides update on fire at Maurice's Piggy Park offices, cooking facilities

Around 9:15 p.m. on Saturday, the West Columbia Fire Department responded to the area of Charleston Highway and Airport Boulevard in Cayce. Fire Chief Marquis Solomon said it took multiple agencies to extinguish this fire.

“We had large amount of resources on-scene; we had agencies from five different jurisdictions working on this incident, so it was very intense," he said. "And manpower, we were in the neighborhood of about 50 to 60 firefighters on-scene at the height of the incident.”

According to Solomon, the fire took four hours to put out, and crews were still on the scene Sunday morning checking for small hot spots.

“The restaurant was not affected. However, the administrative offices, the cook house were all contained inside that building that was that was damaged by fire last night,” Solomon said.

The restaurant shared additional news in a Facebook post on Sunday morning.

“We plan for all our restaurants to be closed Monday until further notice," the statement said. "We will be taking it day by day as we work to reopen and rebuild. For anyone who knows our family knows we won’t give up and will work endlessly to do what we need to do to continue the BBQ legacy and support our 150 employees and community we love dearly.”

RELATED: Well-known barbecue restaurant issues statement after fire at headquarters: 'Unbelievable mountain to climb ahead of us'

The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

"We do have a multiple-agency investigation being conducted that's through the city of West Columbia, also SLED [South Carolina Law Enforcement Division], state fire and the ATF," Solomon said. "This is a common practice with large dollar loss incidents.”

The fire department asked anyone in the area to stay away from the actual fire scene as the fire is still under investigation.