Landrum’s Restaurant Corridors Serve Different Crowds

Pull off I-26 at Fairwinds Road right now and you'll find a Waffle House with the grill lights still smelling new. Drive three-quarters of a mile into town, past the depot, and you'll find a dining room where the wait for a table on a Friday night can run past 40 minutes even with a reservation. Both are recent additions to Landrum. Neither one is stealing business from the other, because they were never built to serve the same person.

That's the part of Landrum's growth story that gets flattened when it's told as a single narrative about a small town booming. It isn't one restaurant scene expanding. It's two separate ones, growing on two separate streets, aimed at two separate kinds of hunger.

The interchange got the fast lane

The corner of Fairwinds Road and I-26 has spent the past year turning into Landrum's answer to a highway rest stop, minus the vending machines. A Waffle House opened at 120 Fairwinds Road this month, close enough to the interchange that the site sits roughly a tenth of a mile from the off-ramp. For its first few weeks it's running a limited 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. schedule before shifting to the round-the-clock hours the chain is known for. A few months earlier, in January, a Zaxby's opened a short drive away at 1820 SC-14, with a ribbon cutting that brought more than 60 new jobs to the area, according to the franchise group that owns three other Spartanburg locations.

Neither of these is a downtown business in spirit or in design. Both sit on parcels the city had already flagged for commercial development, part of the same review wave that also cleared a storage and training facility for Landrum Fire and Rescue. The pattern is deliberate. Developers have been eyeing that stretch of Fairwinds Road specifically because of the commuter traffic passing through on I-26, the same road that connects Spartanburg to Asheville. You don't build a 24-hour grill for people who live a block away. You build it for people who are already moving through.

North Howard Avenue and East Rutherford Street took the opposite bet

A mile or so into town, the calculation flips entirely. These two restaurant openings didn't chase highway visibility. They bet on being a destination worth the extra turn off the main road.

Stubborn Mule Restaurant and Brewery opened June 1, 2025, at 501 North Howard Avenue, in a building its owners bought and gutted after it spent years as a truck repair shop. The location isn't an accident. It sits near the future route of the Saluda Grade Rail Trail, the former Norfolk Southern rail line that the Saluda Grade Trail Conservancy purchased for $28.5 million after negotiations that stretched back to 2022. That trail isn't open yet, but the brewery is already positioned for the foot traffic it's expected to bring. In the meantime, the outdoor seating area looks straight at Hogback Mountain, and the owners say they're already pulling customers from as far as Easley, well outside anyone's normal commuting range. That's not commuter traffic. That's a destination crowd making a choice.

CARO-Mi Dining Room tells an even sharper version of the same story, minus any of it being planned. The restaurant had operated for 67 years on the Pacolet River just outside Tryon, North Carolina, when Hurricane Helene's floodwaters tore through the building on September 27, 2024. Owner Dane Stafford had no flood insurance. What followed was seven months of uncertainty before CARO-Mi reopened on April 23, 2025, at 909 East Rutherford Street in Landrum, in the space that had previously held The Pasta Station. Most of the Tryon staff came with him, including two employees who'd already put in a combined 45 years at the restaurant before the move. The restaurant, founded in 1945 by the Mehaffey family and named for its owners' roots in the Carolinas and Miami, was marking its 80th year in only its third location ever when it reopened.

Nobody chose CARO-Mi's new address for highway exposure. Diners drive to it specifically, often reserving days ahead, because the trout deboned tableside and the family-style sides are the point, not a convenient stop on the way to somewhere else.

Why the split makes sense once you see it

The obvious read on all this is that Landrum is simply growing, and growing towns get more restaurants. That's true but not useful. What's actually happening is that two different customer bases are being served by two different business models, on two different streets, and each one only works because it isn't competing with the other for the same seat.

The interstate exit serves people who are between places. They're driving from Spartanburg toward Asheville, or the reverse, and they want something fast, familiar, and open at hours a sit-down kitchen can't justify. The in-town corridor serves people who have already decided Landrum itself is the destination, whether that's equestrian visitors connected to Tryon and the surrounding foothills towns, weekenders exploring the antique shops downtown, or locals who've made Friday night at the brewery part of their week.

Landrum's mayor, Bob Briggs, described this shift bluntly when Stubborn Mule opened: the brewery sits right on the future path of the rail trail, and he expects it to draw new visitors and residents as that project moves forward. The Carolina Foothills Chamber of Commerce, which tracks business across Landrum and the neighboring North Carolina towns of Columbus, Tryon, and Saluda, has made a similar case, pointing to Landrum's location between those towns as the reason growth keeps compounding rather than leveling off.

That framing matters more than the raw count of new restaurants. Landrum's population has hovered around 2,500 for decades, and even the more recent estimates put it closer to 2,620. A town that size can't support two competing full-service restaurant districts fighting over the same 2,600 dinners a night. It can support one corridor built for people passing through and one built for people who came on purpose, because those are structurally different revenue streams that happen to share a zip code.

What this actually changes if you live here

For a resident, the practical upside is that Landrum finally has both halves of a food scene it didn't have 18 months ago. The highway run home from Spartanburg now has a Waffle House for daytime stops and a drive-thru chicken option that didn't exist before this year. A weeknight when nobody wants to cook doesn't require a drive to Tryon or Inman anymore.

The other half is slower to use but arguably the bigger change. A Friday night at Stubborn Mule now means live music spilling into a beer garden with a view of Hogback Mountain, and a table at CARO-Mi means booking ahead for a dish and a family recipe that's been served continuously since 1945, just not always from the same building. Neither of those existed in Landrum a year and a half ago. Both required someone to bet that people would drive into town specifically for them, and both bets are paying off enough that a Wednesday night can mean a packed parking lot.

The rail trail is the piece still unfinished. Once it opens, the calculus along North Howard Avenue could shift again, this time with actual foot and bike traffic instead of just proximity to a future route. For now, the two corridors sit a mile apart, doing two different jobs, and neither one needed the other to succeed.

If you're the kind of Landrum resident who tracks what opens and what closes because it tells you something real about where the town is headed, that instinct is worth trusting. It's the same instinct that matters when you're deciding what a property here is actually worth, not just what it's listed for. Brighten Real Estate Group keeps a close eye on these shifts because they show up in home values long before they show up in a listing description. If you're curious what your own Landrum property looks like against a market that's clearly moving, get your instant home valuation and see where you stand.