Conway's September Is Running on Two Different Clocks, and Only One of Them Has a Fixed Date

Drive down Church Street this week and you'll pass two kinds of change happening at once. One has a date circled on a calendar that's been printed since spring. The other is still waiting on a contractor's punch list, which means nobody, including the owner, can tell you exactly when it starts. Understanding the difference between those two clocks is the actual story of Conway's food scene this month, and it explains why the same three weeks can feel both perfectly predictable and genuinely uncertain if you're trying to plan around it.

The clock that never moves: Burger Week

Conway Burger Week runs September 11 through 20 this year, and it's been running long enough now to have its own history. This is the fifth time downtown restaurants have signed up to build a specialty burger for the week, and the format hasn't changed much since it started: no registration required, just pick a spot, scan the QR code for the menu, eat, and vote for your favorite at conwayalive.com.

What has changed is who's been winning. Bonfire Taqueria, the restaurant on the Waccamaw River, took the inaugural title with a surf and turf burger. Rivertown Bistro took home the Best Burger prize the year after that. The event has also kept adding wrinkles to keep the field interesting. Last year introduced the Patty Whisperer award, a category voted on by the participating chefs themselves rather than the public, and it's back again this year, a peer-judged prize that rewards creativity within the trade rather than just crowd appeal.

The full list of participating restaurants and their burgers goes up on conwayalive.com on September 4, a week before the event starts. That's the fixed part. Conway Downtown Alive has run this event enough times to know exactly when to post the menu, exactly when the week opens, exactly when it closes. If you live here, you already know Burger Week isn't a discovery, it's a tradition with a start date you can put on the fridge calendar in July.

The clock that hasn't been set yet: Presswell's

A few minutes away, on the 16th Avenue side of the Coastal Centre redevelopment, a different kind of countdown is running. Presswell's Sandwich Co., a newspaper-themed sandwich shop at 1206 C Cottage Lane, has been telling local reporters for months that it's targeting a mid-to-late September opening. That's the same window as Burger Week. Nobody involved, including owner Warren de Villiers, has committed to an exact date, because the construction timeline that determines when a restaurant opens doesn't run on the same schedule as an annual street festival.

What makes Presswell's worth watching isn't just the timing coincidence. It's the concept itself, which is doing something genuinely different from what's opened in Conway recently. De Villiers spent 22 years in the restaurant industry before building a space designed to look and feel like an early 20th century print shop: exposed brick, dark wood tables, leather banquettes, industrial lighting, and a deliberate absence of the digital menu boards and televisions that have become standard everywhere else. The menu leans into the bit. Sandwiches are split between "Headliners," the panini-forward showpieces like The Front Page (grilled chicken, mozzarella, basil, sun-dried tomato pesto) and The Exclusive (turkey, Swiss, Granny Smith apple, fig spread), and "Classifieds," the more familiar ham-and-cheese, roast beef, and grilled cheese standbys. All the bread gets baked in house.

"Conway is exploding at the moment, so there is a bunch of traffic out this way," de Villiers told a local reporter. "I also think Conway is starving for some good food."

The restaurant seats 39 people in 1,750 square feet, small enough that it won't disappear into the mall around it the way a national chain storefront can. Whether it opens before Burger Week wraps up on the 20th or lands after the vote is already counted is genuinely unknown right now. That's not a knock on the project. It's just what happens when a fixed community tradition and a construction-dependent restaurant opening happen to land in the same calendar month.

Why this is bigger than two businesses

Presswell's isn't opening in isolation. It's one piece of a redevelopment that's been reshaping the retail corridor along Church Street (U.S. 501) for the better part of two years. The Coastal Centre, built on what used to be a Kmart and its garden center, already has HomeGoods, Marshalls, Five Below, PetSmart, Burlington, and Ulta Beauty open and running. A Chipotle is under construction in front of Belk. J Peters Grill & Bar, a casual sit-down concept from an owner who already runs a location in Carolina Forest, is aiming for an opening by the end of 2026. A Walmart Neighborhood Market has been in the planning stages, along with a Parker's Kitchen, Wingstop, Nothing Bundt Cakes, and a Chase Bank branch.

That's the pattern worth noticing: Conway's growth this year is arriving in two different flavors at the same time. One is homegrown and independent, the kind of business where the owner is on-site pouring 22 years of experience into the details of a sandwich menu. The other is a national footprint filling in around it, retailers and chains that follow rooftops rather than create a neighborhood identity of their own. Presswell's sits right at the seam between those two tracks, an independent concept choosing to open inside a corridor otherwise dominated by recognizable national names.

The same split shows up elsewhere in town. Liberty Brew Coffee, a veteran-owned shop that started as a cafe honoring service members, announced plans to open a second location at 1801 Main Street with a drive-thru and outdoor seating, aiming for a summer 2026 debut and framed by its owner as a way to reach a part of Conway the original location doesn't touch. Meanwhile a Slim Chickens and a Firehouse Subs are both under construction along U.S. 501 near Conway High School, two more national names filling gaps in the same corridor. Conway isn't choosing between homegrown and franchise growth. It's getting both, running in parallel, on their own separate timelines.

What comes right behind it

Burger Week ends September 20, and the calendar doesn't leave much of a gap before the next thing starts. Conway's "City of Halloween" celebration, now in its fourth year as an official city designation, runs through October, with related programming stretching into the first days of November. The full agenda dropped in early September and includes the Conway Ghost Walk on October 14 through 16, a nighttime storytelling walk beneath the oaks of the Historic Conwayborough Residential District, and Witches Wizards & Wine, held twice this year on October 8 and October 22. Downtown Alive is also running its Midnight Market, a Thursday-through-Sunday vendor market along the Riverwalk from October 1 through November 1, and a separate ghost-story river cruise runs Wednesday through Sunday all October long.

Stack it up and the back half of 2026 in Conway reads less like a scattered list of things happening and more like a sequence: a fixed food tradition with a five-year track record, a wave of restaurant openings whose timing depends on construction crews rather than a printed schedule, and then a month-long Halloween program that's become its own institution in just four years. The predictable and the unpredictable are running side by side, and the only way to actually plan around either one is to know which is which.

If you're the kind of Conway resident who already has Burger Week penciled in every September, the useful thing to watch this year is whether Presswell's manages to open its doors before the 20th. If it does, it becomes the first genuinely new independent restaurant to exist during a Burger Week it might not even be old enough to participate in. If it doesn't, it just becomes the next thing on the list, one more entry in a Coastal Centre corridor that's been adding names to the map every few weeks since the redevelopment started.

Either way, the town keeps its rhythm. One clock keeps ticking on schedule. The other one gets set the moment the doors actually open.

If you're watching Conway change from the outside, whether you already call it home or you're weighing what a move here would actually feel like day to day, William Bill Moody has spent years tracking these shifts up and down the Grand Strand. Let's Connect if you want a local read on what a neighborhood like this actually offers beyond the listing photos.