One Monday morning in July 2026, Piace Pizza posted to Facebook that it was leaving Lady's Island. The pizzeria had anchored 1 Merchants Lane for roughly a dozen years, and now it was headed to Port Royal. Hours later that same day, Scratch Italian Kitchen + Bar in Shell Point posted that it was closing for good. The two posts were not a coincidence. Ownership at Scratch confirmed the business had been sold to Piace, and the timing was the point: one restaurant's last day made room for another's first.
If you have lived on Lady's Island for any stretch of time, you have probably noticed the pattern without naming it. Nothing here seems to just open. It moves into something. The island's commercial strip along Sea Island Parkway has quietly become a place where restaurants change hands more often than they change addresses, and the reason has less to do with any one business and more to do with how little room is left to build.
A Corner That's Outlasted Three Restaurants
The building Piace is moving into at 831 Parris Island Gateway in Shell Point has a longer restaurant history than most people realize. It spent more than a decade as Fat Patties before Nick Borreggine, who also owns ShellRing Ale Works and Alvin Ord's, converted it to Scratch Italian Kitchen + Bar about two years ago. Now it becomes Piace. Three concepts, one set of walls, spanning more than a decade.
That same logic shows up on Lady's Island itself, just with different tenants.
| Location | Previous occupant | Current status | What actually happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 136 Sea Island Pkwy, Grayco Shopping Center | Rancho Grande restaurant | The Kitchen, expanded | The Kitchen absorbed the adjacent space in 2025, more than doubling its footprint |
| 831 Parris Island Gateway, Shell Point | Fat Patties, then Scratch Italian Kitchen | Piace Pizza (targeting reopening around August 7, 2026) | Third restaurant tenant in the same building in just over a decade |
| 163 Sea Island Pkwy | Vacant lot | Harris Teeter, with an in-store Starbucks and wine bar | Opened June 25, 2024, folding new uses into one construction project rather than building them separately |
| Sea Island Pkwy & Ferry Rd | Wooded lot | Planned stand-alone Starbucks | First reported in February 2022, still not confirmed open as of the most recent construction timeline |
Read down that list and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with any single business's success or failure. When something new comes to Lady's Island, it tends to arrive inside a box that already exists. When something genuinely new has to be built from an empty lot, it takes years.
What Absorption Actually Looks Like
The Kitchen is the clearest example of the first kind of growth. Leigh Ann Pingree and her sister Michelle Clark started the business in 2013 out of a small space in the Newpoint neighborhood on Lady's Island. After six years there, they moved to their current spot on Sea Island Parkway. In 2025, when it came time to grow again, they did not look for new ground. They took over the former Rancho Grande restaurant next door, gutted it, and connected it to their existing kitchen.
"We are adding the former Rancho Grande restaurant spot next door to our present location, and have completely gutted it to fit what we are trying to do," said Ty Reichel, describing an expansion that added a coffee counter, expanded retail shelves, a larger menu, and enough extra kitchen space to take on bigger catering jobs. The goal was a spot people could treat as a meeting place as much as a takeout counter.
By July 2026, The Kitchen was expanding again, this time off the island entirely, into a spot next to Surchero's Tex Mex near the new ALDI at Beaufort Station on Robert Smalls Parkway, with plans to open sometime in late 2026 or early 2027. Even that move follows the same instinct. Rather than build something new from scratch, the plan is a smaller grab-and-go format, described in the announcement as a return "to our roots with the grab & go that started it all over a decade ago." The brand keeps finding existing footprints to grow into, on the island and off it.
The Slow Lane: What Building New Actually Costs in Time
Compare that to the stand-alone Starbucks planned for the corner of Sea Island Parkway and Ferry Road. The Beaufort Gazette and Island Packet first reported in February 2022 that Starbucks was scouting that wooded lot across from SouthState Bank. By 2023, a Charleston-based commercial real estate firm had confirmed it secured the lease, and Beaufort County's Planning and Zoning Department had given the site plan conceptual approval, with final approval and construction still to come. The most recent construction update available, from January 2025, targeted completion around March 2026. Whether that date held is not confirmed as of this writing.
Meanwhile, a full-service Starbucks already exists inside the Harris Teeter that opened at 163 Sea Island Parkway on June 25, 2024. Harris Teeter's grand opening came with store-made pizza, sushi, an expanded seafood counter, and a wine and beer bar, all built inside one project on what had been a vacant lot. The difference is not that Harris Teeter moved faster than Starbucks. It is that folding a coffee counter into a grocery store already under construction takes far less time than clearing, permitting, and building an entirely stand-alone building on three separate lots that first have to be consolidated into one.
The island keeps proving the same point in two directions. Growth that reuses an existing structure happens in a season. Growth that requires new ground can take years, and sometimes still isn't finished by the time you'd expect.
Where Piace Landed, and Why That Spot Made Sense
Piace's move was announced with a level of detail that makes clear how deliberate it was. The Lady's Island location's last day was Sunday, July 26, 2026. Its sister restaurant next door, which had been closing gaps in the move for weeks, wound down operations on Friday, July 17 to help with the transition. Scratch, on the other end of the sale, closed its doors the same weekend, giving the Piace team about a week to convert the Shell Point space before reopening.
Sanna Ferry, speaking for the family behind Piace, described what the move actually buys the business, beyond square footage.
"We plan to expand our menu adding many items from our sister restaurant, La Cucina, and we'll also add more sandwiches, appetizers, and salads, and we're also adding some brand new pasta dishes as well. We'll still offer our popular menu, but we're adding to it and are definitely going to keep the same Piace-vibe."
Part of that expansion is a liquor license, something the Lady's Island location never carried. Ferry pointed specifically to the Shell Point building's existing bar, a holdover from its Scratch and Fat Patties days, as the reason a full beer, wine, and liquor program is now on the table. The building already had the plumbing and layout a bar needs. Piace didn't have to build one. It just had to take one over.
What the Pattern Actually Tells You
None of this is really about pizza or coffee. It's about how little undeveloped ground is left along Sea Island Parkway and its side streets, and what that scarcity does to the businesses trying to grow there. On Lady's Island, expansion tends to look like The Kitchen swallowing its old neighbor's lease rather than breaking ground somewhere new. A restaurant closing tends to look less like an ending and more like a handoff, the way Piace's exit from Merchants Lane opened a door for whatever comes next in that space, the same way Scratch's closure in Shell Point opened one for Piace itself.
The lone project that required truly new construction, the stand-alone Starbucks planned for Ferry Road, is also the one still waiting more than four years after it was first reported. That's not a coincidence either. It's what happens when there's no existing box left to step into.
If you eat on Lady's Island regularly, the next time you notice a familiar storefront with a new name on the door, it's worth asking what used to be there. More often than not, the answer explains the whole story.
If you're getting to know Lady's Island from the outside and want a local's read on how the island actually works, not just what the map shows, the team at J.P. Signature Group lives and works here too. Contact us anytime, we're always glad to catch you up over whatever's being poured on Sea Island Parkway these days.
