Eleven years ago, Max and Lauren Schlueter were in suburban Rochester, N.Y., where they grew up, met and married. But they were ready to move on beyond their career tracks and beyond Rochester. They chose Columbia, and they started what is now Carolina Cafe and Catering on the ground floor of the Cornell Arms.
The Schlueters were both born in Rochester where Max’s father was a fireman and Lauren’s father worked for Eastman Kodak. Max’s family had a second home on Sodus Bay, part of Lake Ontario. Lauren’s second home was on Honeoye Lake, one of the finger lakes, the wine country of New York State.
Two years apart, the Schlueters went to Alfred Tech, part of the State University of New York higher education system, and both finished with two- year associate degrees – his in accounting and hers in medical laboratory technology. Max entered the construction business as an accountant for a mechanical contractor about the same time he married Lauren.
They immediately began a family with first daughter Brooke, now a divisional manager for Heartland Payment Systems in Columbia, and with second daughter Jessica, who graduates from Clemson this May.
Max advanced early in his career in mechanical contracting, and he moved his family to Burlington, Vt., when he became the company’s general manager. After about five years, the Schlueters moved to Webster, N.Y., and after a few more years, to Hanover, N.H., to work on the new Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.
Becoming more specialized in the hospital construction field, Max moved the family to Waynesboro, Va., near Charlottesville, to build the Augusta Medical Center. From Virginia, there was one last move in the mechanical contracting business, this time back to Rochester. But it just didn’t work out to everyone’s expectations, so the decision was made to open a bagel business in the greater Columbia area.
The Schlueters started on 378 in Lexington County, next to the Bi- Lo and Wild Birds Unlimited. There they began as a bagel bakery with both retail take- out and wholesale delivery. The wholesale side listed major hospitals, USC, Rising High, and the Marriott as regular customers.
Soon after the emphasis was put on retail, the Carolina Bagel Company opened a cafe at the corner of Sumter and Hampton and stayed for three years. Their Cornell Arms location opened about the same time.
In early 2004, the name was changed to Carolina Cafe and Catering to reflect the growing take- out catering side of the business.
The street- corner location at Pendleton and Sumter was enhanced recently with the relocation of Tio’s Mexican Restaurant next door. Across Sumter Street is the Horseshoe, home of about 30,000 students, faculty, staff, and visitors, all cafe customer prospects.
The signature dish is the chicken salad, and the Schlueters need at least 120 pounds of chicken breasts a week to meet the demand. The fresh- cut fruit salad is popular, but the price of a case of grapes for the Schlueters has shot up over the past two years from $15 to $50. Tomatoes in the same time frame, roughly, have tripled in cost.
Being part of an apartment building housing mostly students, the Carolina Cafe and Catering Company on Saturday and Sunday mornings hears a lot of orders for the “hangover special,” as the residents have come to call it. It’s a pile of sausage, bacon, egg, and cheese on a toasted sliced bagel, and usually there are two ordered together with two cups of coffee.
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