Wedding DJ at Hendrix Restaurant in Columbia, SC

The Space

The building at the corner of Main and Blanding in downtown Columbia dates back at least to 1872, when it first appears in a C. Drie illustration of what was then called Richardson Street. The restaurant’s own name comes from E.T. Hendrix, a grocer who ran a store in the building from 1906 to 1926, long before the space held a restaurant at all. Ruff Hardware Company took the space in September 1928 and stayed fifty years, investing about sixty thousand dollars in that year’s renovation, nearly nine hundred thousand dollars in today’s terms, work that left the building fireproof-constructed and 11,000 square feet total with three display windows facing Main Street.

After Hennessy’s closed in November 2011 and the building sat vacant for several years, Main & Blanding LLC bought and rehabilitated it in 2015, stripping out a later mezzanine and drop ceilings to expose the original pressed tin ceilings and wood trusses, and restoring the historic hardwood floors on the first and second levels. Hendrix now occupies 7,700 square feet across the second floor and the rooftop.

Capacity & Layout

The restaurant splits across two distinct levels: a second-floor dining room with exposed brick, pressed tin ceiling, and restored hardwood floors, and a separate rooftop bar one level up with open-air seating over downtown Columbia. An elevator added during the 2015 renovation connects the two, which matters for any guest who cannot manage the stairs to reach the rooftop level.

Rooftop seating runs first come, first served rather than fully reserved, a detail worth knowing when planning how a wedding-adjacent event, a rehearsal dinner or a smaller reception, would actually flow between the two floors. The dining room below offers a mix of booth and table seating, giving a more contained, formal option compared to the open rooftop above it.

Amenities

A large modern window enclosure around the staircase provides shelter for guests moving between floors, and the rooftop bar itself gives a view of downtown Columbia that the enclosed second-floor dining room does not. The building’s preserved details, pressed tin ceiling tiles, exposed wood trusses, and original hardwood floors, give the second floor a texture that a newer restaurant build-out could not easily replicate.

The building’s restoration earned the South Carolina Historic Preservation Awards Honor Award in July 2021 and the Columbia Chamber’s Golden Nail Award in 2020, recognition tied directly to the adaptive reuse work rather than the restaurant’s food program. We provided music for an event here and can speak to how the split-level layout actually works once a crowd moves between the dining room and the rooftop.

Location & Getting There

Hendrix sits in Columbia’s Main Street Commercial Historic District, a downtown address that puts guests within walking distance of other Main Street venues and hotels for a wedding weekend built around the city center.

With a hard-surfaced second-floor dining room under a pressed tin ceiling and an open rooftop bar exposed to the sky above it, a DJ setup has to account for two very different acoustics in the same building, tighter and more reflective downstairs, open and wind-affected on the roof.