Most people agree that New Orleans has the best indigenous American cuisine. No argument here. Second place is more contentious, although in my mind, the low-country cooking of South Carolina is far ahead of whatever comes in third. Now, at long last, it has arrived in the City of Sinners.
Thank you, Louis Osteen.
Osteen, heretofore referred to by yours truly as “the Paul Prudhomme of Pawley’s Island,” has opened two restaurants in the new, Pentagon-sized Town Square. There’s delicious irony in the choice of locations. His food is gloriously excessive at times, just like this mall space. If the economy has slowed lately, you can’t prove it by the developers of this 900-pound gorilla. Box the compass if you get lost in here.
But even without your GPS, you’ll find both these joints by locating Buildings N or P, directly across from the Rave cineplex. Osteen’s fine-dining room, in P, is simply called Louis’s. It is surprisingly understated in terms of the décor and home to dishes like timbale of shrimp and grits with low-country gravy, good enough to risk jail time for.
Across the hall, in N, is the casual Louis’s Fish Camp, the subject of today’s review, an enormous space decorated with over a hundred crab pots suspended from the ceiling. Fish Camp also features a bourbon bar called Zelda’s, where you can sip small-batch spirits such as Platte Valley and Elijah Craig, and enough fish netting to trap a day’s catch off the Rice Islands, where America’s only true dialect, Gullah, survives.
It is this latter group of onetime slaves that inspired what is called low-country cuisine today, so we owe them a debt of gratitude. Osteen has many of the dishes that you find in that part of the country: she-crab soup, shrimp-and-okra gumbo, a delicious pulled pork in a bun and the chocolate chip cookie-like wedge called Pawley’s Island pie.
Assisting him is his executive chef, the brilliant Carlos Guia, formerly guiding light at the late, lamented Commander’s Palace. Guia, who is adept at both these native cuisines, was just too big a talent for Vegas to lose. Osteen may have made his best catch by hooking Guia. Better stop in to see for yourselves.
The menu at Fish Camp is disarmingly simple: bar snacks, appetizers, soups, salads and a few so-called House Favorites. A vegetarian friend was thrilled to sample the Low Country Vegetarian Plate, a combination of beer-braised collard greens, mac ’n’ cheese, creamed spinach, winter succotash and skillet cornbread.
I opted for New Orleans barbecue shrimp, an equally simple preparation using butter, black pepper, Worcestershire sauce and ketchup, slathered over fresh, shelled shrimp.
At first glance, the soups—all terrific—may strike you as expensive. They are $6-$8, and the bowls are rather small, probably no more than 10 ounces. But a small bowl of the coral pink she-crab soup will fill you up, and ditto for the shrimp-and-okra gumbo, the latter made with a flour-and-oil roux.
Appetizers have heft as well, such as crispy okra, deftly battered and served with a buttermilk-blue cheese ranch dipping sauce, or jumbo lump crab and lobster cakes, served with something called Plantation Slaw, a sweet side dish with lots of carrot and onions in the cabbage-and-creamy-mayo mix.
If you want larger plates, you can’t go wrong by ordering the flash-fried Carolina seafood, stocked with the fish of the day (on the day I visited, battered mahi-mahi), fried shrimp, a pile of fried oysters and flat-out the crispest, tastiest hush puppies I’ve ever had. There is, of course, low-country shrimp and grits, and also a Creole-spiced rib eye with smoked paprika butter.
I can’t resist one of these salads, peppery arugula greens tossed in cane vinegar molasses vinaigrette. The menu is also peppered with more pedestrian fare, such as onion rings, completely acceptable oysters on the shell and a workmanlike Caesar salad.
And you’d be remiss if you didn’t save room for desserts, most of which are just plain wonderful. My favorite among many might be the most mundane-sounding one, coconut cupcake with cream-cheese frosting, a delicious goop that fairly drools onto the plate.
Spencer’s (that’s chef Guia’s little son) malted-milk-ball bundt cake is as good as you’d imagine, and buttermilk panna cotta with raspberry and apricot coulis puts ones I’ve had in upscale Italian restaurants to shame.
While you’re having your bourbon, she-crab soup, barbecued shrimp or dessert, by the way, you’ll be listening to a carefully put-together soundtrack of blues, zydeco, Creole or Cajun music, selected by Osteen himself. Even if they only served water in here, I’d want to come back to hear artists like Sonny Terry, John Lee Hooker or Duane Allman doing a short course on American music, the perfect companion to this all-American cooking.
Louis’s Fish Camp
At Town Square, Building N. 463-3000.
Open daily, 11 a.m.-11 p.m.
Suggested dishes: New Orleans barbecue shrimp, $11; she-crab soup, $8; low-country shrimp and okra gumbo, $7.50; flash-fried Carolina seafood, $24; desserts, $7.