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Alodia’s Italian restaurant in Lexington has temporarily closed its doors after staff said their checks have bounced and they have not been paid for two weeks.

Lauren Brunson, who worked for two years as one of three managers at the restaurant, said issues began June 20 when several staff members were unable to cash their checks.

By June 28, managers at the West Main Street restaurant had decided to have a “cash-only day” in an attempt to pay staff. At the end of the day, employees decided to close the restaurant.

“I mean, it’s the end of the month and the beginning of a new month. I mean, everybody has bills due,” Brunson said. “The number one thing that you’re supposed to do for your employees is keep them happy, keep them paid. And when that’s not happening, I would have had so much more respect for (the owner) if he had addressed the issue.”

According to Brunson, Alodia’s owner Adam Huneau is currently on vacation and has not communicated with staff members about their concerns.

Zoe Spires, a former server at the Alodia’s for about two and a half years, took to Facebook before June 28, asking for any customers visiting to pay with cash. Spires said she thought getting word about the situation out to the community was important.

“I wanted people who go to Alodia’s to know that the tips that they’ve been leaving their servers wasn’t coming to us,” Spires said. “The money they spend is going to someone who doesn’t care about his employees.”

In her Facebook post, Spires said that while some employees were paid or given cash from the general manager’s personal account, multiple staff members were still waiting on money from working Monday.

Huneau replied to Spires’ post but otherwise has not publicly commented on the situation.

“Zoe is correct, there has been a cash flow issue for sure,” Huneau wrote on Spires’ post. “We are actively pursuing measures to correct it and it will be rectified.”

Huneau commented that the lack of pay was not intentional and said he plans to compensate Spires and reopen the restaurant. Spires said that she has yet to be compensated.

“It’s been a very challenging three years. I would appreciate everyone’s support when we reopen as we did recently at the Irmo store,” Huneau wrote in a comment. “Lexington will reopen and continue to serve the great community there.”

Alodia’s serves Italian food, featuring a variety of homemade pasta dishes for dinner. In 2019, Huneau was named the South Carolina Small Business Person of the Year by the Small Business Administration.

Brunson and Spires said checks had bounced before this month but that the problem was always resolved in the past.

According to Spires, Alodia’s was typically a popular and busy restaurant in Lexington. Brunson said the staff had a strong relationship with each other and the community.

“We’ve had our regulars, and that’s also part of what makes me really sad is that we’ve gotten to know the community,” Brunson said. “That’s also been ripped away from us, all those relationships.”

In the comments under Spires’ post, community members offered jobs and expressed their concerns about the situation while other employees explained their shared experiences.

“This sounds like less of a community problem and more of an illegal work situation. After not being paid, i sure wouldn’t return for more. File a wage complaint and move to a more reliable place. I’m sorry you are dealing with this,” one person commented.

Spires said she and other employees plan to take legal action.

“We all agree that this legal action should be done because not only has it affected our livelihood, but also our mental state on all of us who are extremely upset,” Spires said. “We work our butts off, and we work to pay for the things that we have.”

The restaurant’s Irmo location, 2736 North Lake Drive, is still open.

When her paycheck bounced in mid-June, Zoe Spires, a former waitress at Alodia’s Cucina Italiana in Lexington, didn’t think much of it. Checks had bounced before, she said.

But nearly two weeks later, when she said that original payment declined, she started hearing whispers of concern among other wait staff.

“One of the servers looked at me and she said ‘You need to find a new job, but you didn’t hear that from me,’” Spires said.

Wait staff told The Post and Courier that their paychecks bounced because of what bank tellers told them were insufficient funds in the account on June 20. When workers brought it to the attention of the restaurant’s general manager Jessica Amick, she paid them using her own money.

“Nobody’s getting paid at this point so she a reimbursed a couple of people out of her own pocket, I think upwards of $3,100 in total,” former manager Lauren Brunson said.

While the employees of Alodia’s awaited payment for nearly two weeks, communication from owner Adam Huneau was minimal, Brunson told The Post and Courier. Amick made a phone call to Huneau, who, according to Brunson, was on vacation at the time, on June 28, to express the staff’s frustration with the lack of pay.

“I’ve never been treated like this, I’ve never had somebody not even be able to tell me and be honest with me that I wasn’t going to have a job,” said Brunson, who’s worked in the restaurant industry for over a decade.

As of June 29, the neighborhood Italian spot’s Lexington site is “temporarily closed” and is set to reopen July 5, an employee from the restaurant’s Irmo location told The Post and Courier.

According to both Spires and Brunson, the nearly 40 employees at the Lexington restaurant have not received pay since June 20. By June 28, Amick and the staff made the decision to shut the restaurant’s doors.

″‘Where do we go from this point?’” Brunson said the staff collectively asked. “We felt like we were trying to resuscitate a dead animal at this point.”

Owner Huneau has not responded to calls or texts. An employee at the Irmo location told Post and Courier he was unavailable.

However, Huneau did respond to a now viral Facebook post that Spires made on June 27 about the situation, imploring people to come support Alodia’s.

“Zoe is correct, there has been a cash flow issue for sure,” Huneau’s comment read. “We are actively pursuing measures to correct it and it will be rectified ... we will reopen and continue to serve the great community there.”

The Lexington restaurant’s business license also expired on April 30 of this year and hasn’t been renewed, according to Laurin Barnes, the communications manager for the Town of Lexington.

This isn’t the first time Alodia’s has faced financial issues. The Irmo location temporarily closed in May 2021 and remained shuttered for five months until it reopened in October. Owners cited “shortages in the labor market” as the reason for the temporary closure.

A full-service restaurant company under Huneau known as Umberto Enterprises LLC received over half a million dollars in loans through the COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Program — $262,105 in April 2020 and $353,955 in January 2021.

But Spires said she’s faced issues with being paid on time roughly five times in the year and a half that she’s worked at the restaurant.

“Anytime that did happen, and they had the funds to pay me for it, I would go in and let my manager know and she would give me cash in hand,” Spires said.

Alodia’s, which serves typical Italian cuisine like chicken parmesan and shrimp scampi, opened in Irmo in 2008 and expanded to Lexington’s Main Street in February 2018. Huneau was named the South Carolina Small Business Person of the Year by the Small Business Administration in May 2019.

Don’t worry, Lexington. You’re also going to get a chance to get your hands on some steamed bagel sandwiches.

Sully’s Steamers, the sandwich franchise that has long been popular in the Upstate and is known for its wide variety of sandwiches served on steamed bagels, recently opened a shop at 2835 Devine St. in Columbia. Now, franchisee Michael Stuckey confirms that Sully’s has set its sights on its next Midlands location, which will be in neighboring Lexington.

Stuckey said the Lexington spot will be at 5580 Sunset Blvd., in the Kitty’s Corner shopping center. The Sully’s restaurant will be going into the space that was formerly a Kitty’s Hallmark store. That’s right next door to Menchie’s frozen yogurt shop.

“We are hoping to be open there in mid-November, if everything works out well,” Stuckey told The State. “If not, it will be very early December.”

Sully’s Steamers has long had a location on East Washington Street in bustling downtown Greenville, and it also has Upstate locations in Clemson, Simpsonville, Mauldin and Spartanburg, as well as a spot in Brevard, N.C.

Aside from the recently opened Columbia shop and the coming Lexington spot, Stuckey also has plans to open Sully’s restaurants in several other Midlands areas, including West Columbia, Irmo and Forest Acres, though exact locations for those units have not yet been finalized.

The Lexington County Chronicle first reported the location of Sully’s Steamers in Lexington.

The response to the Devine Street Sully’s, which opened June 26, has been tremendous, Stuckey said.

“There has been a perfect mix of customers (visiting the Columbia shop) who have been to the Sully’s in Greenville, who already were fans of Sully’s, and people from the local community,” Stuckey said. “I grew up maybe 10 blocks away, right off of Rosewood, and Devine has always been a place, for me, that needed a more family-friendly spot, with some outdoor space.”

The Sully’s in Lexington will be along a very busy thoroughfare. About 35,000 cars per day pass down that stretch of Sunset Boulevard, per state Department of Transportation data. There are a host of shops, restaurants and other businesses in the area, including a Walmart, a Chick-fil-A, Ganbei Japanese restaurant and many others.

“We looked for a while in Lexington, and we were kind of going between Main Street and (Sunset Boulevard),” Stuckey said. “Everyone who lived in Lexington that I knew said (Sunset) was where we should go. Traffic is heavy, yes, but it flows.”

Sully’s menu has a plethora of bagel steamers, including the Nachos Maximus, which has turkey, cheddar, lettuce, honey mustard, parm-peppercorn and Doritos (the chips are on the sandwich), and the Hulk, which features turkey, pepperoni, salami, onions, provolone, cheddar and Italian dressing. The also have a number of breakfast steamers.

By this time next year, the heart of downtown Lexington will be home to up to 31 new houses as a planned development gets underway.

Sandpiper Square will be a mixed-use development off Old Chapin Road and Snelgrove Road. That’s a block north of one of Lexington’s busiest intersections at Columbia Avenue and West Main Street, behind the Shoppes at Flight Deck, which it will connect with the new development.

The development was approved by the town Planning Commission back in 2021, but developers Purty Property Company say they now plan to break ground in October, with the first units completed early next year.

When Sandpiper Square gets up and running is partly dependent on when developers can meet town of Lexington and S.C. Department of Transportation requirements to offset the impact on local roads, said Jonathan Stambolitis, Purty’s director of development.

“We’ll be making off-site improvements to Old Chapin Road, and they want us to do that at night,” Stambolitis said.

The company will be expanding the median on Old Chapin for 420 feet from near Flight Deck to past Snelgrove, Stambolitis said, along with moving light poles along the roadside.

“Everything the town’s asked us to do, we should have done by early February,” he said.

The traffic impact on the new development was top of mind when Purty and Montgomery Construction were planning out Sandpiper.

“Connectivity is a huge factor,” Stambolitis said. “That’s why we designed it the way we did. We hope it sets the tone for future developments... We know how to utilize land well. We have a very different approach than Lexington County has seen, so that we don’t spread out and put a big impact on the infrastructure.”

The single family cottage-style development is projected to take up a little more than two acres. The site was approved as a mixed-use development, but the development will mostly be residential housing, with only two to four small commercial properties on the site to keep parking and traffic in check. The two commercial properties currently planned will feature ground-floor business space with two-story apartments above. Stambolitis said he already plans to live in one of them.

The target buyers for Sandpiper are “young families and empty nesters” who want a walkable urban feel to the neighborhood, but some properties may be short-term rentals, which Stambolitis said have a favorable environment in the area.

The company plans a phased opening with eight units becoming available every four months, beginning four months after the planned groundbreaking.

This story was originally published May 12, 2023, 12:05 PM.

Plans to build hundreds of houses, a hotel, marina and town-run conference center on the shores of Lake Murray appear to be dead.

The developers behind what would have been a major development at Smallwood Cove sent a letter to the town of Lexington on Wednesday withdrawing their request to be annexed into the town limits. The annexation would have been the first step in plans to put up to 940 townhomes and 160 single-family houses on the 93.5-acre site beside the lake.

Lexington town council had given its preliminary approval to the plan in May. Smallwood Cove would have hosted a 50,000-square-foot, multi-million-dollar conference center owned by the town, as well as a 290-room hotel, restaurants and retail space. All of that goes out the window with the withdrawal.

“The Town received notice today that the Smallwood Cove property owners have withdrawn their request to annex all parcels as well as the application for zoning and the proposed development agreement,” Lexington announced in an email Wednesday afternoon. “As a result, the previously submitted proposal will receive no further consideration from the Planning Commission or Lexington Town Council.”

The law firm Maynard Nexsen, which represents the property owners who had sought the development, sent a letter to the town Wednesday announcing it was dropping its request for annexation and for approval of the plans, apparently coming as a surprise to town officials.

“Therefore, a meeting with Town Council to discuss these matters on Monday is not necessary,” the law firm’s letter concludes.

George Bullwinkel, the attorney who represents the property owners, said the plans for Smallwood Cove would have allowed more members of the public to take advantage of the lakeside property, but the approval process has “overshadowed” that goal.

“The landowner has enjoyed Lake Murray for more than 80 years and only wants the best for the community,” Bullwinkel said. “Regrettably, the annexation and zoning process has overshadowed the thoughtful plans that would have opened up community access to this beautiful location. My client has elected to withdraw annexation and rezoning efforts at this time.”

Last week, an overflow crowd packed town hall for a joint meeting of the town and county councils to discuss the proposal, with many of them raising concerns that Smallwood Cove would add to the area’s traffic and over-development woes.

The development site hugs the coast of Lake Murray along North Lake Drive, above Jake’s Landing and below the Lake Murray Public Park and Dreher Shoals Dam.

Town officials said at that meeting they would seek an outside firm to conduct a traffic study after the initial study submitted with the proposal was deemed “inadequate” and “biased,” in the words of Lexington Mayor Steve MacDougall. Any changes to the proposal would have gone to the town planning commission for review before they could receive approval.

Lexington had been appropriated some $16 million by the S.C. Legislature for development of a conference center on the lake. State Rep. Chris Wooten, R-Lexington, warned at last week’s meeting that the town risks losing those funds if the conference center isn’t built, although the center doesn’t have to be built at Smallwood Cove.

Proposed Smallwood Cove development

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This story was originally published July 20, 2023, 9:37 AM.