As pandemic abates, new restaurants abound

“If you had told me two years ago that on a random Sunday, I’d be scooping 100 cups of gelato in Conway, South Carolina, I would have said, ‘You’re a damn liar’,” says Brandon Lynn, who earlier this month celebrated the opening of Carolina Cheese & Provisions by participating in the downtown stroll that marks the start of the holiday shopping season.

Lynn, who spent close to a decade at New York’s Gotham Bar and Grill as its director of operations, left the city at the start of the pandemic. Because Lynn worked in hospitality and his husband worked on Broadway, and because a January 2020 trip to Italy had impressed upon them the severity of lockdown, they decided to relocate temporarily to Lynn’s parents’ house in Georgia.