The Burger Joint at 1033 East Montague Has Had Three Names Since 2017, and That Tells You More About Park Circle Than Any Restaurant Review Will

Walk past Holy City Brewing this week and the tents from Saturday's Oktoberfest are still coming down. The Dirndl Dames have packed up, the pint glasses are washed, and the brewery is back to its regular Wednesday-through-Sunday rhythm. That's the thing about Park Circle in September: something is always just wrapping up on East Montague Avenue, and something else is always about to start. The farmers market still has seven Thursdays left before its October finale. The Harvest Festival is a month out. And a few blocks down, a storefront that's held three different restaurant names since 2017 just changed hands again, this time to a burger joint called No Bull.

That last detail is the one worth sitting with, because it's not really a story about restaurant failure. It's a story about who actually owns the building.

One Address, Three Signs, One Company

The short version, pieced together from Post and Courier business coverage: Southern Roots Smokehouse opened at 1083 East Montague Avenue in 2017 and ran there for close to a decade. Earlier this year, that location closed and the barbecue operation relocated a few doors down into a space East Montague regulars will remember as Ship's Wheel Hard Cider, before Ship's Wheel moved its production operation up to Cross County Road. Not long after, that same relocated spot changed hands again. This time the new tenant was No Bull, a burger concept that had been running out of West Ashley since 2023 as a reimagined version of its Tex-Mex predecessor, 3 Matadors, until an unexpected summer closure sent it looking for a new home.

On paper, that reads like a neighborhood churning through restaurants the way some commercial strips do: open, struggle, close, repeat. It isn't. Both Southern Roots and No Bull belong to the same company, Travis Glen's Lucky 17 Restaurant Group, which also runs Sportsbook locations in Nexton and at Tanger Outlets and keeps Southern Roots' original West Ashley location open on Savannah Highway. What looks from the sidewalk like a storefront that can't hold a tenant is actually one operator reshuffling its own real estate. The address changed hands. The ownership didn't.

If you've lived in Park Circle long enough to remember Ship's Wheel pouring cider on that block, this is useful context the next time a familiar sign disappears. Before assuming the neighborhood lost a business, it's worth checking whether the business just moved its chips to a different table.

What Hasn't Moved

Compare that to the stretch of East Montague that hasn't changed hands in years. LoLA, the Louisiana seafood kitchen, started as a food truck in 2010 and has run its brick-and-mortar location since 2016, a full decade in the same spot. Jackrabbit Filly has held its corner since opening, still serving the same heritage-driven Chinese American menu it built its name on. EVO Pizzeria and Bakery, Commonhouse Aleworks, and the volunteer-run Park Circle Film Society round out what locals tend to describe as the neighborhood's fixed points, the places you plan an evening around rather than the places you happen to notice are open.

The distinction matters for how you use the neighborhood day to day. The turnover businesses cluster in a small number of storefronts near the Ship's Wheel address and tend to be single-concept plays by restaurant groups testing whether a location works for them. The anchor businesses are the ones whose owners bought in for the long run. If you're building a Thursday-night routine, the anchors are the safer bet. If you're curious what's new, keep an eye on that one stretch of block, because it's clearly still in play.

The One Thing That Actually Doesn't Change

While the storefronts rotate, the park itself has become the fixed point around which everything else orbits. North Charleston's roughly $20 million renovation of Park Circle brought a new playground, a community center, a baseball field, a farmers market pavilion, and community buildings, transforming what a Post and Courier editorial once called a scruffy, underused circular park into a genuine regional draw. The playground alone is marketed as the world's largest inclusive playground, and it sits right next to the pavilion where the Thursday market sets up.

That investment is why Park Circle's community calendar has stayed remarkably stable even as its restaurant row keeps trading hands. The events aren't tied to whichever business currently holds a lease on East Montague. They're tied to the park, which the city owns and isn't going anywhere.

Here's what's actually on the calendar between now and the holidays:

The Harvest Festival includes trick-or-treating, a costume contest, and a kids zone, all free. The Boos & Brews run is part of the 2026 South Carolina Brewery Running Series, which means the finish line doubles as a taproom. And the Christmas Festival wraps the green space around the traffic circle in lights and closes with a parade that starts at the pavilion and loops the park.

None of that calendar depends on whether the current tenant at 1033 East Montague is flipping burgers or smoking brisket next year. It depends on the city's continued investment in the park, which has held steady for several years running.

When The Beach Company's development manager, Tim Cotter, described the corridor while explaining why his firm was building apartments nearby, he called Montague Avenue "the heartbeat of North Charleston." He's right that developers keep betting on the block. But the heartbeat isn't any single restaurant. It's the circle itself, and the calendar the city built around it.

What This Means for Your Fall

If you live here, the practical takeaway is simple. Plan your recurring routines, the Thursday market run, the Saturday morning coffee, the dog walk past the free disc golf course, around the park and its fixed calendar rather than around any specific storefront. Treat the restaurant row as the more volatile layer on top: worth checking in on, fun to watch change, but not something to build a weekly habit around until a place has been there long enough to prove it's staying.

That's also, incidentally, the same lens worth applying if you ever find yourself evaluating a specific block here for reasons beyond a Thursday night out. A storefront's history on a listing sheet tells you less than knowing which businesses are anchors and which are one restaurant group's current experiment.

If you're weighing a move within Park Circle, or just want a second opinion on how a specific block on East Montague has actually held up over time, Marie Pohlman knows this stretch of North Charleston block by block, tenant by tenant, and is happy to talk through what she's seeing.