What's Opening, Closing, and Coming Next Along Maybank Highway on James Island

Drive Maybank between Folly Road and Riverland in a given month and you can read the neighborhood's appetite in the storefront signage. A "coming soon" panel goes up at James Island Center. A pastry case fills at 1939. A four-month-old dining room goes dark before New Year's. The corridor has been unusually active since fall 2025, and the pattern beneath the churn is worth paying attention to if you eat here every week.

The short version: James Island is trading national chains for owner-operated, chef-led concepts, and the turnover is happening fastest at the Harris Teeter-anchored shopping center that most residents pass through several times a week.

The tenant swap at James Island Center

Two closures in the back half of 2025 set the stage. Maple Street Biscuit Co., the Jacksonville-founded chain owned by Cracker Barrel, abruptly closed its James Island location in late September 2025 as part of a broader shutdown of fourteen locations. It had operated on Maybank for about seven years. Ten weeks later, Charlotte's on Maybank went dark after just four months in business.

The replacements are not chains.

At 1739 Maybank, the former Maple Street space is being taken by Caviar & Bananas, the specialty cafe founded by Joe Caradonna in 2010 near the College of Charleston. Owner and CEO Caradonna confirmed to the Post and Courier in late January 2026 that James Island would be the company's third location and its first off-peninsula outpost, with an expected May 2026 opening. The buildout will bring the space into line with the downtown cafes, with expanded catering capacity and possible evening hours. Caradonna's own read on the location was blunt in his interview with What Now Charleston: it is a demographic the company has not tested, and he expects post-work, post-school, and post-practice traffic to carry the afternoon.

Worth pausing on what that means for a shopping center that already includes Muddy Waters Coffee Bar and a Starbucks kiosk inside Harris Teeter. James Island Center will soon host three coffee-forward concepts inside a single parcel. That is not oversaturation so much as a wager on frequency: the corridor's residents are apparently willing to sustain multiple daily-visit formats within walking distance of each other.

The bakery that quietly redrew the morning map

Two doors down, at 1939 Maybank, Girl Nextdough opened its brick-and-mortar on October 17, 2025, in the former LB Sweets & Treats space. The bakery is run by Caitlin Schumacher, previously the executive pastry chef at FIG, alongside her father John McCormick. The concept began as a weekend food truck parked on Signal Point Road outside Salthouse Catering in 2021, then built a following large enough that the transition to a storefront was less a launch than a formalization.

A few specifics that matter to a regular:

• Hours are tight. Thursday through Sunday, 8 a.m. to noon.
• The coffee program is curated by Sam Sidwell, another FIG alum, and runs on BEVLAB espresso rather than a traditional machine. The rosemary espresso spritz and the strawberry-infused iced latte have both become house signatures.
• Wholesale relationships continue to run through Jackrabbit Filly in North Charleston and Gold Star Coffee on Johns Island, and FIG still uses Schumacher's brioche.

The last detail is the useful one. When a downtown James Beard finalist keeps sourcing bread from a bakery three miles south of the peninsula, the bakery is not a neighborhood convenience. It is a supplier to the city's better kitchens that happens to sell to walk-ins on weekend mornings. That reframes the line out the door on a Saturday at 9 a.m.

Where to take out-of-town guests

Two dining rooms have settled into the role of the corridor's default guest nights.

The Harlow, at 1015 Harbor View Road, opened in November 2023 and continues under executive chef Brett Riley with a beverage program from Megan Deschaine. It came out of a Drewry family conversation about the absence of a place where you could get a good burger with the kids at 6 p.m. and a dozen oysters and a martini at 9. The menu still reads that way.

The James, from David Howard's Neighborhood Dining Group, is the sibling to Husk, Delaney Oyster House, Minero, and Marbled & Fin. It sits open seven days a week and takes a deliberately un-fussy posture. Traditional American, family-friendly, steaks on the weekend, happy hour anchored in the bar and lounge. For a group that has already been walked through Husk downtown, this is the version of Neighborhood Dining Group hospitality that lives on the island rather than commuting to it.

The point of naming both together is that James Island residents no longer have to cross the Ashley for a competent oyster or a considered wine list. That is a shift from where the corridor was five years ago.

A quick map of the churn

What Camp Road tells you about the next twelve months

Off Maybank, the smaller signal is on Camp Road, where Jeff's Bagel Run has been listed among Holy City Sinner's upcoming Charleston openings without a firm opening date. Combined with Girl Nextdough at 1939 Maybank, that will give a two-mile stretch of James Island two distinct bagel programs, one sourdough-forward from a former fine-dining pastry chef and the other a New York-style chain outpost. Neither existed on the island eighteen months ago.

Read across the corridor, the tenant list is starting to look less like a suburban strip and more like a compressed, walkable food scene of the kind that used to require a bridge to reach. That is a slow but visible reordering.

What this means if you already live here

A few practical takeaways for people who already have coffee routines and Friday dinner habits on the island:

1. Reserve Girl Nextdough time on Sunday, not Saturday. The Sunday morning line is meaningfully shorter, and the doughnut and pastry case still has the full display through late morning.
2. Watch the Charlotte's on Maybank space. A four-month closure in a Harris Teeter-anchored center will not sit empty long. Post and Courier reporting cited "serious interest" from restaurant tenants at James Island Center from commercial broker Will Sherrod of NAI Charleston.
3. Anticipate a Caviar & Bananas after-school rush. Caradonna's own framing pointed to post-practice traffic. If your family uses that cafe for a quick weekday dinner, plan around 5:30 to 7 p.m. congestion once the doors open in May.
4. The Harlow and The James are not interchangeable. The Harlow is a bar-forward room with oysters and burgers. The James leans traditional American on white tablecloth adjacencies. Choose based on the guest, not the drive.

The corridor is not finished changing. The pace of turnover between September 2025 and May 2026 is faster than any stretch James Island has seen in recent memory, and the concepts moving in are, on balance, more ambitious than the ones moving out. For homeowners who bought here partly on the promise that the island's food scene would eventually catch up to the peninsula's, this is the year that promise started to look concrete rather than aspirational.

If you own a home on James Island and are curious what the corridor's momentum means for your property's position in the current market, the team at Handsome Properties tracks these neighborhood-scale shifts as part of every valuation we prepare. Reach out for a quiet conversation about where your block sits in the year ahead.