The Columbia Food & Wine Festival starts this week. | Forrest Clonts The festivities begin this week in Columbia, South Carolina This year’s Columbia Food & Wine Festival will showcase the culinary talents of the capital city of South Carolina, including several James Beard Award finalists and semifinalists. The festival kicks off on Wednesday, April 24, with the Iconic Dishes of Columbia: Main Street Edition event and concludes on Sunday, April 28, with the Grand Tasting event. Wine bar Lula Drake (1635 Main Street) is up for a James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program and will participate in the Petals and Picnics event on Saturday, April 27. Pitmaster Robbie Robinson of City Limits Barbeque (1119 Methodist Park Road, West Columbia) is a Best Chef: Southeast finalist and will appear at Bovinoche on Saturday, April 27. Kitwanda “Kiki” Cyrus and Tyrone Cyrus of Kiki’s Chicken and Waffles (7001 Parklane Road) were semifinalists for Best Chef: Southeast — they will be at the tasting event on Sunday, April 28. The Columbia Food & Wine Festival started in 2018 to showcase the bars and restaurants of the Midlands. It began as a one-day tasting event, but now it has grown into a five-day festival full of various celebrations, including an Asian night market, food truck rodeo, and multiple collaborative dinners. Tickets are still available for many of the events this year.

Cheeni Indian Food Emporium is now closed. | Stacey Sprenz Photography The Cheeni Durham location will remain open Restaurateur Preeti Waas took to Instagram Reels yesterday to announce that Cheeni Indian Food Emporium in Raleigh (1141 Falls River Avenue) would close permanently on Monday, April 22. In the video, Waas says she “will not go into details” and “will not make excuses.” She also says, “We did more than we ever thought we could.” Cheeni opened in Raleigh in 2022 with a mission to help customers seek “independence from blandness.” The kitchen offered dishes like keema pav, oven-cooked Hariyali whole fish, and braised Bengali roast chicken — but never chicken tikka masala or butter chicken. Waas explained that there were plenty of other restaurants in the Triangle serving those dishes. Cheeni was a place to explore every region of India. Eater Carolinas named Cheeni its North Carolina Restaurant of the Year in 2022. Contributor Eric Ginsburg wrote, “Cheeni ... isn’t meant to be a classic American-adapted Indian restaurant. In a way, it isn’t a restaurant at all. And that’s what makes it so remarkable. Part all-day cafe and part community hub, Cheeni offers an alternate, more complex vision for restaurants as a third space.” Those who want to try Waas’s fare can still visit the Cheeni Durham location at 202 Corcoran Street. The second Cheeni opened at the end of 2023 with a larger dining room and kitchen space, which gives Waas and her team room to create a wider range of Indian fare. In an interview before the opening, Waas said “We’re really leaning into the regionality of Indian cuisine. It would be great for a country as large as ours, as diverse as ours, to have an appropriate amount of representation here.”