RESTAURANT NEWS | SOUTH CAROLINA

Melrose Market Turns an Italian Childhood Into Dinner

MELROSE MARKET | MAP | INSTAGRAM

By Maria Rodriguez
6:32 a.m. ET, Aug. 16, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.

Josh Rogerson learned to eat in Italy. Cooking came later.

His parents were missionaries, and the family moved among Perugia, Bologna, and Trieste, three cities where a child could receive a fairly serious education simply by paying attention at lunch. Rogerson did.

“Obviously, being in Italy, I fell in love with eating, which quickly translated into falling in love with cooking,” Rogerson told Columbia television station WIS.

Those early lessons now show up at Melrose Market, an all-day restaurant, bar, and retail shop in Columbia’s historic Melrose Heights neighborhood. Rogerson, the former executive chef at Saluda’s and co-founder of Parabellum Mobile Eats, runs the kitchen with his longtime collaborator, sous chef Alex Runyan.

Rogerson

Owner Chad Elsey had been turning over the idea of a European-style café and wine bar for several years. It was the sort of location that did not need another restaurant built entirely around Saturday night.

Melrose Market is designed to be useful throughout the day: lunch, coffee, a martini, dinner, or a bottle of wine on the way home. The black-and-white tile and bentwood chairs recall a European café, while the menu wanders more freely.

There is chicken piccata and a Maine lobster-and-avocado salad. A thin flatbread arrives topped with housemade sausage and roasted potatoes. The sweet-and-savory sandwich piles crisp pancetta, whipped goat cheese, and fig jam onto grilled sourdough.

The kitchen butchers whole rib loins, slow-roasts them, and shaves the meat to order for the French dip. It also grinds its own burger blend and makes chicken tenders without gluten, welcome news for the person at the table accustomed to watching everyone else eat the fried food.

Behind the bar, Eboni Page mixes cocktails with fresh juices. General manager Kaitlin Broome McCrackin built the wine list around small family producers, and the adjoining market stocks bottles alongside local honey, benne wafers, and other provisions.

Rogerson is not attempting to rebuild the Italy of his childhood along Gervais Street. He has taken something more useful from it: the idea that good food belongs in the middle of ordinary life. At Melrose Market, memories of Bologna and Trieste arrive quietly, sometimes tucked inside a sandwich.