The building at 207 South Main Street was a shoe store before it was a restaurant. Before that, it was something else. By 1997, the south end of Main Street in Greenville was the kind of block that developers had largely given up on — the anchoring businesses had moved or closed, foot traffic was thin, and the storefronts that remained were doing whatever they could to hold on. It was not an obvious location for a restaurant that would help reshape a city.
Carl Sobocinski did not grow up in Greenville. He came to South Carolina from New Hampshire to study architecture at Clemson University, intending to design buildings rather than fill them. While at Clemson, he worked his way through restaurants to pay the bills, starting as a bartender and waiter at Keowee Key Country Club. He noticed things. He noticed how hospitality worked — and how it failed to work — and filed that understanding somewhere useful. After graduating in 1993, he moved to Greenville and, with two partners, opened a downtown restaurant called The 858. That venture confirmed what the Clemson years had suggested: he was better suited to feeding people than drawing floor plans.
By 1997, Sobocinski had established himself as someone willing to bet on a downtown that most of the business community was still treating as a problem to be managed. He and David Williams identified the former Shoe Mart building on South Main and saw something in it. The south end of Main Street was underdeveloped. Some people in the community questioned the choice — why anchor there, when the commercial energy was concentrated elsewhere? Sobocinski and Williams had an answer, though not everyone found it convincing at the time: the block would catch up.
Renovation of the space revealed what years of commercial tenancy had buried. Hidden behind plaster, the original interior brick walls were intact. Above a dropped ceiling, a skylight had been covered over and forgotten. The discovery of these elements changed the feel of the project. Rather than building a restaurant interior from scratch, the team was uncovering one that had been there all along. The fireplace was restored through collaborative work that, by Sobocinski’s own account, created a shared sense of ownership among the staff before the doors ever opened. That sense of investment, he has said, made a real difference in how Soby’s operated from the beginning.
Soby’s opened in November 1997. On the day it opened, the Greenville News published a story announcing that the historic Poinsett Hotel directly across the street would undergo major renovation. The timing was coincidence, but its effect was to frame Soby’s as something more than a single restaurant — it was the leading edge of a wave that was, apparently, finally arriving. The south end of South Main Street, which Sobocinski and Williams had gambled on, was becoming exactly the place they had predicted it would become.
The restaurant’s name comes from Sobocinski’s own — a phonetic nickname that had followed him since childhood. The menu was built around what Sobocinski calls New South Cuisine: food rooted in the flavors and traditions of the Upstate and the broader South, handled with the kind of technique and sourcing attention that makes regional cooking worthy of genuine respect. The wine program was built with the same care. Over time, it became one of the defining features of the restaurant.
In the years that followed, Soby’s became a fixture on Main Street in a way that few restaurants sustain. It survived the economic contraction of 2008, the attrition that takes out most ambitious independent restaurants within their first decade, and the upheaval of the early 2020s. The dining room continued to draw the kind of mix — long-time regulars, first-time visitors, families celebrating milestones — that marks a restaurant as genuinely embedded in its city rather than merely operating within it.
In 2025, Wine Spectator awarded Soby’s its Grand Award, the highest recognition the publication gives to a restaurant wine program. It was the first restaurant in South Carolina to receive the distinction. The award recognized something that had been building for nearly three decades: a wine program built with the patience and consistency of a place that intends to stay.
Sobocinski has expanded his work in Greenville well beyond that original building. Table 301, his restaurant group, now includes multiple concepts across the city. But Soby’s remains the foundation — the first bet, the one that worked when the street it sat on was still trying to find its footing.
The Poinsett Hotel across the street is now the Westin. The south end of Main Street, once the skeptics’ exhibit A, is now one of the busier stretches of one of the more celebrated restaurant corridors in the Southeast. Falls Park sits a few blocks away. On any given evening, the sidewalk outside 207 South Main has people on it.
What Sobocinski has built since 1997 has grown considerably. But the original question he was trying to answer — whether a restaurant committed to regional food and serious hospitality could take root on a block that the market had already written off — was answered in November 1997, when he and Williams opened the doors and started cooking.
The block caught up. It turns out that was the right bet all along.