Hendrix combining fun and fine food on Main Street

By C. Grant Jackson

 

When Hendrix opens at 1649 Main Street later this year, partners Chris Davis and Jon Sears believe their new restaurant will bring downtown Columbia something it hasn’t seen,  but is ready for.

“We are really trying to toe a line that not a lot of people have in Columbia,” Davis said, “but it happens in every other major city. You go to a lot of these places that have an elevated menu that are still fun places.”  The partners, who also own Jake’s and a few other popular Five Points spots — believe Hendrix will be that place.

Hendrix will be the first tenant in the renovated building that formerly housed Hennessy’s restaurant. Columbia architect and developer Scott Garvin,  president of Garvin Design Group, and several partners purchased 1649 Main in the fall of 2016 and began renovating it that November. The building has two floors of roughly 4,000 square feet each and a 6,000-square-foot basement. Hood Construction is the general contractor for the project.

Hendrix will include a restaurant and bar on the second floor and a rooftop bar, each with a capacity of about 99 customers, overlooking Main and Blanding streets. Sears and Davis have lured Javier Uriarte, one of the city’s rising culinary stars and most recently sous chef at Motor Supply, to create a menu based on fresh, locally sourced foods. Sears describes the menu as “modern American.” Wade Penland, who began his restaurant career working at Harper’s while at USC and spent the last seven years working for restaurants in Arizona as a managing partner, returns to Columbia to be the general manager for  Hendrix.

The Hendrix team is committed to bringing a unique experience to Columbia’s Main Street and continuing to grow downtown.  “We want to add to Main Street. We don’t just want to come in and be the new hot thing and be gone in year. We want to contribute to the community. We want to help it grow,” Penland said.

 

       

 

Hendrix will have the quality of food and service, but without the formality found in a fine-dining, white-tablecloth restaurant.  “You’ll be able to relax. You’ll be able to have conversation. The level of the service, the knowledge of the staff will be top notch, but they are not putting your napkin across your lap for you.  It won’t be stuffy,” Penland said. Hendrix will be a place for date-night and special occasions, but casual enough for T-shirts and shorts.

“I think we can do it. I think people in Columbia are ready for that, they want something different,” Davis said.

The prospect of a rooftop bar is what sold Sears and Davis on the former Hennessy’s location for a Main Street restaurant unlike anything they have done before. Partners for nine years, they had been looking at Main Street for a long time. “We’ve always been interested, but the right opportunity never really came along where we felt comfortable,” Davis said. But then their real estate broker mentioned 1649 Main. “He showed it to us, and the building just looked amazing. You could really envision a lot of opportunity there. So we were really excited,” Davis said. “Then he mentioned the opportunity for the rooftop space and I think that was pretty much the opportunity that we had been waiting for.”

The rooftop will offer a different experience, Including live acoustic music, than diners will get in the restaurant, Sears said.

 

 

Garvin had to open up the building’s roof and add staircases and an elevator to create the new venue. The rooftop would have been prohibitively expensive if not for the building’s narrow footprint, Garvin said. The 26-foot width of the second floor allowed the creation of the rooftop bar without adding a lot of additional support. “We simply reinforced the existing trusses and secured them to the masonry walls,” Garvin said.

When Garvin originally began renovations to the building he had planned for a restaurant on the ground floor, which Hennessy’s had occupied. He also renovated the basement and created a garden level by opening up the adjacent Blanding Street sidewalk for an open courtyard. The idea was that perhaps a coffee shop in the garden level and the restaurant above could share the courtyard.

The second floor was “we’ll figure that out later,” he said. “I really thought it would be office space, but nobody wanted it.” But then Sears and Davis saw the potential in the roof. “These guys wanted it, which was awesome, so the sequence of development was completely reversed,” Garvin said.

Since the Hendrix announcement, “we have had a lot of interest in other spaces in the building. But we’re being very patient. We want to make sure the tenants are a complement to Hendrix. No announcements yet, but lots of people are looking at it,” Garvin said.

Hendrix will bookend the west side of the 1600 block of Main Street, which has become downtown’s hottest redevelopment spot, beginning with the opening of Mast General Store at the southern end of the block followed  by the Nickelodeon theater, The Grand on Main, and Lula Drake Wine Parlour, all in renovated historic buildings. “This is at the other end of the block. It ties it together’” said Garvin, whose firm was involved with Mast on the architectural side. “When Mast went in, it was kind of like what are you doing? It’s a dead zone down there. But look at it now,” he said.

The Hendrix name evokes the area’s history. The Hendrix family were grocers in Columbia from 1868 until 1927, mostly at 1649 Main Street.

The building is on the National Register of Historic Places and much of the building’s architectural history — from original floors to exposed brick and rafters to pressed-tin ceilings — is being preserved. Christy Davis of Christy Davis Interiors, Davis’ wife,  is handling the interior design work. “I think she has really tried to blend the traditional and the historic aspects — the brick walls, the exposed rafters. But she has also tried to use furniture and light fixtures, in particular, to give it a pop of some modern touches,” Sears said. “We want it to be nice but we want to be comfortable. We want to be stylish, but we want to be accessible.“

But Hendrix will be about the food. “The food that Javier is going prepare is going to be some of the best food you can find in this city, because it will come from the city itself,” said Penland.

“We really wanted this to be a chef-driven concept,” Davis said.

At 27, Javier has trained under some of Columbia’s top chefs, including Nate Whatley at Garibaldi’s, Tom Berry at Colas, and Wes Fulmer at Motor Supply, where Javier rose to second in command of the kitchen and where he developed a passion for using fresh, local ingredients.

Sears and Davis share that passion and Hendrix will have that same emphasis. But they are giving Javier free rein. “It would be terrible for us to waste a talented, young chef,“ Sears said.

Since leaving Motor Supply, Javier has been talking with  local farms and local suppliers and telling them what Hendrix wants to do. ”I want  to be the first one to get those crazy truffles, those crazy lettuces, those crazy produces, good grass-fed beef. I want to be the person that the farmers and purveyors can rely on, and be like ‘Hey I have this stuff that you should try and put it on the menu.’ And I will. I want to have that uniqueness on my menu.”

With that approach, the menu at Hendrix is going to change frequently, “perhaps changing a few things every day, just because  it is easier to stay local, to stay fresh and to also keep you on your toes, keeping always moving forward,” Javier said.

But Javier also wants to keep his heritage nearby.  One dish that will be on the menu is a  Peruvian influenced paella. “We are going to make it our own, probably call it our Hendrix Paella.”

The Hendrix menu will have plenty of variety, however. “We are never going to limit the menu so that a group of five people can’t all find something they want,” Penland said.

“I’m going to try to change the way a normal Southern plate would look and taste. I don’t want to change it completely, but I do want to add things to it to make it my own,” Javier said. “But at the end, I’m not doing anything crazy modern. I’m not using crazy chemicals or this and that. It is just different. There is no one here that is doing what I will be doing.”