Restaurants in Columbia, SC

Columbia, home to 144,788 people, has 921 places listed in this guide, including 667 restaurants, 85 quick service spots, 71 cafes and 95 bars. Bars top the category list at 96, with Coffee shops and cafes and Sandwiches and delis both at 74 in the listings.

Columbia's listings come to 63.6 places per 10,000 residents, a figure above the 41.8 median for all cities in this guide. Those numbers describe this guide's listings rather than a census of the city's businesses.

570 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Starbucks (20), Subway (20), Chick-fil-A (9) and McDonald's (8).

In the Servestack Independent Restaurant Index, Columbia ranks #195 of 332 large US cities for the share of places that are independent.

Food in Columbia by cuisine

Own a restaurant in Columbia?

801 of the 921 places here (87%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in Columbia and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.