Blake and Heather Hartwick are opening a restaurant on Lake Wateree. Photo courtesy

Blake and Heather Hartwick are opening a restaurant near Columbia, South Carolina on Lake Wateree, with plans to serve their first guests around Memorial Day. The husband-and-wife team will be leaving their positions at Dilworth restaurant Bonterra, where they first met. Blake Hartwick is executive chef there, while Heather is a bartender.

They recently purchased The Retreat at Colonel Creek, a waterfront space with stunning views and a log cabin aesthetic. The restaurant is about an hour from Charlotte towards Columbia. Blake Hartwick says they have been looking at the space for several years, but when they recently got a call from the building’s property manager after the restaurant closed, they decided to move forward with opening a restaurant there. They’ve put a farm on the half-acre property to grow produce that will be used in the kitchen with the help of their daughter, Katelyn.

When they announced to the community they were reopening the restaurant as The Retreat at Ridgeway on Facebook, the post got engagement from more than a thousand people expressing their excitement. 

“There’s not a whole lot of restaurants down there, but we’re kind of 20 minutes from everything from Camden, from Winnsboro,” Hartwick says. “There’s a couple of restaurants on the lake, but this was basically the big one.”

The restaurant has 16 boat slips, making it a destination for those spending a day on the lake as well as those seeking a waterfront view. Inside, the dining room seats 80 with space for an additional 25 diners in an outdoor gazebo.

The menu will be “simple and easy,” according to Hartwick, using local sourcing when possible to create approachable yet chef-driven dishes on a small menu. There will be a smoked pork rack with butter bean ragu with fried cabbage and country ham and cornbread, as well as a quail dish as a nod to the popularity of quail hunting in the area. 

“Quail’s kind of been pushed on the back burner, it seems like, in the last decade or so — you really don’t see a whole lot of it on the menu,” he says. “We’re going to try to bring a few things like that back.”

Blake has been at Bonterra for two decades on and off, and says the departure is bittersweet. This upcoming weekend will be the Hartwicks’ last at Bonterra, wrapping up there after Mother’s Day service.