Recently I spent some time on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. And when I got there, I found that there wasn’t a great deal of information about what to do, where to go, what to see, places to eat and so forth. Most of the sites that purport to do that sort of thing are obviously rinky-dink search engine sucks trying to draw you in and maybe get your clicks without really giving a great deal of information.
So we kept notes. And if you ever find yourself at Hilton Head…well, we hope this can be of use.
[ad#rightpost]The British Open Pub in Wexford. Actually really excellent pub food. Now I’ve never eaten in a pub in the UK, so I don’t know what beyond the usual fish and chips and shepherd’s pie and whatnot that would be considered your standard pub food. I will say that the mini-beef wellingtons that they had as an appetizer plate were excellent and turned me onto beef wellingtons where I hadn’t tried them before. Also, the lobster pot pie (with fresh lobster) was ridiculously good. But molten. When you dug into it, it was like that model volcano you made in elementary school. But excellent. The standards mentioned above were also worthy. We ate there twice, if that tells you anything.
Sunrise Cafe. Inside and outdoor seating, friendly wait staff, really good brunch food. I am a fiend for eggs benedict, so we tried both the ham and crab cake eggs benedict variations–both were good. Also sampled: hash browns, grits, biscuits and gravy, and an interesting breakfast dish called strata which apparently everyone’s heard of but me. Ate there twice for breakfast.
Signe Bakery. Apparently they’ve won awards and such, so maybe we got them on an off-day, but we tried their lemon/dark chocolate “Thunder and Lightning” pound cake as well as the Cappuccino Chip pound cake and they were both sort of dry and uninteresting. Same with the cookie. Bit of a let down.
Flamingo Bakery and Cafe. An odd combo, they’re mostly a Mediterranean restaurant but they also make custom donuts. Kick-ass custom donuts. Pick a glaze, pick a topping. Mine was chocolate with chocolate chips plus another with a honey glaze with cinnamon sugar. We didn’t go back to try out the restaurant portion, but if it’s half as good as the donuts–rock on.
Old Oyster Factory. The uber-tourist seafood restaurant. Good view, food was decent. Tried a fried food platter as well as some of their specials. Huge portions. Packed to the gills (no pun intended) with tourists. Only full-on letdown was the calamari appetizer.