Veteran-Owned Businesses in the Myrtle Beach Area: A Local’s Guide by Category

There is a stretch of Northgate Drive in the Socastee end of Myrtle Beach where the asphalt still remembers it was an Air Force base. The runway is gone, the hangars are gone, and most of what stood there in 1993 has been replaced by shopping plazas and stoplights. But walk into the café tucked into that plaza on a Tuesday morning and the room is full of men in ball caps that say Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and the walls are covered floor to ceiling in uniforms, unit patches, folded flags and photographs that families brought in and never asked back. Somebody has even donated a chunk of the Berlin Wall. The coffee is ordinary. The room is not.

That room exists because Horry County has an unusual amount of military memory packed into it. Roughly one in ten residents here is a veteran — more than thirty thousand people in a single coastal county. Some of them came through the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base and simply stayed when it closed. Some retired from Camp Lejeune or Fort Liberty up the road and drifted south for the weather and the cost of living. A good number of them, rather than retiring quietly, went and opened something: a brewery, a glass shop, a charter boat, a pest control truck, a breakfast joint, a real estate office.

Most visitors never know it. You can eat three meals a day for a week along the Grand Strand and never learn which kitchens, taprooms and boat docks are run by people who spent a decade in uniform first. This guide fixes that. Everything below is a real, currently operating business between Pawleys Island and the North Carolina line, grouped by what you would actually be looking for — a place to eat, a place to get coffee, something to do with the kids on the water, somebody to fix the garage door at the beach house. You will not find other vacation rental companies on this list, for reasons that will become obvious by the time you reach the section on Thomas Real Estate.

One honest note before we start: we checked each of these. Where a business is widely listed as veteran-owned but the record says otherwise, we say so rather than repeat it. There is a section near the end explaining why that distinction matters more than you would think.

Why So Many Veterans Settled on the Grand Strand

The short version runs through a single piece of ground. From 1940 until 1993, the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base occupied what is now The Market Common. Fighter wings flew out of it. Thousands of airmen and their families cycled through it, and a steady fraction of them decided that a place with mild winters, cheap land and an ocean at the end of the street was worth coming back to when the twenty years were up.

When the base closed, the land did not sit idle. It became a walkable district of shops, restaurants, a lake and a park, and the aircraft that used to fly from the runway now sit on concrete pads at Warbird Park, nose up, with memorial walls behind them. Tidal Creek Brewhouse brews its beer in a building that was once part of the base. The geography did not forget, in other words. It just changed jobs.

The second half of the story is about the rest of the East Coast. The Carolinas hold one of the densest concentrations of military installations in the country, and the Grand Strand sits a few hours’ drive from most of them. For somebody separating after twenty years, this coast offers the combination that is genuinely hard to find elsewhere: a veteran-heavy community that understands the transition, a tourist economy with low barriers to starting a small business, and a Veterans Affairs clinic close enough to make it practical. The result is a service economy quietly staffed and owned by people who learned logistics, maintenance and leading crews somewhere else first.

Restaurants and Cafés Run by People Who Served

Veterans Café & Grille — Myrtle Beach

This is the room described at the top of this article, and it is the one place on the list you should visit even if you are not hungry. Army veteran Lou Mascherino opened it on Veterans Day in 2009, near the old base and within sight of the VA clinic, and it ran for fifteen years as a breakfast counter that functioned more like a day room. In 2024 a rent increase nearly closed it. The Veterans Welcome Home and Resource Center stepped in, took over operations, and turned the café into part of its reintegration program — veterans who come through the organization’s housing and services work the kitchen and the floor.

It is open to the public, not just to veterans, despite what the name suggests to first-timers. Breakfast and lunch only, mid-morning into the early afternoon, at 3544 Northgate Drive. Go hungry, allow time to read the walls, and expect to end up talking to a stranger.

Blueberry’s Grill — Barefoot Landing and Grande Dunes

Blueberry’s began as a small breakfast operation in Little River, co-founded by a restaurant operator and a U.S. veteran partner, and grew into what is now probably the most consistently praised brunch on the Grand Strand. The original opened in Grande Dunes in 2017; the Barefoot Landing location in North Myrtle Beach followed within about six months and sits directly on the Intracoastal Waterway, which means the wraparound porch gets morning light off the water and the boats go by while you eat.

The kitchen is scratch-made and leans ambitious for a breakfast house — shrimp and grits built on grit cakes, cast-iron skillets, Mediterranean bowls, Benedicts that go several steps past the standard. There is a full bar, mimosas on tap, and a wait on weekends that is real. For guests staying in Windy Hill or Crescent Beach, Barefoot Landing is a short drive up Highway 17. The team behind it has a third local concept, Blueberrys Autograph, under construction between Little River and Cherry Grove — worth checking whether it has opened by the time you visit.

Crab Catchers on the Waterfront — Little River

Listed by the area’s tourism authority among the Grand Strand’s veteran-owned dining rooms, Crab Catchers sits on Water Front Avenue in the Little River fishing village, on the deep part of the waterway where the charter fleet ties up. It is the unhurried end of the coast — shrimp boats, Spanish moss, a sunset that arrives over the marsh instead of behind a high-rise. You can get there by boat, which a surprising number of people do. Blue crab and stone crab are the specialty, the calamari has a following, and the wait on a summer evening is part of the experience rather than a flaw in it.

The Crescent Moon Grill & Saloon — Myrtle Beach

Owner Chris Lawrence is an Army veteran, and the Crescent Moon is the kind of neighborhood bar and grill that tourist guides tend to skip over and locals use twice a week. Daily happy hour in the late afternoon, domestic buckets, nothing fussy. If you want the version of Myrtle Beach that is not performing for anybody, this is closer to it than the boulevard.

Calli Baker’s Firehouse & Grill — Myrtle Beach

Calli Baker’s is a veteran-created spot on Lake Arrowhead Road built around a firehouse theme, serving baked goods, breakfast and sandwiches in a room that commits fully to the concept. It is a good stop if you are traveling with kids who need a reason to be interested in breakfast, and the baking is better than the gimmick suggests.

Coffee Roasters and Craft Breweries

If there is one category where veteran ownership clusters on this coast, it is the one that involves roasting, brewing and running a counter where people linger. That is not an accident. Both businesses reward the same instincts the service builds — process discipline, early mornings, and a room where people who do not otherwise know each other end up talking.

Be Known Coffee Company — Little River / North Myrtle Beach

Just north of the swing bridge at 4207 Sea Mountain Highway, Be Known is a veteran-owned specialty shop that roasts its own beans in house, leans toward fair trade and organic sourcing where it can, and brings in pastries from local bakers. The name is the mission statement — the owners built it to be a place to belong rather than a place to transact. Drip, pour over, cold brew, espresso, matcha and chai, with enough syrups to keep a teenager happy. For anyone renting in Cherry Grove, this is the closest genuinely good coffee to the north end, and it is a five-minute drive rather than a fifteen-minute one down the highway.

Tidal Creek Brewhouse — The Market Common

Founded by an Army veteran and run by owners Dara and Adrian Sawchuk, Tidal Creek occupies a palm-lined building at 3421 Knoles Street that was once part of the Air Force base — which gives the whole operation a pleasing symmetry. It brews on site and roasts coffee on site, so the same counter that pours a Harmonic Hefeweizen at six pours espresso at seven in the morning.

What makes it worth the drive from North Myrtle Beach is the yard. There is a fenced off-leash dog run called the K-9 Korral, a wide beer garden where regional bands play through the warm months, pickleball, and a kitchen doing shrimp and grits rather than the usual brewery pretzel. They run yoga, trivia and art classes through the week. It is the rare brewery that works equally well at eleven in the morning with a stroller and at nine at night without one. Walk over to the rest of The Market Common afterward and you have an afternoon.

Voodoo Brewing Co. — Broadway at the Beach

Operated by a Marine Corps veteran, the Myrtle Beach pub sits inside Broadway at the Beach, which makes it one of the easiest veteran-owned stops to fold into a day you were already spending downtown. Craft beer, pub food that reaches higher than the district average, and a room loud enough to feel like vacation. If your evening is already pointed at Broadway, this is where to put the first hour of it — and the rest of the night has plenty left in it.

Black Rifle Coffee Company — Myrtle Beach

The outpost at 118 Loyola Drive was the brand’s first South Carolina location. Black Rifle is veteran-founded rather than a small local business — it is a publicly traded company now, and worth being clear about that — but the coffee is strong, the shop is comfortable, and the brand’s hiring commitment to veterans and first responders is real. Treat it as a reliable caffeine stop rather than a local discovery.

Liberty Brew Coffee — Conway

Twenty minutes inland, in the riverfront town that was here long before the beach was, Liberty Brew is a veteran-owned shop with an unapologetically patriotic room and a mobile coffee truck that turns up at local events. Pair it with a morning walking the Conway Riverwalk and the historic downtown, which is a genuinely good rainy-day alternative to the coast.

Out on the Water

Southern Shores Cruises — North Myrtle Beach

Operating out of 2201 Little River Neck Road, Southern Shores runs the only catamaran tour boat working the North Myrtle Beach and Little River stretch of the Intracoastal, alongside a custom thirty-two-foot jet boat and a fleet of private charters. The two-hour island excursion heads north through the Little River fishing village past the yacht club lighthouse, usually finds dolphins, and puts you ashore for a while on a barrier island where the shelling is good and the only footprints are from that morning.

For families staying in Ocean Drive or Cherry Grove, the dock is close enough that you can do a sunset cruise and still be back for a late dinner. Book ahead in July. The sunset trips fill first, and the jet boat ride is the one teenagers actually talk about afterward.

Fitness, Wellness and Pet Care

Vacation does not have to mean a week off from looking after yourself, or from looking after whoever came along with you. Two of the newest veteran-owned businesses on the Grand Strand cover those two jobs between them, and they opened on the same day.

Zen Social Club — Myrtle Beach

The newest name on this list and, for a certain kind of traveler, the most interesting. Zen Social Club opened at 3848 South Kings Highway in the Glenmark Center as a veteran-owned recovery and wellness club built around contrast therapy — luxury sauna sessions followed by cold plunges, the heat-then-shock cycle that athletes have used for decades and that has lately escaped the locker room. The club cut its ribbon on Veterans Day, which tells you something about how deliberately the owners have framed what they are doing.

Beyond the saunas and the plunge pools, the stated mission is community: the club is built to serve veterans, first responders, doctors and nurses alongside everyone else, which gives the room a different center of gravity than a typical spa. For a vacationer, it is a genuinely good answer to the day after a long drive, a hard round of golf, or a night on Ocean Boulevard that ran later than planned. Check hours and session booking before you turn up, since contrast therapy usually runs on appointments rather than walk-ins.

Woofie’s of Myrtle Beach — mobile pet care

If you are the kind of traveler who brings the dog — and on this coast a great many people are — Woofie’s of Myrtle Beach is worth knowing about. Owned by Army veteran and longtime Myrtle Beach resident Ali Alsadiq, it is a mobile operation covering the Myrtle Beach area with grooming that comes to you, plus dog walking and pet sitting, scheduled through an app that lets you track a walk by GPS while you are at dinner. It opened with a Veterans Day ribbon-cutting at the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber. For families in a pet-friendly rental who want an afternoon at an aquarium or a restaurant that does not take dogs, a mid-week sitter solves the problem without anybody feeling guilty about it. Confirm service coverage for your address, since mobile routes vary across the Grand Strand.

Elsewhere in the everyday category, the Grand Strand’s veteran-owned directory listings run deep and strange and genuinely useful: tattoo studios, med spas, a conflict resolution and mediation practice in North Myrtle Beach, a blues musician who gigs around the county, computer repair in Myrtle Beach. The national Veteran Owned Business directory lists dozens of Horry County entries, and the local Yelp filter for veteran-owned businesses surfaces a different set again. If you are looking for something specific that is not here, those two lists are the ones worth checking.

Trades, Repairs and Property Services

This section is aimed at a narrower reader — the second-home owner, the long-term snowbird, the family that bought on the north end and now needs somebody reliable to call in February. It is also the category where military-trained owners are thickest on the ground, for the obvious reason that twenty years of maintaining aircraft, ships or vehicles transfers directly.

Seabreeze Electric and Lighting, run by Marine Corps veteran Steven Faircloth out of North Myrtle Beach, is registered as a service-disabled veteran-owned business and handles residential, commercial and industrial wiring along with lighting design. Team Veterans Pest Control works out of Carolina Commercial Drive in Myrtle Beach and covers the whole north end — relevant here because coastal South Carolina has a termite and palmetto-bug situation that catches new owners off guard every single spring. Veterans Garage Door Repair on Dick Pond Road services the full Horry, Brunswick and Georgetown county spread.

Also in the mix: CoastLine Glass in Little River for windows, doors, storefront and shower glass; Waterbridge Contractors of the Carolinas, a veteran-owned marine construction firm working docks and bulkheads since 2013; Plantation Shutter Pros, a veteran-owned, family-operated window treatment company serving Myrtle Beach through North Myrtle Beach; and Veteran Handyman Service, operating out of 6th Avenue South in North Myrtle Beach for the pressure-washing, fence-repair and odd-job end of the list. For owners of oceanfront homes, salt air makes every one of these trades a recurring expense rather than a one-time one.

Real Estate and Vacation Rentals: The Thomas Family Story

The oldest veteran-owned business on this list is also the one writing it, which is worth stating plainly rather than burying.

Thomas Real Estate began in 1962 out of a one-room office in North Myrtle Beach, started by Mildred Thomas — one of the first women in South Carolina to work in real estate, and a mother of seven who, by her son’s account, went into the business because the family needed her to. She built it into something that outlasted her. Her son Hank Thomas, a retired Marine, is the owner and broker-in-charge today, and the company is a verified member of the national Veteran Owned Business directory under his service.

Hank Thomas was born and raised here and has served for years on North Myrtle Beach City Council, which is a different kind of continuity than most tourist-town businesses can claim. The third generation is already in the building: his nephew Andy Thomas, a Citadel graduate, directs owner services out of the Cherry Grove office on Sea Mountain Highway and sits on the North Myrtle Beach Chamber board. Three generations, one family, one town, sixty-four years.

What grew out of that one-room office is Thomas Beach Vacations, the vacation rental division, managing roughly 420 homes, villas and condominiums across the four beach sections of North Myrtle Beach — Cherry Grove, Ocean Drive, Crescent Beach and Windy Hill — plus real estate sales, annual rentals, homeowner association management and the golf vacation program that started in 1989. If you have been reading this article wondering where the vacation rental companies are, that is the reason there is only one: naming competitors would be a strange thing to do in a guide published by a company that has been in the business here since the Kennedy administration.

Where to Pay Respects Along the Strand

Supporting veteran-owned businesses is one half of it. The other half costs nothing and takes an afternoon.

Warbird Park at The Market Common is the essential stop. Preserved military aircraft sit on open ground with memorial walls behind them honoring service members from the Second World War, Vietnam and the Global War on Terror. It is free, it is outdoors, and it takes twenty minutes or two hours depending on how much reading you do. Walk the surrounding district afterward and you will find historical markers explaining what each stretch of it used to be.

Closer to the rentals, the North Myrtle Beach Park and Sports Complex on Robert Edge Parkway holds a quiet Veterans Memorial inside what is otherwise a busy recreation park — playgrounds, walking trails, a dog park, and Shark Wake Park next door. It is an easy combination if you have children who need to move and an adult in the group who wants ten minutes of stillness.

Farther afield, the Horry County Museum in Conway covers regional history including local service members’ contributions, and Surfside Beach Memorial Park has a veterans tribute area and fountain a short walk from the pier. Myrtle Beach History Tours also runs a Second World War experience covering the Grand Strand’s role in coastal defense — the German submarine activity off this coast is a piece of local history most visitors have never heard. For more indoor and weather-proof options, the museum and the tour both hold up on a gray day.

What “Veteran-Owned” Actually Means

Here is the part most lists skip, and it matters if you are choosing where to spend money on the strength of a label.

There are at least three different things the phrase gets used for. The strictest is verified veteran-owned, where a directory or federal program has confirmed that a veteran holds majority ownership — Thomas Real Estate and Seabreeze Electric both carry verification of this kind, the latter as a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. Looser is veteran-founded, where a veteran started the company but it has since been sold, franchised or taken public. Loosest of all is military-honoring: a business that plays the national anthem daily, hires veterans, gives free meals on Veterans Day and donates to service organizations, but whose owners never served.

Mission BBQ is the clearest local example of the third category, and it turns up on more than one regional veteran-owned list by mistake. Its founders, Bill Kraus and Steve Newton, are a former apparel marketing executive and a former restaurant executive. Neither is a veteran. They opened the first location on the tenth anniversary of September 11th specifically to honor service members and first responders, Kraus’s two sons served in the Marine Corps, and the company’s record of supporting veterans’ organizations is substantial and real. It is a fine place to eat and a company doing genuine good. It is simply not veteran-owned, and saying so costs them nothing while keeping the label meaningful for the people it actually describes.

The practical takeaway for a visitor: if the distinction matters to you, look for a specific name and a specific branch rather than a flag in the window. Every business in the first seven sections of this guide has one.

Quick Reference Table

Ownership status reflects public business-directory records and the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber’s visitor information as of late 2026. Hours, locations and ownership can change — confirm directly before planning a trip around any single stop.

Building a Day Around These Places

If you want to do this properly rather than by accident, the geography cooperates better than you would expect. The north end — Cherry Grove, Little River, Barefoot Landing — holds Be Known Coffee, Blueberry’s, Crab Catchers and the Southern Shores dock within about fifteen minutes of each other. That is a full day without ever getting on Highway 17 south.

The second day runs south. Drive to The Market Common in the morning, walk Warbird Park while it is still cool, have lunch and a flight at Tidal Creek, then push on to Veterans Café if it is a weekday before two or to Broadway at the Beach and Voodoo if it is later. That is the whole arc of the story in one afternoon: the base that closed, the memorial that replaced it, the brewery operating out of its bones.

Around Veterans Day in November the calendar does most of the work for you. The Veterans Café celebration draws hundreds and has run out of food before closing time more than once, and ceremonies turn up at parks and memorials across Horry County through the week. If you are traveling with children, pairing a memorial stop with a park or a boat ride keeps the day moving — the same logic behind most of the kid-friendly itineraries that work along this coast.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: Veteran Owned Business national directory (Horry County and South Carolina listings); Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce / Visit Myrtle Beach veteran-owned business and military history guides; WMBF News and WPDE coverage of the Veterans Café & Grille; Thomas Real Estate, Inc. company history. Business details verified November 2026; please confirm hours and availability directly.