A fork-licking feast in the Carolina lowcountry

The south has some of the best food in the entire country. Period...

Jul 25, 2011

Hilton Head, South Carolina

The south has some of the best food in the entire country. Period. You can fight me on that if you want to, but I’ll send you to New Orleans or one of those hole-in-the wall “We ain’t got no mo’ yams baby, what else you want?” restaurants in Georgia and make a believer out of you. Soul food is named so for a reason. There is a rich tradition, sweat equity and some elbow grease folded into each morsel of food that makes each dish more robust than the average American fare. So when I read this passage from the menu at Roastfish and Cornbread, I knew I was in for a treat.

“I was born in the lowcountry. I was raised in my great-grandmother’s Gullah kitchen. The recipes were not written but the flavor was etched on my tongue like hieroglyphics on papyrus paper.”

These heartfelt words from Chef David immediately piqued my curiosity about this new restaurant that my mother had read about in a local paper that morning. This wasn’t just some new business venture from a culinary school wannabe. This man had a passion for food and, as I looked over the menu, I had a feeling that his passion was about to be translated into a party in my belly.

My first sip of the sweet tea was diabetically sweet with a tinge of lemon, assuring me that we had found ourselves an authentic southern restaurant. For the appetizers, my dad selected the alligator since I had never really had it, and I chose the conch fritters. Both dishes met a swift death as we devoured the perfect blends of lowcountry seasoning and fresh seafood. The alligator was not tough or fishy as I’ve experienced in the past, and the conch fritters had actual recognizable pieces of (wait for it) conch inside. Call me crazy but quite often restaurants add a lot of filler (bread crumbs, corn meal, and randomness) in the fritter and leave you searching for the meat.

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