SFA | Oral History | Bowen's Island Restaurant

“You know, [my grandparents] developed an interesting place. And I worked in restaurants from college and graduate school and then law school and never intended to get in the restaurant business. But when I came back here to practice law, they were getting old. And I mean it was just such an interesting unique place that so many people have enjoyed coming to. It’s a real treasure.”

– Robert Barber

Robert Barber has always been connected to the restaurant business. When he was born in 1949, his grandparents were already operating Bowen’s Island Restaurant. As a teenager, he worked at other restaurants to earn extra money. After obtaining a law degree, however, Robert had bigger plans: He ran for public office and served in the state legislature. Still, he would make frequent visits to his see grandparents and experience Bowen’s Island. His attachment to the place brought him back for good in the 1980s, when his grandparents began showing their age. He helped fry shrimp and greet customers. He set up a law office in a back room. When his grandmother, May Bowen, died in 1990, he felt strongly about continuing the family tradition. He moved to the island and took the helm of the family restaurant. Since then only a few details have changed. One thing that will never change is Robert’s profound connection to the place his grandparents built—the island, the restaurant, and the state of mind.

Listen to this 4-minute audio clip of Robert Barber talking about all of the characters behind Bowen’s Island Restaurant. [Go here to download the player for free.]

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NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Edited Transcript

Subject: Robert Barber
Date: January 16, 2007
Location: Mr. Barber’s home on Bowen’s Island – Charleston, SC
Interviewer: Amy Evans

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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Tuesday, January 16, 2007; and I am in Charleston, South Carolina, on Bowen’s Island with Mr. Robert Barber. Mr. Barber, would you say your name and also your birth date for the record, please, sir?

Robert Barber: Surely. I’m Robert Barber, and I was born on July 29, 1949.

Were you born on Bowen’s Island?

Well I was born in Charleston, but the first place I lived was Folly Beach. I lived on Bowen’s Island as a young child, but the first place I lived was on Folly Beach over a family’s restaurant there [called Bob’s Lunch].

Okay. That’s a good place to start because your grandparents, Jimmy and May Bowen—.

May Bowen was my dad’s [Bob Barber’s] biological mother and Jimmy Bowen was his stepfather, and so they were married when he was a fairly young child.

And were they originally from this area? Were they born here?

My grandmother was. Yeah, she was from Charleston. My grandfather, Mr. Bowen was originally from Baltimore, but they actually met in Savannah.

Do you know how they met?

As I recall, my grandfather played music. Actually, he, as a young boy was put in an orphanage in Baltimore, a place called St. Mary’s Industrial School. It was a Catholic orphanage. And he trained to be a printer while he was there, and they also gave him private music lessons, and he became a professional musician, as well. And so he was playing music in Savannah when he and my grandmother met.

So then they decided to relocate back here to Bowen’s Island?

Actually came back to Charleston. I’m not sure when they came back. But they came back, and she was also a hairdresser, and so they came back. And I think he played music a while longer, and she had a hairdressing shop. And he also was in the printing business. But they lived downtown for a while and then started a restaurant on Folly Beach, which is about two miles from Bowen’s Island. And after the War in World War II, when my father [Bob Barber] came home, he took over that restaurant then, and we lived upstairs over the restaurant. And also, during part of that time, he went to the Citadel as a veteran student and got a degree in business and went into banking.

Now in the late ‘40s my grandparents purchased Bowen’s Island. And when they bought it, it truly was an island. I mean it was surrounded by water. You’d have to come over on high tide and they—I guess one of the first things they did, certainly, before they moved here was to, you know, finish up a causeway that connected the island to the mainland. And they built a little one bedroom house, and I think there was one other two bedroom house. As a matter of fact, where we’re sitting right now—we had a two-bedroom house; we added a third bedroom onto it, and so my grandparents lived next door to us, and my grandmother and grandfather operated the restaurant and my grandfather also, from eight to five in the daytime, he went downtown and worked in a print shop.

So what made them want to get into the restaurant business? Do you have any idea?

Now that’s a very good question. And I think—I know when they came to Bowen’s Island, they didn’t intend to open a restaurant here. They had been in the restaurant business [on Folly Beach], and when they came over here, I think they, you know, kind of wanted a peaceful existence. And when they first started, they started a little fish camp, and they built the dock and, you know, sold tackle and soft drinks and stuff like that to the customers. And at that time and actually before Hurricane Gracie—Gracie was a pretty big hurricane here back in 1959—we used to have lights on the dock and people would come out, you know, with their families and would sometimes fish all night long. And I think their actually getting back into the restaurant business was maybe a bit of a surprise with them. I think they had customers who, you know, would buy snacks and would catch fish and finally, I guess, somebody asked them about cooking fish for them, and they started cooking fish before long. So I don’t think they intended to get back into the restaurant business, but they got into it fairly soon after they moved out here.

What all do you know about the restaurant on Folly Beach?

It was more like a typical little café. It was called Bob’s Lunch because my dad’s name is Bob. It was right across from where the police station is right now. And, you know, it was a typical place where you go get a breakfast or and—but, you know, a variety of food, but it certainly wasn’t anything fancy. It was a typical kind of little tiny café kind of place.

For about how long, would you say, was that restaurant on Folly Beach?

I don’t think Bob’s Lunch was there much more than about eight or ten years, I don’t believe. It’s a little place called John’s Sundries now. It’s kind of an assortment of beach kind of paraphernalia. But I don’t think the restaurant was there more than ten years.

Do you have any idea, when your grandparents bought Bowen’s Island, what kind of real estate value it had back then?

Well first of all, I think Bowen’s Island is about fourteen acres or somewhere in that neighborhood. And it sits on what is called Folly Creek, Folly Creek being the first deepwater river behind Folly Beach. Folly Beach is separated from the mainland by Folly River, and if you follow Folly Creek around, if you go—Folly Creek goes up to the Stono River. If you fork off, you swing back around into Folly Creek where we are. I think they bought that from a gentleman who was maybe—I think is still alive today, a fellow named Mike McCarthy. And Mike was in the restaurant business on Folly—owned a real well known place called the Sandbar that was there for a long time. But I believe that they paid $3,900. And I’m also thinking it probably cost them more to finish off the causeway to connect the island to the mainland than it did to buy the island. And so—but you know they were—it sounds fascinating now that everybody wants to live on the water that anybody could have bought that but it—everything is relative and things can be different. At that time they were thought to be rather peculiar people to want to go out and live on, you know, kind off to themselves when most people were beginning to get excited about the idea of living in a subdivision, you know. But they were a little bit eccentric. No doubt about that.

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So then fade into when Bowen’s Island Restaurant really started getting established, when the fish camp kind of grew to be an actual restaurant. Can you pin down what year that might have been?

You might get a more accurate figure from my dad on that, but it was the very early ‘50s. I mean it—there was food being served before then, but I can remember—I was born in ’49, and I can remember as a very small child when we served oysters out in the yard. In other words, you put two sawhorses up and a—you know, a piece of plywood over it. And back then, as opposed to getting all you could eat for a certain amount of money, they would serve them by the bushel or by the peck and, you know, you’d have a family that would come and order a bushel of oysters, and they’d all stand around and they’d eat that bushel of oysters and leave. But it was the early ‘50s when they were serving food. I think it was before then, myself.

And who was out picking the oysters for them then?

Well the first person I remember was a gentleman who lived to be over 100 years old. His name was Ben Richardson. Ben is, I think, related to both Goat and to Nell [who are the oyster pickers for Bowen’s Island today]. So they know him. One of them is a distant—I think Nell’s granddaddy or grandmother and Ben were brother and sister, and I think Goat was a nephew or cousin. But Ben was the first one I remember and, you know, Ben would come in on his boat and would come up to the restaurant because my grandmother would be over there. And we had a fellow that worked for us by the name of John Sanka, who was from Pennsylvania—came down here with the Navy and actually cooked for them a little bit on Folly Beach before they came over here. And he showed up again and ended up cooking for them for about thirty-five years until he died. But Ben would come up and look for John…And they would count the oysters out, you know, by the bushel and you would pay—pay him by the bushel and—and in days gone by you—they would just drop the oysters in the water down there and—and then John would retrieve the oysters whenever he needed them to wash them and to cook them. He didn’t have to—you didn’t put them in a cooler back then; you just dropped oysters in the water right down there by the restaurant. And but Ben picked oysters for my grandparents for a long time. And then Ben had a son who did it as well, a fellow named Arthur Richardson. We’ve had some other folks doing it but, you know, right now the two picking are Nell Walker and Goat Lafayette. And last spring we had another wonderful person named Josiah Small, who died of a heart attack. But Josiah was a very devoted seafood man, I mean crabs and shrimp and oysters, especially.

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And then with folks like Nell and Goat, all they do is pick oysters for you?

That’s all Nell does. Goat works parties sometimes for us, and we’ll do, you know, big oyster roasts for customers and things like that, and he’s very, very good at that. Nell does a good bit of crabbing, too. We don’t do too many crabs on a regular basis, unless people ask us for them. People, I don’t think around here, fully appreciate what a wonderful creature a crab is and how—I mean, I think they enjoy it, but they think about catching crabs when they’re at the beach and on vacation. They don’t realize how expensive crabs are and how much you’ve got to pay for them, you know. But Nell catches crabs, as well. And Goat used to work, you know, regularly on a shrimp boat in the summertime. But he’s a very engaging fellow. The customers like a lot and so, when we have private parties or we do benefits, Goat frequently, you know, prepares oysters for them.

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Is Bowen’s Island [Restaurant] kind of an anomaly in that you have your own oyster pickers that have always been with you, and they harvest just for you, or is that a pretty regular arrangement?

You know, for a restaurant, I think that would probably be somewhat unique. There used to be a restaurant over on the beach. I’m sure the Sandbar probably did the same thing on Folly Beach, and probably Bushy’s that used to be near Folly Beach did the same thing. But I don’t know anybody right now. A lot more people than you think just because of the presentation, you know, local restaurants serve Gulf oysters. It’s not because of the taste because our oysters truly taste better, in spite of what some of the Gulf Coast people would think. But the little singles is a nice presentation compared to our cluster, but the clusters just have an exquisite taste to them. So there are a lot of restaurants that serve the Gulf oysters, particularly if you do them, you know, on the half-shell. But I can't think of anybody else that I know of that serves their own oysters.

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So growing up here on Bowen’s Island and in the restaurant, what was that like? Do you have some memories that stand out?

Oh, yeah. I have a number—lots—lots of good memories. My grandmother [May Bowen] and I were very close. And I would come back in the summers and stay down here for, you know, three weeks…And, you know, I remember everything from, you know, Ben [Richardson] bringing in oysters, to going down to Carroll’s Seafood, which is, if you’re downtown, a building is at the corner of Market and East Bay, a place called the Noisy Oyster is there. There used to be a place called Carroll’s Seafood. And I would go down with my grandmother and, you know, you could go in and buy—they’d weigh—weigh the shrimp on the scale…And we’d go down there to buy the non-oyster stuff that we—that we would serve: the fish and the shrimp and stuff like that…And they would make a crab cake that it was the best tasting least-filled crab cake you’d ever—it had a very little crab meat in it but boy that thing tasted good. And she’d make those on Sunday morning, when nobody else was around and made it look like a little nugget. And they was very protective about them; we always called them golden nuggets because they were so protective about letting those things go. But made a good crab cake and the flounder was just as good a thing you’d ever eat in your life and wonderful—wonderful shrimp.

But she and I would play cards in the afternoon, you know, before the business started. They were open all day long, but most time business didn’t start until, you know, six o’clock or something like that. We would, you know, sit down in the dining room playing a game called Stealin’ Casino. I can't remember how you play it now, but I remember just enjoying that like crazy. But, you know, I remember they’d sell beer, and back in the early days beer was about twenty-five cents, back when Schlitz was a big beer and, you know, Pabst Blue Ribbon.

You know, another unique thing about the restaurant was that the people there were really interesting characters. My grandmother was the boss. I mean she, you know, called all the shots. And she was very conservative, financially, other than what she gave to her family. She was very generous to all the family, but she acquired a lot of property over the years and—but lived a very modest lifestyle. I mean she lived in either a trailer or a little concrete block two-bedroom house for the last, my gosh, you know, thirty-five years of her life and could have done a lot of things but just completely content to be here. My grandfather was you know very much dependent on her, but he was around the restaurant an awful lot.
And the restaurant was a very unusual and kind of a modest, you know, old block building. But we had the same cook for good Lord, thirty years. John [Sanka] used to cook for us and do just about everything else—handyman. But with a little bit of help they built that building or most of the building. My dad [Bob Barber] helped—helped with it, too. But John was into extraterrestrial life and very unusual Far Eastern religions and channeling and all this kind of stuff, you know. And my grandmother was somewhat a skeptic about all the stuff he was into but they were—you know, they were there at the restaurant eighteen hours a day together. It’s amazing they didn’t drive each other nuts. But they had assigned duties around there, and those three people pretty much kept that place going for thirty years. It’s amazing. And when you go into the restaurant, you know, my grandmother was the boss, too. You know [the saying] “the customer is always right”? Well the customer wasn’t always right in that restaurant. [Laughs] The customer was out of there, if you didn’t agree with her, you know. And there were a lot of people that, you know, kind of got their feelings hurt but they were—but people have very warm memories of the restaurant, quite honestly.
She was a hairdresser. We still had two pieces of equipment: one was a hair curler that had these strings of electric wires coming down with these clamps that would put on the curls on your hair; and there was a hair dryer, which looked like a little, you know—the head on one of those characters on Saturday Night Live or, you know, unusual equipment. But she had a real Depression [era] mentality. You know, she could always go back to fixing hair or, if things got real bad, she could always live out of the river, you know, from what she could get out there. But they lived very modestly but were very generous to us. And people have a lot of fund memories of coming to the restaurant everything from, you know, she was very—never very good at carding people and there were many, many a Charlestonian who drank their first beer there when they were fifteen or sixteen years old, you know. If you would go in and ask for a beer from her, you would about get one. That was a dangerous thing. I got elected to the School Board back in ’84, and I said, “Well Grandmother, you can't be doing this. [Laughs] You’ve got to—you’ve got to check these people out. Because I saw some kids,” and I said, “I know that I saw those at my daughter’s school,” you know, in high school.

But it was kind of a rigid operation. I’ll tell you, we had an oyster room where if you didn’t—if you weren’t buying oysters, you didn’t sit in that room. And you might have come with ten people, and nine of you wanted to eat oysters and not—the tenth person could not go in that room, unless they were paying to eat oysters. It just—that wasn’t the way we did it. And really, it really wasn’t a bad rule because it’s a real headache when you take up too many seats in the oyster area with people who are not eating oysters, you know.
But you know, so they developed an interesting place. And I worked in restaurants from college and graduate school and then law school and never intended to get in the restaurant business, but when I came back here to practice law, they were getting old. And I mean it was just such an interesting unique place that so many people have enjoyed coming to. It’s—and it’s a real—real treasure.

Can you describe who they were as people and your grandfather’s personality and kind of what he brought to the mix?

Yeah. He was a very loving fellow. I tell you, he grew up in an orphanage. His name was James Aloysious—and of course Aloysius, you spell it A-l-o-y-s-i-o-u-s is—I think one of the Popes was Pope Aloysious, but I don’t know where he got that name—if the parents were Catholic. But you know, he—he was a very generous person in spirit, and he was really concerned about all of us…And he was a great printer and was in the Marine Band in both World Wars, because he was a great trombone player. I mean he’s a real good trombone player…And even though he was our step-grandfather, I mean he was always, you know, a grandfather to us. See they’d been married a long, long time. But he was a real rounder in his younger days and, you know, heavy drinker, partier kind of thing. And I think my grandmother finally kind of had to lay down the law to him, and he kind of really settled down as he got a couple of years on him. But, you know I think she kind of gave him an ultimatum about all that. But he certainly took good care of my dad, you know, growing up. I think my dad was like six years old when Mr. Bowen and my grandmother got married. My grandfather, if you were a customer, he’d talk you to death over there. That was part of, I think, why he liked being there, so he could just talk and have somebody to listen. He loved to tell stories. And you know, my grandmother didn’t—wasn’t quite so talkative but she had a way of sort of—you know, people liked her, even though she could be pretty crusty. Let’s put it like that. And they were just quite a unique threesome, I’ll tell you.

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And so was your grandmother, then, kind of like the matriarch of the restaurant? And it sounds like she had a real presence and was really involved in everything and doing a lot of the cooking herself.

She did. I think for the longest time John did most of the cooking, and she took the orders and served the beer and took the money and that kind of thing. After John died, she did the cooking, and I took the orders and that kind of thing, so—but they both could do all of that. And my grandfather didn’t really get in the kitchen like that, but both of them did that. And it’s absolutely amazing. Until she died, we had never cooked—of course all we cooked was, you know, oysters in the oyster room, shrimp, crab cakes, fish, and hushpuppies. We didn’t do French fries; we didn’t do any grits, nothing like that. But everything that got cooked in that restaurant got cooked in a frying pan—no fryer. I mean it is amazing that—I mean it’s not as busy as it is now days but it’s still amazing that so many people could be fed out of frying pans and not a big fryer with a lot of firepower to it. It’s something else. But they cooked everything in frying pans…We had to get a fryer. [Laughs] Geez you’d go nuts trying to get everything in the frying pan, I’m telling you. I don’t know how we did it.

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And what about the Frogmore Stew; when did that become a part of Bowen’s Island?

We didn’t start that until I—you know, my grandmother died in 1990 and we made a couple—few changes on the menu—didn’t do a whole lot. We did two things: I think we added the Frogmore Stew on there, but we also put a couple of big platters on there—big shrimp platter and a big seafood platter. Because the way she used to do it, somebody would order—instead of a little plate of shrimp, they may have a double shrimp or something, so rather than saying, you know—explaining to people, “Why don’t you get a double,” we just said, “We’ll have a big plate, and we’ll have a regular plate.” But I don’t think we did any Frogmore Stew then. After she died, we—you know one of the things that we did was to—and it was word of mouth but we—we began to have large parties we would cater on premises. We didn’t do any off-premises catering, but we’d do a party for, you know, 100 people or something and so we had several items on that—that we don’t do in the restaurant. But anyway, after she died we put big seafood and a big shrimp [platters] and the Frogmore Stew and the shrimp and grits on the menu.

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Can you describe the process of cooking the oysters and how you do it here?

Yeah. We basically do something you call roasting oysters. Or you can say steaming oysters, but mostly people refer to it as roasting around here. If you put them in a pot with water in the bottom, I mean that’s more like steaming and we do that sometimes for—when we cater events. But in the restaurant we—we roast them and we’ve got a—well we had a pretty good-sized pit. We could probably put four bushels on at a time. And up until about four or five years ago, we cooked them over wood. Four or five years ago we—Jack actually custom designed a gas rack that went under the sheet of—that we cooked the sheet of metal that we cooked oysters on, and it was good because, I mean, you know, you could have—when you’re cooking with wood, it takes as much wood to cook for three people as it does to cook for a dozen people, you know, to get that fire going that good. And in the old days, when Granddaddy would cut wood or John would cut wood or I’d cut wood with a saw or something like that, and it just got too expensive and too labor intensive. And—and so we—we built this rack under there and you know, you put the oysters on there and you—of course oysters around here are grown in something called pluff mud—kind of a dark mud—and you’ve got to wash them off good. So, boy, hopefully before you put them on the fire, they’ve been washed well, and ours have been because we’ve got an apparatus where we wash them with something that looks almost like a baby fire hose or, you know, it’s not like a little garden hose. This stuff will really get the mud off of them, you know. So we put them on there and then we put wet—we call the croaker sacks—the burlap sacks—over the top and you know, it builds—that steam builds up and makes them crack open. And when they crack just a little bit, you—we shovel them on the table. We put newspapers on the tables and give people a knife and a rag and cocktail sauce and let them go at it. And you know, people like them cooked to different degrees. I like mine where I’ve got to work to get in them, and some people like them shriveled up and cracked open, so they’re easy to get to…It’s a great way to cook them…And I mean I think these oysters have an exceptional taste, anyway, but you know, if you eat a hot juicy oyster, it’s just as good as anything in the world, you know.

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And you have an all-you-can-eat scenario for the roasted oysters?

We do. And we’re real well known for that. It’s a little bit of a frustrating legacy to some extent. Again, because people expect it, and at the same time it’s certainly not the most responsible or the most conservative way to serve them because, you know, you can—some people aren’t like me. They’re not going to work to try to get most every oyster there. If one is kind of hard to get into, they just drop it in the bucket and let it pass, you know. And so you get a lot of waste that way but still, we’re real well known for that and it’s a wonderful—I mean it really is a communal kind of event.

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It seems like that oyster room—there is such a theatrical element to it, with the oyster cook being down at the far end and kind of being on stage all night.

It really is a performance of sorts…And there is more of an opportunity to perform and to develop a relationship with customers there than you normally would have, you know. Except when you’re real busy. And there’s generally an appreciation for somebody working their rear-end off and not having the time to—one or two things, you know, to stand there and talk to you or get them to you quite as quickly as you like. Because, I mean, you can sit there watching and, you know, they’re not sloughing off somewhere. I mean they’re working as hard as they can work. So but it is something like that.

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And the oyster cooker only works for tips, too, is that right?

Pretty much. Pretty much. He brings all of his gear and does his own thing and does pretty good with it, really. [Laughs] He does pretty good.

So can you describe kind of the dynamic of what the dining room is like during service? And is the oyster cooker just looking for an empty table to pile oysters on, or is there kind of a rhythm or timing to it?

Well, again, we don’t have table service, and we don’t have a greeter or somebody to handle that. You come to the counter, and it’s first come, first served. And we write your name in a notebook and take your order and give you something to drink and then you can—if you’re going—the—one rule change we made is I let a group go in the oyster room, if the majority of them are eating oysters, depending on how busy we are, you know. So if you’re going in the oyster room, you know, we generally would give you a knife and a rag and cocktail sauce and show you what table to sit at because invariably, if you don’t, a small group is going to take up a big table, and that don’t work. And so you know we get—connected with Henry [Gilliard] about—“Henry, we’ve got four oyster eaters here. I’m going to put them at this table.” So far as other foods are concerned—shrimp, fish, crab cakes, those kinds of things—short of letting you go out on the dock, because we don’t want to have to track you down, we just say, you know, “You’re going—if you’re going to go out on the deck, or are you going to be on the porch?” And find out where they’re going to be sitting so we’ll know, when Evans order comes up, then we can walk, hopefully, the right direction and say, “Evans is out here.” And again, in the meantime, if you want another beer, another tea, or another soft drink, why then you’ve got to make your own way back. So we’ve got a system. I don’t know if I’d call it a rhythm, but we’ve certainly got a system that, most of the time, works pretty well.

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We’ve only kind of mentioned the fire in passing, but the restaurant burned in October of 2006…And there are a million ways to talk about that, but how do you talk about that today?

Well, you know, one of the first things that came to my mind when it happened was that I had lost a family member. And in certain—you know, that’s not to equate, you know, the loss of bricks and boards and tin to anybody—any of your loved ones, you know, so it’s not a real analogy but—. Having been so familiar with it for so long, and it really is in that sense—it was like losing someone very close to me. And I can still walk in there, and I just—in my mind, I mean I just—the way it was before the fire is just so familiar. I mean I’ve been going there for you know, fifty—sixty—my whole life, you know. And I thought it was a—you know, to me, it was a wonderful building. And it was chopped up. It was—we had wasted space in there we didn’t utilize, but it just was so familiar and had a—to me, it had a very nice flow. And we continued to do things with that over the years, and it was a place that so many people were comfortable in going, you know. And in that sense it—it is irreplaceable. And at the same time it’s—the building itself wasn’t necessarily the—it didn’t exhaust what the place was about. You know, the place was—was all—it was more so about, you know, the characters who were there who could have been at a different time and place and just been every bit as interesting and—and enjoyable as they were here, you know. And so it’s—[Emotional]—you know, it will never be duplicated but I believe that, hmm—I believe it will be a place there that, you know, people continue to enjoy coming to.

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We were talking about the timing of the rebuilding and all of that and everybody pitching in. Did you have any other thoughts on that topic?

Well there—as we, I think, touched on earlier—there are a lot of people who have expressed a lot of concern and a lot of sadness and a lot of good—goodwill about the restaurant and who—who are willing to help. And certainly, you know, all the folks who have been involved in it are—have been most helpful. You know, we’ve still got—we’ve got a ton of stuff to do, but sort of the immediate goal right now is to be able to begin serving oysters and shrimp again, and we’re getting pretty close to that. And at the same time we’ve had, you know—I’ve had four different meetings about the—about the restaurant. And we’re a long way from making final decisions about that but, you know, the intention is to—you know, is to rebuild and it’s—it’s more complicated than you would think, you know, being on what they call a V-Zone and a Hurricane Zone and in terms of decisions about what we can rebuild or what kind of—you know, do you—do you—are you being overly sentimental to try to build something just like you had or do you need—? And so, you know, I try to put my—put myself a little bit in my grandparents’ place because I do feel like I’m carrying on, you know, a family tradition here and—and this is, you know, nothing more than a trust to me to keep it operating. You know, you don’t want to be too sentimental about it and want to have something—but you want to have something people, you know, are comfortable, who have enjoyed the place for years who feel—they will feel comfortable in the new place, too. And at the same time, you don’t want to, you know, rebuild a place that twenty years from now you could kick yourself for not having [done] some things differently, given the opportunity you have at this point to do that. But, you know, all the people you saw down at the restaurant, they are, you know—really do have a personal attachment to the restaurant. And many of them go back to, you know, the days of when my grandmother was alive and known here, and some of them have known me since I was, you know, real small and—and I mean so it’s been a big, you know—a big load for everybody. But, you know, nobody—nobody is staying up at night wringing their hands about it. Things are moving along.

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I must mention, too, the James Beard Award that you received as an American Classic and how that was just a handful of months prior to the building burning. And I want for you to explain your experience in New York and wearing the white boots and all that, and then what that has meant to you in addition to what’s been happening an what that award has meant in general.

Well it was, you know, it was kind of country come to town, you know, what I mean? …And I, you know, I felt like that it was—it truly was something that was here because of my grandparents and John [Sanka] that used to cook for us and Ben Richardson and, you know, so many people. And so I felt, you know—it reminded me that, you know, I was carrying on really—a really neat remarkable tradition and that’s what I—I don’t ever forget that. But and—and I appreciated, you know, a great organization like James Beard—the James Beard Foundation recognizing places that contribute in those kinds of peculiar ways, in addition to recognizing people who, you know, truly are masterful in terms of cooking food. And if we’re masterful at cooking food, it’s on a very limited primitive basis. It doesn’t mean there’s anything inferior about it; it just means that it’s different. But that was really—really a heartwarming thing to be able to be there for that. And as I mentioned, I had—had a—had thought about that, you know, wearing my shrimping boots for the reception of the award and almost didn’t, just because I didn’t know that it might come across as very, very hokey, but I did feel like it represented so many people, and at least from my neck of the woods, who contribute, you know, so dramatically to local culture and cuisine and everything else. And so—and as I mentioned that night, the clincher for me was, you know, oyster picker Josiah Smalls—when Joe died, about two weeks before then, I said, “Well, what the heck. I might look stupid, but at least we’ll recognize these good guys,” you know. And so it was well received…But you know I was getting a little poetic that night. I read something recently about it and it really, to me, it was so appropriate for that particular award and something to the effect that, “We were warmed by fires we did not build, and we’ll drink from wells we did not dig.” And I thought it was a great one for that because, certainly, it fit me down here. But I was touched by that, and I won't forget that.

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But we also haven’t mentioned your run for the Lieutenant Governor, if you want to speak to that a little bit. Because that, too, was going on during this whole cyclone of other events and milestones in your life.

Right. Well, I had just concluded the race for Lieutenant Governor here in what—November 7th, I think. And, unfortunately for the people of South Carolina, I lost by 3,100 votes. [Laughs] But had a—a most interesting fifteen months in doing that. And you never know how things work out and, you know, you’ve got to believe that there’s always, you know—if one door doesn’t open, another one is going to open somewhere else and—not that there’s some preordained thing out there that it was supposed to work out that way, but there will be a lot of opportunities. And, you know, I worked real hard at it and came awfully close but—. It was a rather tumultuous the last couple weeks; the fire happened about two weeks before the election so…It took a little extra effort to kind of get refocused and try to get the election over—you know, the last two weeks of the election. I think everybody at the restaurant that works for me was relieved I had lost, but they were all behind me. But they wanted me to come back and get some work done.

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So does the word future come into your vocabulary at all right now, or are you just kind of going day-to-day? Do you have an idea of what the future holds for Bowen’s Island and the restaurant?

Yeah. In general, yeah. I mean we’re going to be—the big thing is we’re going to be—be back in business again. And in terms of the particulars, I think we’ll continue to be pretty simple, pretty bare-bones, not try to sort of change the character of things too much. And I think the food is going to be probably the same, other than a couple of additions that maybe we need to do. And I mean, I’d like to start serving, you know, something like an oyster po-boy sandwich or a shrimp po-boy sandwich. Well I mean it’s pretty simple…One thing that, you know, we’ve always been cash or check. I mean I’ve got a feeling we’re going to have to get a credit card—so for the first time we’re going to have one of those cash registers, where you punch the thing in and it sends a message out for the cook what the order is over there, you know…That’s a change; that’s a big change for us, doing that. And what else? We’re going to set us up a website…But in terms of the types of food and the feel, I don’t think things are going to change.

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I wonder about a long view into the future and, for example, if someone is in line to take the reins from you when you retire or the next generation of Bowen’s Island.

Well we hadn’t—we haven’t made any plans, you know, about that, and I feel sure we will. I got, you know, two—two kids and got two grandkids and almost a third grandkid here and grandchildren, and we’ll work out something…I don’t know. You know, somebody else could get a feel for it, but I think it’s kind of a personal place. And it’s a funny thing. It, you know, I still think of the attraction of the restaurant being the food but also the personalities of my grandparents and John [Sanka] and what unique characters they were….And to some extent, on a much lower level, you know, I’ve become somewhat identified with the restaurant, too, you know. So many of those things—it does grow, and you do mature and there are probably, you know, twenty-year-olds—there are thirty-year-olds who were not around when my grandparents were here, and the only exposure they’ve had to Bowen’s Island has been me. And so that’s part of that tradition in building that tradition, too, and it is something that ultimately, I will make a contribution to as well, you know. Not to say other people couldn’t, but I just don’t see selling the restaurant. It just ain’t going to happen.

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