NOT long ago, I married into South Carolina, land of the old-school Southern cooks.
You know, those ladies who keep the butcher over at the Piggly Wiggly on speed dial, who cook for 50 people when it’s just you dropping by, and who are highly suspicious of Paula Deen.
The ones I know are tickled pink that Yankees just can’t get enough Southern food. Seduced by dishes like shrimp and grits at Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain or barbecue at an ever-growing number of acceptable Manhattan venues, Northerners are pilgrimaging to the food mecca of Charleston in order to taste Lowcountry staples directly at the source.
This creates a problem. With a free-spending, eager audience worshipping at the altar, chefs are inclined to go a little crazy from the attention.
For instance: At McCrady’s, one of Charleston’s finer restaurants, Chef Sean Brock’s shrimp and grits (served as a recent special) turns out to be shrimp paste formed into blocks, wrapped in a grits cake and flash-fried, then topped with dot of a butterscotch tasso reduction.
At Tristan, also in Charleston, Chef Aaron Deal’s she-crab soup comes topped with parsnip foam. Meanwhile, over at Cypress, Chef Craig Deihl’s shrimp and grits is an appetizer, with lobster sauce and lemon grits, and sells for $15. It’s this kind of inventive culinary alchemy that has put the Charleston Food & Wine festival on the map, and most of it truly is spectacular.
But it makes my mother-in-law giggle, and it’s really the kind of eating to which you should graduate after you’ve tried the classics — cooked in the same cast-iron pan, the same way, since before the War of Northern Aggression. No foams, freeze-drying, or suspicious foreign bacon allowed.
The good news is that classic cuisine is bountiful just across the bridge from Charleston. Just minutes away in suburban Mt. Pleasant, you’ll find one of the highest concentrations of unfooled-with food in the entire Lowcountry.
There’s a bonus: Drive to one of the restaurants that line Shem Creek in Mt. Pleasant, and you’ll be surrounded by real working shrimp boats, as well as some of the best water views (out toward Castle Pinckney and Fort Sumter) in the South. (While you might think you’d get a view of Charleston’s stunning harbor from one of its downtown restaurants, you won’t.)
It was here in Mt. Pleasant that I did a recent spot-check for authenticity, bringing along my husband — a South Carolina lifer — and our three-month-old baby (because you can never start ’em too early).
Our first stop was Shem Creek Bar & Grill, where my husband first introduced me to shrimp and grits 18 years ago.
The comforting thing about Shem Creek is that neither its weathered back bar, suspended over the creek on the docks, nor its stellar shrimp and grits — fresh Carolina shrimp sautéed in bacon-and-sausage brown gravy swimming over stone-ground grits — has changed.
Here, you won’t find any artfully deconstructed food. Try, for instance, the “Damn Good Crab Cakes”: handpicked crabmeat, celery, onion and pepper grilled in sweet butter and topped with she-crab sauce.
Across the street on the more touristy side of Shem Creek, you’ll find Water’s Edge, which, despite being the creek’s fanciest restaurant, hasn’t parted ways with tradition.
We went straight for the cheapest — and our favorite — item on the menu, the $6 fish stew, chunks of fish in peppery tomato broth with okra and corn. For that little bowl of bliss, we forgave the restaurant for making country-fried steak with filet mignon.
At Vickery’s, across the creek from Water’s Edge, the food is hit-or-miss, but the view is the most spectacular of all the restaurants (they know it, too: Go outside on the balcony to check out Castle Pinckney, in Charleston Harbor, through the viewfinder). Skip the restaurant’s underwhelming shrimp and grits (which is not so much shrimp and grits as it is shrimp with grits — an important distinction).
A far better choice is the restaurant’s Lowcountry Saute’ of shrimp, crab and crawfish in bourbon butter with fried oysters over grits. Also good: The oyster bisque. Is there anything better than fat bivalves swimming in heavy cream?
We found the sleeper hit of the day in a sort of treehouse, tiki-themed mini-golf park on the road out to Sullivan’s Island (made recently famous as the vacation hideaway of love gov Mark Sanford).
Buddy Roe’s Shrimp Shack is just that; there’s little on the menu but baskets of fried shrimp, but what shrimp!
Just called “Flavored Shrimp Baskets,” they’re fresh Carolina shrimp, lightly breaded and soaking up sauce. A leathery old lady smoking at the bar outside recommended we try the hot-bacon-flavored shrimp basket, which may not have been any kind of traditional Lowcountry dish, but we didn’t care, since it was tangy, studded with bacon and just short of miraculous. All around us people were gorging on the stuff as some live bluegrass struck up on the porch outside.
But if you really want a lesson in doing Lowcountry food the right way (and frankly, after eating all day, we didn’t), you’ll need to head across Mt. Pleasant to Gullah Cuisine, a little storefront restaurant right on Highway 17.
By the time we’d gotten there, we were stuffed to the gills, so we ordered a sweet tea and opted to order takeout. The tea was just as it’s supposed to be — so sweet it makes your teeth hurt. Convinced that we’d struck Lowcountry paydirt, we ordered half the menu.
Before we even pulled into our driveway back home, we were ripping into the cartons of Gullah rice — a kind of dirty rice teaming with shrimp and sausage — collard greens with giant chunks of smoky ham, and the tub of shrimp in gravy they’d packed separately from a carton of grits that must have weighed at least ten pounds.
Before committing, we’d asked the girl at the front desk if the shrimp and grits were prepared in the traditional style.
She looked at us, confused, and said, “Is there another way?”