New Restaurant Aims for New Dining Experience Downtown
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The first thing Casey Metz and Shane White want people to notice about Millies on Main is not a single dish, though the menu has plenty worth noticing. It is the room itself: dark, deliberate, a little more Charleston than Anderson, with a Southern polish and a western undertow, the sort of place that seems designed to make dinner feel like an occasion without insisting on ceremony.
Metz, who is from Seneca, is the operating partner and the person left to shape the front of the house and the atmosphere. Shane White, the other partner and chef, grew up in Six Mile and came to the project with the sort of résumé that tends to accumulate in kitchens where one learns everything at once: line work, banquet cooking, country-club precision, the choreography of a crowded service.
Together, Metz and White have turned a storied space downtown - home to “The Red Hot Racket Store” at the turn of the last century, a postal office in the 1940s, a furniture store from the 1950s-2001, Matty’s Downtown Restaurant in the early 2000s and later a cigar-bar - into something they hope will feel both familiar and slightly aspirational, a place where a guest can come for a serious meal and stay for the feeling that the night has opened a little wider than expected.
The idea, according to Metz, came through a chain of local familiarity and fortunate timing. They knew the building’s owner, had worked with people tied to the space before, and saw in it a chance to build something that matched White’s vision. White said he did not arrive in Anderson with an elaborate civic romance; at first, he said, he did not even especially care for the city. But downtown, as he got to know it, began to change his mind. The parks, the new energy, the steady redevelopment — all of it made him revise his first impressions.
What they are building is not another predictable downtown menu. White said he wanted to avoid the standard procession of burgers, sandwiches and reheated certainty. Instead, the kitchen is leaning toward what he called an upscale Southern “country club to the public” kind of experience: shrimp and grits, country steak, halibut, lobster, and dishes that carry a familiar accent but a more exacting tone. The menu, he said, will be broad within that frame, with lunch and dinner versions that are not merely scaled copies of each other.
Price is part of the conversation, too. White was blunt that diners should not expect bargain-basement cooking, and he seemed almost offended by the idea that quality ought to apologize for itself. At the same time, he and Metz were careful to stress accessibility, arguing that the restaurant aims to meet people at several different price points without drifting into the bland middle. The goal, as they describe it, is not cheapness but value — a good steak, a proper seafood plate, a meal made from stocks and sauces that begin in-house rather than in a freezer case.
White’s menu reflects both habit and improvisation. He spoke with particular affection for short ribs, a dish he said he would “hang my hat on,” and for a set of signature items meant to give the restaurant an identity of its own: a Carolina Twinkie, crackling cornbread, pimento cheese hush puppies, and a sweet-tea crème brûlée that started as one of his daughter’s ideas. Desserts, he said, would mostly be made in-house, with the exception of a chocolate cake he liked too much to improve on.
The restaurant’s ambitions stretch beyond the plate. Metz said Millies on Main will eventually host live music, comedy, bingo and trivia — a restaurant, yes, but also a small event space. White sounded cautiously sympathetic to that idea, and he was clear that the dining room must come first. He knows the traps of turning a restaurant into a venue before it has learned how to turn tables, and he is determined not to let entertainment interrupt the mechanics of service.
That balance — between hospitality and performance, between seriousness and ease — seems to animate the whole project. White said he wants the staff cared for, the work environment humane, the pace sustainable. Metz, who worked for years in events, said the restaurant business is not a normal nine-to-five but a long-running test of endurance.
Both men spoke in the language of people who understand that a restaurant is only partly about food. The rest is rhythm, morale, and the invisible promise that guests will feel noticed when they walk in.
There is also history in the walls, though not yet the complete kind. The building has gone through multiple lives and the basement still seems to be yielding clues. White said he wants to learn more about the structure’s past, particularly because downtown Anderson is in the middle of a larger anniversary year and a civic reappraisal of its own.
For now, the mystery is part of the charm: old beams, hidden spaces, a downtown that keeps remaking itself while still carrying traces of what it used to be.
Millies on Main is scheduled to open June 26 for dinner only first two weeks. While working on the liquor license, patrons can bring in beer and wine for a $5 table fee. The goal, again, is not just to provide Anderson not just another place to eat downtown, but a room that wants to be read as an argument for what the downtown can still become.
