Two wine, cocktail bars from budding hospitality group in the works for West Columbia

A face familiar to the West Columbia dining scene is looking to bring two new bar and restaurant concepts to the city.

Matt Catchpole, who worked previously as the general manager for West Columbia fine-dining mainstay Terra, is developing a semi-private cocktail bar/supper club and another business bringing together alcohol retail with a relaxed wine bar vibe and kitchen. Both have circled locations along key corridors in the city across the Congaree River from downtown Columbia.

The two concepts are part of an effort by Catchpole and his family to start a local hospitality group. Burgeoning West Columbia, Catchpole said, is a great place to begin.

“I’m very excited about West Columbia’s potential in general and starting to kind of see it realize a little bit of that potential,” he said. “We looked at Aiken for a while. We looked at Atlanta and some places in Alabama. We looked towards the coast a little bit and looked at Greenville. And this feels right to me, like we’re hitting it at just the right time. And I’ve kind of grown to love this community.

“So we decided that we would make an effort to help the community along, and kind of help it develop.”

‘Champagne and hot dogs’

The first of the concepts to come online will be the cocktail bar/supper club, with work already ongoing to renovate an undisclosed space along Sunset Boulevard, just up from West Columbia’s River District. Catchpole said he’s hopeful to open the new business in January.

A few names are being considered for the establishment, with one of the frontrunners being Ikie Lu, Catchpole’s grandmother’s nickname.

“We’re working on a thing that would be a kind of a semi-private cocktail bar and event space,” he said. “That would be ‘champagne and hot dogs,’ that’s the thing that I like very much. There’s a concept in Tybee that does that.”

The Tybee Island business leaning into the trend is Sea Wolf, which serves hot dogs alongside oysters and fancy cocktails.

“There’s a couple places throughout the country that do this,” Catchpole continued. “People have trouble sometimes, if you open something that’s quote-unquote ‘a wine bar,’ there’s a small sector of the population, especially in a place like Columbia, that gets that. You’re kind of excluding certain demographics, not on purpose, just because it’s like their preferences.”

The exact execution of how the new business will balance more “esoteric” wine offerings with more down-to-earth food and drink selections remains up in the air, but Catchpole said more precise plans should be announced soon. The small event space, he added, should accommodate about 30 and be available for members to rent out.

“Doing something that would have some classic cocktails, some more adventurous stuff, only be open a few nights a week, very likely,” he said. “We’re not looking to create a country club, but we are looking to do something where there would be a small membership fee involved.”

Second place, Leonard’s Peach, still in the works

The other concept Catchpole hopes to bring to West Columbia would come online later. His team is working through approvals to build the new construction establishment at 1051 Meeting St., just down from the Triangle City neighborhood.

But the idea has been in the works for about 10 years, with Catchpole adding that they’ve already settled on a name, Leonard’s Peach, again inspired by his family.

“My grandfather, who ultimately inspired a lot of my love for food and beverage,” Catchpole said of where the name comes from. He added that his grandfather’s cooking inspired an affection for simple, well-made, classic dishes “with enough salt and fat in it.”

“Peach” was a term his grandfather used a lot, Catchpole explained: “Like, ‘That’s just right’ or ‘That’s A-OK.’”

He added that with Leonard’s Peach they’re looking to build a two-story building and do something similar to a New Orleans spot called Bacchanal.

“In Bacchanal in New Orleans, you walk through a little wine shop, and if you want to take wine home, you can let them know, and they’ll sell you a bottle to go,” Catchpole said. “What 99% of people that go in there are doing is they pick up a bottle of wine, pay for it, go sit outside in this little courtyard area and kind of hang out with their friends and drink wine.

“That space in New Orleans also has a full-service bar, and they have a kitchen that will sell you some food, but it’s all kind of vaguely counter service.”

It’s a concept not dissimilar to the beer-and-wine-retail-with-beer-garden-and-food-trucks model that WECO has succeeded with since moving in down the street, and Catchpole is confident that the area, which continues to draw more development and more residents, would be able to support his new addition.

“That whole corridor is overdue for some development,” he said. “I think the city has been kind of like, not secretly, but pretty quietly, working on trying to clean that whole stretch up. And I think that in five years, that area looks a little more like a Main Street area would in a traditional downtown, where you’ve got more commercial storefronts, more walkability, more pedestrian traffic.”