Charleston center offers ready-to-go restaurant space

Restaurants that couldn’t make it through the pandemic at a high-end mixed-use community in Charleston ended up making it easier for new restaurants to start cooking.

After Continental Realty lost a popular restaurant that was a traffic-builder at Mount Pleasant Town Centre in the southern charm capital of South Carolina, the leasing agents at Zuckerman Co. decided to keep the culinary flames burning by enticing new tenants with fully equipped and built-out restaurants.

The first to take advantage of the offer was Malika, a local Pakistani restaurant that decided to put its second location at Mount Pleasant because of the low cost and ease of opening in a ready-to-go restaurant.

“This was a turnkey space. Ovens, refrigerators, and all the equipment a restaurant needs to run were already in place,” said Zuckerman VP Monica Klawuhn. “It’s hard to put a food and beverage operator in a new space because all of this equipment would have cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Mount Pleasant Town Centre’s extensive restaurant roster includes nationals like P.F. Chang’s and Longhorn, but Continental and Zuckerman strive to maintain a local flavor at the property with hometown tenants like Malika. Its latest new retail tenant signing, The Beaufort Bonnet Company Signature Store, was founded in Beaufort, S.C., and proprietors of this new shop are Charleston residents.

“Restaurants are key components of any mixed-use centers, and we see an opportunity to integrate more of them. Outdoor patios add energy and create more linger time for patrons,” said Klawuhn, who added that Mount Pleasant has three or four more empty spaces that could be converted into restaurant spaces.