6 Restaurant Chains That Disappeared From South Carolina and Are Still Mourned
Some restaurants leave a hole in a town when they close.
These are the restaurant chains that disappeared from South Carolina and are still mourned.
1. Piccadilly Cafeteria
Piccadilly Cafeteria served its last tray in South Carolina on July 21, 2012, when the North Charleston location on Mall Drive locked its doors after 15 years.
Then it was gone.
Regular customers told the Post and Courier they’d miss the fried chicken, and more than one showed up mid-week only to find the doors already shut for good.
Piccadilly had already swallowed up the Morrison’s Cafeteria chain back in 1998, a merger that briefly doubled its size to 270 restaurants.
A first bankruptcy in 2003 started shrinking the chain again.
A second bankruptcy in 2012 left just 41 locations standing nationwide, the same year Charleston lost its last one.
Piccadilly’s website lists 28 restaurants today, spread across Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Virginia.
Not one sits in South Carolina.
2. Po’ Folks
Po’ Folks opened in 1975 at 206 Concord Street in Anderson, when Malcolm Hare and Betty Trowbridge turned a diner called Life Savers Chicken into a mason-jar, country-cooking restaurant.
The idea caught on fast.
The chain grew to 170 stores by 1985.
Hare sold the company that year to the Krystal Co. of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Krystal filed for bankruptcy in 1988.
The Anderson store moved to Clemson Boulevard in February 1991.
Owner Clint Wittner closed it for good on Dec. 2, 1994, citing slumping business and high debt.
Nearly 25 years later, it topped a list nobody could have predicted.
An Anderson Independent Mail reader poll asked which long-gone local restaurants people missed most.
More than 570 responses named over 100 former restaurants.
Po’ Folks came out on top.
Jeff Pittman started working there in 1977 and later ran several Po’ Folks locations in south Florida.
He now runs Anderson’s Chicken Basket, where some of the old Po’ Folks recipes still turn up on the menu.
Only five Po’ Folks remain today, and every one of them is in Florida.
Not one has reopened in South Carolina.
3. Sticky Fingers Smokehouse
Sticky Fingers traces back to Mount Pleasant in 1992, when three partners from Chattanooga built a menu around a family rib recipe.
The barbecue caught on fast.
Sticky Fingers grew to 15 restaurants across five Southern states, and by 2006 its bottled sauces sat on shelves in roughly 4,000 grocery stores nationwide.
The pandemic hit harder than the sauce line could carry.
By 2025, only two restaurants were still open anywhere, one of them in Greenville.
Greenville closed that summer under a bankruptcy filing.
The last Sticky Fingers of all, a North Charleston location, shut down around September 5, 2025, closing out the same bankruptcy case.
The company’s goodbye post called it a heavy-hearted decision and thanked guests and staff for decades of support.
“Closed” And “Gone For Good” Aren’t the Same Bankruptcy
A Chapter 11 filing lets a company shed its worst locations while it keeps operating the rest.
Sticky Fingers filed one in March 2025, with four restaurants still open, and spent the next six months closing them one by one.
A Chapter 7 filing is different.
It liquidates the whole business at once, which is why Fatz Cafe, later on this list, went from open to closed within days of filing.
A chain that files Chapter 11 can still come back smaller.
One that files Chapter 7 is done.
4. Fatz Cafe
Fatz Cafe opened around 1988 inside a converted peach shed in Spartanburg County.
It was the idea of a restaurateur named Jimmy Rogers, who built the menu around Southern comfort food and a signature Calabash chicken.
It grew to nearly 48 locations across five states by 2011.
A 2008 leveraged buyout loaded the company with debt it never fully worked off.
The count slid to 32 restaurants by 2019, then dropped again in 2020 with closures in North Charleston and Aiken.
Sales fell another 15% between 2021 and 2022.
On August 23, 2023, all 18 remaining Fatz Cafes, including the Upstate’s Greer, Greenwood and Clinton locations, closed at once.
Staff had until 3 p.m. to lock up.
It happened just like that.
The parent company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy two days later.
News outlets across the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia described the shutdown as a shock to customers and employees alike.
Management’s farewell note called the restaurants a gathering place where families had built years of memories.
5. Ryan’s Family Steak House
Ryan’s Family Steak House traces its start to a single restaurant on Laurens Road in Greenville in 1978.
That came a year after founder Alvin McCall sold an earlier steakhouse that would go on to become Quincy’s.
Ryan’s went public in 1982 and added a buffet called the Mega Bar in 1986.
It grew into what the Post and Courier later called one of South Carolina’s most successful dining ventures.
Buffets Inc. bought the chain in 2006.
By March 2016, that parent company was on its third bankruptcy reorganization.
It shut six more South Carolina Ryan’s restaurants at once, in Columbia, Conway, Greer, Orangeburg, Spartanburg and Surfside Beach.
Diners who showed up for lunch that Monday found the Grand Strand locations already dark, with no warning posted the week before.
The six South Carolina Ryan’s that survived that round didn’t last either.
Not one of them did.
The old North Myrtle Beach building sat empty long enough that a Maryland company bought it for $2.4 million in June 2024.
It’s still not clear what will open there next.
6. Steak and Ale
Steak and Ale opened in Dallas in 1966 and grew to 157 restaurants by its 1992 peak.
A series of owners ran the chain down through the 1990s and 2000s.
The end came fast.
Parent company Metromedia filed for Chapter 7 in July 2008, and all 58 remaining Steak and Ale restaurants closed within days.
One of them was in Spartanburg.
No new Steak and Ale has opened in South Carolina since.
The company behind Bennigan’s revived the Steak and Ale name in 2024, opening its first new location in Burnsville, Minnesota.
A franchise partner has now set a target of summer 2027 to build a new one in Anderson.
The plans call for a ground-up building of about 6,500 square feet with room for outdoor seating.
The company describes fans reacting to the brand’s return as though a long-missing favorite had finally turned back up.
Psst! These aren’t the six chains above. They’re a different batch of South Carolina restaurant names, and some of them aren’t nearly as gone as people assume.
Where These Chains Got Their Start
Po’ Folks, Sticky Fingers, Fatz Cafe and Ryan’s didn’t just close in South Carolina.
They started in South Carolina.
An Anderson diner called Life Savers Chicken became Po’ Folks, and a Mount Pleasant rib shop became Sticky Fingers.
A Spartanburg County peach shed became Fatz Cafe, and a single Greenville street steakhouse became Ryan’s.
Each one grew for years on local ownership before an outside buyer, usually a private equity firm from somewhere else, took over the growth plan.
Every one of them eventually left the state that built them.
One of those old buildings is already gone for a new reason.
Crews tore down the former Fatz Cafe next to Gaffney’s Peachoid water tower in April 2026, clearing the site for a $50 million Spartanburg Community College campus expansion.
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