A restaurant that opened with optimism in a newly redeveloped Whaley Street shopping strip couldn’t survive the area’s student-driven boom-and-bust seasons, says the property owner who now plans to expand an existing liquor store into the vacant restaurant space.

Vietnamese sandwich shop Bahn Mi Boys opened in a Whaley Street storefront in June 2023. The business did well for about a year and a half, but struggled during student breaks, said property owner Hashmukhbhai Parekh. By August 2025, the restaurant had announced its closure on Instagram.

Despite the storefront being just across the street from the busy Olympia Mills student apartments, Parekh said he couldn’t find a new restaurant tenant because business is so slow when students leave for the summer.

“I tried, for one year to put [a] restaurant ... but nobody wants to come, because from May to August, no students, so they’re having problems,” Parekh told the Columbia Board of Zoning Appeals Thursday.

Because no restaurant operator wants the site, Parekh said, he is planning to expand his existing Tony’s Liquor Store into the former Bahn Mi Boys storefront at 625 Whaley, Suite C.

The Columbia Board of Zoning Appeals approved a special exception to allow that expansion March 5.

Parekh operates the Shiv Mart convenience store on the corner of Whaley and Wayne streets, and he has operated a convenience store on the corner since 2004, he told the board. In 2020, he remodeled, building a “new, modern” store with two retail spaces, explained attorney Jake Moore, who was representing Parekh at the hearing. Moore also stressed that Parekh had wanted the second storefront to remain a restaurant space, but that the economics haven’t seemed to work. “Summer hits, and the students leave for about four months in the summer, and the restaurant went dead,” Moore told the board. “As a result, the restaurant could not survive.”

A portion of the vacant storefront will be used for storage, with the remaining 1,000 square feet of the unit expected to be occupied by the expanded liquor store. The zoning board approved the expansion 4-1, with board chair Kathryn Fenner voting against the plans, saying she felt there were already too many liquor stores in the area. There are two other liquor stores within about 1.5 miles of the existing store.

Green’s Beverages on Assembly Street is about .7 miles from the Whaley Street liquor store, and about a 15-minute walk or a 5-minute car ride.

Tilly’s Warehouse in Five Points is a roughly 1.7 mile, 40-minute walk or an 8-minute drive from the Whaley Street store.

One member of the public spoke against the liquor store plans.

Viola Hendley, representing area neighborhoods through the Mill District Alliance said she was concerned about the level of traffic that can often back up Whaley Street during peak times.

“Whaley Street is a very, very, very busy street taking on 22,000 vehicles a day during the school year,” Hendley said.

Several board members, and attorney Moore, disagreed that the expanded liquor store would create a traffic issue.

“If we did find a restaurant to go in there, there’s going to be a whole lot more traffic associated with the restaurant than there would be with 1,000 extra feet of retail space in the liquor store,” Moore said.