Charleston SC restaurants add outdoor seating during COVID

Edward Crouse took the coronavirus seriously. When leading infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci urged people to avoid large indoor gatherings last year, Crouse listened.

He abstained from dining out despite living a Southern city that is also a world-class culinary destination. And, like many who are trying to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus, Crouse supported local restaurants by getting his meals delivered or to-go.

But as a small business owner in Charleston’s food and beverage industry, Crouse knew that a take-out or delivery-only model wouldn’t work for Babas on Cannon, the European all-day cafe he opened with his wife, Marie Stitt, in 2019.

“We opened Babas to make great food and drink and hospitality accessible and really approachable,” he said.

Even in a pandemic.

Inside the 750-square-foot cafe, which was once home to a barber shop, Crouse estimates there is enough seating for some 20 people. The neighborhood spot, where the menu is painted on the window, is meant to be as intimate as it is versatile. It’s a place where patrons can buy coffee and pastries in the morning and return in the evening to order a Negroni.

The small setup made sense in 2019, but during a pandemic it made Crouse anxious. Restaurants, after all, were places where people were used to gathering inside — without masks — while eating and drinking for extended periods of time.

“When my wife and I stepped back and looked at our options and thought about the level of service we wanted to provide to our guests, it was obvious that outdoor dining was the only real option,” he said.

Other bars and restaurants in downtown Charleston have come to the same realization and are inviting locals and tourists to take a seat at tables set up on sidewalks in front of their restaurants.

Originally made possible by a local emergency ordinance that began on May 12, nearly 50 Charleston restaurants have been authorized to serve food and drinks at outdoor tables, turning stretches of sidewalk into dulcet dining experiences where people eat at bistro tables, beneath umbrellas or twinkling lights and, at times, near outdoor heaters.

Along with its four white bistro tables on the sidewalk, Babas on Cannon has transformed two on-street residential parking spaces into an additional outdoor dining offering, called a parklet, and also put tables and chairs in a previously unused adjacent alleyway.

“It meant the survival of our business,” Crouse, 35, said. “We are a brand new business and never had the chance to create the wealth necessary to close our doors for any extended period of time. For us, it was simple: The more seats we could fill, the more revenue we could do.”

Now, nearly one year into the coronavirus pandemic, there’s a push to make outdoor dining a permanent offering in Charleston, a place where such a move could also change the look and feel of the peninsular city’s historic downtown.

43 and counting

The first major move to make outdoor dining a lasting fixture came last week when Charleston City Council unanimously approved a change to its zoning ordinance that will expand space for outdoor dining downtown and extend all current outdoor dining permits until 2022.

When the same language was part of the city’s emergency ordinance last year, many restaurateurs moved quickly to set up street and sidewalk seating areas as soon as they were allowed.

The city also eliminated the $200 fee once required for an outdoor dining permit and streamlined its application process into a one-page online form. In that first month, the city issued 24 permits in May 2020, according to Meg Thompson, the city’s director of business and neighborhood services.

However, because the permits were part of a temporary emergency ordinance, restaurants and bars had to reapply for permits every 60 days. The food and beverage industry was looking for some certainty while operating in uncertain times and asked the city for help in getting out of the 60-day cycle.

“It was just causing anxiety and stress, and they wanted to know if it was going be a longer-term thing,” Thompson said.

That’s when she said city officials started working on translating the emergency ordinance into a regular one with some staying power.

Even though the ordinance could change how locals and tourists experience downtown Charleston’s streets and sidewalks, the Historic Charleston Foundation supports the effort.

Cashion Drolet, the chief advocacy officer for the Historic Charleston Foundation, said the addition of outdoor dining is a nod to the history of Charleston itself.

“Charleston is a 17th century city. It was designed for the pedestrian. It was a city designed at the human scale. This puts humans back out into the public realm, and we like that. And let’s be honest,” Drolet said, “putting restaurants back out into the public realm has, frankly, cleaned up the city a little bit. Folks have swept the sidewalks and cleaned up parking lots and attended to exterior maintenance, which helps keep Charleston beautiful.”

In addition to giving guidance about what’s allowed, the city ordinance reads like a love letter to its food and beverage scene. It credits the city’s restaurants and bars for Charleston’s growth and the city’s repeat standing as the No. 1 tourist destination in the world.

“In fact, this time of unprecedented isolation emphasizes the important role of the City’s food and beverage establishments in bringing people together, helping people celebrate life’s blessings; sympathize in life’s difficulties; reinforce relationships with existing friends and family; reacquaint with old friends; and meet new ones,” the ordinance states.

To date, 43 outdoor dining permits have been issued, and Thompson said nearly all have been for local restaurants rather than chains. A majority of the permits — 29 of them — are for sidewalk dining, while 13 were issued for restaurants to expand outdoor dining into private property. One is a permit for both.

‘We should have done this a long time ago’

Already, Charleston leaders are saying they want outdoor dining to stay for good, and they have verbalized plans to make it so well before the Jan. 10, 2022, expiration date.

“The next thing on this ordinance is to get rid of that sunset provision,” Councilman Mike Seekings said during the first City Council meeting of 2021, drawing a quick nod from Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg and positive acknowledgment from fellow council members.

In an interview, Seekings said the health of the city’s restaurants is vital to the economic well-being of Charleston. In 2020, he attended a virtual City Council meeting while sitting outside at a downtown restaurant as a way of showing visible support for the concept. He said the ordinance has not only removed a barrier for restaurants, but it has led to a beautification of the city itself.

“There’s been a lot of creativity happening as a result of this. It’s drawn your eye to places you may not have seen before, especially some of the smaller restaurants,” said Seekings, who lives downtown and represents residents in the southwestern part of the peninsula. “I see it, and I think we should have done this a long time ago.”

Even during these traditionally slower and cooler winter months, there are clues that the outdoor dining phenomenon in Charleston will outlast the pandemic that made such seating a necessity.

Signs of staying power

At least three high-top tables, all painted with the design of the Texas flag, can be found outside El Jefe, a Tex-Mex cantina on King Street. At Félix, a Parisian-inspired cocktail bar with a small-plate menu, six glass tables with navy-and-white rattan bistro chairs await patrons looking to experience French cuisine.

Bobby Williams, chairman of the S.C. Restaurant and Lodging Association and CEO of the iconic Lizard’s Thicket restaurants in the Midlands, said the pandemic stands to not only change how downtown Charleston dines but will forever change how restaurants do business in South Carolina and beyond.

“In the future, outdoor seating is going to be a must. People just do not want to feed into a small 75-100 seat restaurant dining room,” Williams said. “We used to cram as many in as we could get, but in the future I think you will see restaurants that are socially distant even after the pandemic, and that they do it in a way where it doesn’t feel socially distant.”

Even for larger places like Uptown Social, a 10,000-square-foot sports bar with a rooftop bar, adding visible outdoor dining was paramount to surviving the pandemic.

Keith Benjamin, co-owner of Uptown Social, said it became essential when a statewide emergency order went into effect over the summer that banned alcohol sales at all restaurants, bars and nightclubs after 11 p.m. The ban is still in effect.

His establishment had to find creative ways to make up for lost revenue.

“There’s no sugar-coating this. It’s been brutal. We have kind of ebbed and flowed through 2020 and into 2021, and we had to pivot in a million different ways,” Benjamin said.

Because Charleston’s coastal Southern climate is more hospitable to year-round outdoor dining, Benjamin said Uptown Social saw an opportunity to make use of an adjacent empty lot between its building at 587 King St. and the Read Brothers building next door.

By summer, Benjamin had signed a lease and the abandoned driveway had been transformed into an outdoor space now called “the lot,” which features rows of socially-distanced picnic tables and a small stage. It created an additional 92 seats for eating and drinking. And, in a take on a popular quote from the movie “Mean Girls,” a mural painted by a local Charleston artist tells passersby, “You Can Sit With US.”

Within a week of opening the new outdoor dining space at Uptown Social, Benjamin launched his long-planned concept for a New York-style deli called Bodega. Originally envisioned as its own brick-and-mortar, Bodega’s business plan had to be overhauled because of the pandemic.

“Never in a million years did I think I would be opening a deli out of my 10,000-square-foot sports bar, but I have about 100 people I need to employ, and I had to find some way to put people back to work,” Benjamin said.

Before the pandemic, the earliest Uptown Social ever opened was 11:30 a.m. Now, Benjamin said, front of house staff reports at 7 a.m. and back of house shows up at 4 a.m. to prep for Bodega, which also serves breakfast.

None of it, he says, would have been possible without establishing outdoor seating at “the lot,” which he says customers have now associated with Bodega.

At Babas on Cannon, Crouse said the seating outside his cafe has been a frequent draw for customers.

“When I ask people how they heard about us, I can’t tell you the amount of folks that say, ‘I was driving by and saw the seats outside and it reminded me of when I was traveling in Spain or France,’” Crouse said. “This is inviting and fresh and lively and open.”

In other ways, it further reinforces Charleston’s beginnings as a city founded by European settlers.

“Charleston is always best seen on foot,” said Cashion Drolet, of the Historic Charleston Foundation. “This is another nice way to view the city and take in the architecture and breathe in the city in a different way.”

For Crouse, it has become a way to showcase what his cafe has to offer in a way that a written menu cannot.

When people drive by, they can see if there’s an open table. When they walk by, they can smell the food and see the drinks.

“It’s just more welcoming when the offerings are kind of there for people to see with their own eyes. It does look warm. It does look inviting,” Crouse said.

On top of that, he said, outdoor dining not only increased his dining capacity from 26 to 35 but it has brought him piece of mind.

Babas on Cannon ended the year with no additional debt, Crouse said, despite the pandemic.