Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [132]
Of special note are Diana’s coffees. The back of the breakfast menu is devoted to beverages, with more various ways to have your caffeine than at a Starbucks. Fat-free variations of café mocha and café mocchiatto are available, and we were in heaven with a double-shot red-eye, here known as a “shot in the dark.”
Duke’s
789 Chestnut St.
803–534–9418
Orangeburg, SC
LD Thurs–Sat only | $
When connoisseurs of southern food refer to Orangeburg-style barbecue, they mean Duke’s. Here is a definitive eastern South Carolina barbecue parlor, including—please note—the very limited hours of operation, Thursday through Saturday. The limited schedule hearkens back to an old-fashioned pig pickin’, which was a weekend celebration at which hogs were enjoyed from beard to tail, or “barbe à queue.”
There’s nothing at all charming about Duke’s décor, at least not in an HGTV sort of way. It is a stark place with a single purpose: to celebrate hickory-smoked pork. Hacked into chunks at a cutting board in back, it is pork with a complex flavor that is just faintly smoky. Each piece is a tender mouthful that is a joy to savor in the peace of this room, where the only music is the cadence of more pork being hacked into hunks back in the kitchen.
You get the pork from a serve-yourself buffet line that also includes rice, hash (a stewlike mixture made from pig innards), a choice of red sauce that is four-alarm hot or yellow mustard sauce that is sweet and tangy (unique to central South Carolina), and pickles. Dish out as much as you want in your partitioned plate, grab a plastic fork, and find a place at one of the long picnic tables in the cavernous eating hall.
The drink of choice is presweetened iced tea, and each table is outfitted with a few loaves of Sunbeam bread, which is just the right thing for mopping a plate of all its good sauce.
Fishnet Seafood
3832 Savannah Hwy.
843–571–2423
Johns Island, SC
LD | $
A fundamental rule for finding good things to eat while traveling is to look for restaurants located in former gas stations. We don’t know why, but they’re some of the best Roadfood stops. To wit: Fishnet Seafood. It isn’t really a restaurant at all; it is a fish market with no tables, not even provision for stand-up eating. But if you point to just about any fish in the house, the staff will bread it and fry it to order, and in this part of coastal South Carolina, frying is a fine art. Flounder is particularly wonderful, sheathed in a brittle gold crust, its sweet white meat moist and tender. If you order it as a sandwich, you get one huge, melt-in-your-mouth fillet with two token slices of white bread: finger food, for sure!
Another fine dish is Jesus crab, which is the management’s name for what other places refer to as deviled crab. When we inquired about the name, a woman behind the counter explained that the dish was simply too good to be named for the prince of darkness. Indeed, Fishnet is a very religious place, its décor featuring not only the expected panoply of nautical nets and buoys, but signs everywhere reminding guests of Jesus’s goodness and His ultimate importance. We’ve seen a lot of barbecues where religion is a fundamental aspect of the dining experience, but not so many seafood places. This is one where the original fisher of men is the star of the menu.
Gullah Cuisine
1717 Hwy. 17 N
843–881–9076
Mt. Pleasant, SC
LD | $$
“Food that speaks to ya” is the motto of Gullah Cuisine, a restaurant on a laudable mission. Its purpose is to celebrate the cuisine (and the culture) of coastal South Carolina, known as the low country.