What's New Near Tuscany Myrtle Beach This Year

If you live in Tuscany and wanted a real night out that didn't involve driving toward the tourist strip, your options for years were thin. Coastal Grand Mall covered dinner and a movie. Everything with any real energy, from Broadway at the Beach to the restaurant rows on Highway 17, sat fifteen or twenty minutes away in traffic that only gets worse from spring through fall. Carolina Forest had thousands of rooftops and almost nothing built specifically for the people living in them.

That gap closed this year, and it closed close to home. Two new places opened within a few minutes of the Highway 501 and 31 intersection where Tuscany sits, and neither one was built with a tourist in mind.

The Corridor That Took Its Time

Carolina Forest has been one of the fastest-growing residential areas on the Grand Strand for years, but its commercial corridor grew slower and in a different direction. The Village Forest plaza on River Oaks Drive, where a new restaurant just opened, was built around 2008 with an exclusive agreement that only allowed Asian restaurants in one of its spaces. That space held a string of them over the years, most recently Hana Teppanyaki House. For most of that stretch, a proper night out still meant leaving the neighborhood.

Coastal Grand Mall, a short drive down Highway 501 toward Highway 17, has been the reliable default for a Cinemark movie and a chain restaurant since the mall opened in 2004. That's not nothing, but it's a mall, not a place with any particular loyalty to the people who live nearby. What Carolina Forest never had, in all that growth, was a brewery of its own.

South Coast Beer Project Broke the Streak

That changed when South Coast Beer Project opened at 5020 Carolina Forest Blvd. It's the first brewery Carolina Forest has ever had, and the people who built it were direct about who it's for. Head brewer Brock Kurtzman put it plainly when WMBF News toured the space before opening.

"We are gonna have tourists here, and we hope that all the tourists come and find us, but we are definitely geared toward the locals in Carolina Forest."

The people behind it aren't new to the area. Owners Chris Evans and Susan Heryadi run Coastal Concepts Hospitality, the group behind three Grumpy Monk locations and The Sneaky Beagle, and this was their first building constructed from the ground up rather than a renovation of someone else's space. The result is a 9,000-square-foot restaurant and a 20,000-square-foot outdoor beer garden with a 7-barrel in-house brewing operation, seating for 150 to 175 people inside and room for 250 to 300 more outside on artificial turf and pond-side patio seating.

The house beers lean into the coast rather than into anywhere else: Blondes Do It Better, a blonde ale, Board Meeting, an American brown ale, and Queen Anne's Revenge, a mocha white stout named for Blackbeard's ship. The food is Detroit-style pizza and what the menu calls sauce and char wings, along with sandwiches, salads, and appetizers made in-house. Outside, there's a dog park, bounce houses for kids, and an 18-foot movie screen for outdoor movie nights, plus a monthly outdoor game day for kids that Evans built with a friend who teaches physical education.

The detail that says the most about who this place is for is the 1,000-foot lit pathway connecting South Coast to The Sneaky Beagle next door. You can leave your dog at the dog park, walk the path around the pond, and end up at a second restaurant without ever getting in a car. That's not a layout built for a weekend visitor. It's built for someone who lives five minutes away and wants an easy Tuesday.

SeaBasil Picked This Block on Purpose

The other new arrival is SeaBasil Thai & Seafood, which soft-opened in mid-February at 4036 River Oaks Drive, in the same Village Forest plaza that once housed Hana Teppanyaki House. A grand opening celebration followed on March 27, with a ribbon cutting hosted by the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce.

The owner, Laddawan Fox, isn't a newcomer trying out the area. She's run restaurants across the Grand Strand and Charleston for years, including King Kong Sushi in Carolina Forest and at Broadway at the Beach, Thai Elephants and Thai Elephants II in Charleston, and Thai Cuisine in downtown Myrtle Beach. She's also a fisherwoman who owns a boat and works the Gulf Stream for tuna, mahi mahi, wahoo, and cobia, bottom fishes for black sea bass, snapper, and grouper, and crabs and flounder-gigs in Murrells Inlet. That's not incidental to the menu. SeaBasil blends fresh seafood, including scallops, shrimp, clams, mahi mahi, salmon, and flounder alongside filet mignon and New York strip, with traditional Thai dishes like stir-fried basil, drunken noodles, hibachi plates, larb, and papaya salad. There's a kids' menu, and the drink list carries the same personality as the food, with Thailand-themed specialty cocktails including a modified Old Fashioned made with whisky, charcoal powder, house-made ginger syrup, and a flaming orange peel garnish, plus wine, hot and cold sake, and bubble tea.

According to local coverage, Fox had watched this stretch of Carolina Forest for years before opening here, back when the area around River Oaks Drive was still mostly woods. She wanted this specific location once she saw where the neighborhood was heading. Early reviews have picked up on details that only come from a place finding its footing quickly, including one server who's already become enough of a fixture that a reviewer called him out by his nickname, Tommy Terrific, in a March writeup.

What This Actually Changes for a Tuscany Weeknight

Put the two together and the shift is clear. A year ago, a proper dinner and drinks near Tuscany meant a drive toward the tourist corridor, past Broadway at the Beach, where this same year brought a 40,000-square-foot distillery and brewery in Ole Smoky and Yee-Haw, and past Myrtle Beach Mall, where Guy Fieri's 50,000-square-foot Downtown Flavortown opened in June. Those are real additions to the Grand Strand's entertainment scene, but they're built at a scale and for a crowd that has little to do with a Tuesday night five minutes from home.

Carolina Forest got something smaller and more specific to the people who actually live here. Dinner at SeaBasil, then a walk down a lit path between two bars that already know your name, all without crossing back toward the beach traffic.

The Calendar Is Filling In Too

The dining scene isn't the only thing that's grown busier. The Carolina Forest Recreation Center on Carolina Forest Blvd has built out a steadier lineup of community events, and a few recurring ones are worth having on your radar heading into fall:

• A Carolina Forest Farmers Market runs Wednesdays at 2254 Carolina Forest Blvd
• The K-Bar Farm Farmers Market sets up Thursdays at the Claire Chapin Epps Family YMCA
• The 2nd Annual Carolina Forest Holiday Fair and The Parks of Carolina Forest Fall Market are both scheduled for November 21, giving the neighborhood two events on the same Saturday without having to leave the corridor

None of this required a trip toward the ocean. It's showing up on the same stretch of road most Tuscany residents already drive.

Carolina Forest spent a long time growing faster than its own amenities could keep up. This year, on one stretch of Carolina Forest Blvd, that finally caught up.

If you're already living in Tuscany and want to talk about what's happening in the neighborhood, or you know someone weighing a move to a Grand Strand 55+ community and could use a guide who actually walks these streets, Brendan Danna is always glad to connect.