What do you actually get when a James Beard Award winner takes over the seafood house you've been ordering the same basket at since you were in middle school?
If you live on Sullivan's Island, you already know the building at 2019 Middle Street. You've sat in that room for a graduation dinner, a rainy Tuesday lunch, a bar seat after a bad beach day. Back in the spring of 2025, ownership changed hands again, and Jason Stanhope, a James Beard Award winner who spent years running the kitchen at FIG before becoming executive chef at Lowland inside downtown's Pinch Hotel, stepped in as chef and part owner. The obvious assumption is that a chef with that resume walks into a beach shack and turns it into something else. He didn't. That restraint, more than anything on the new menu, is the actual story.
A Restaurant That Won't Stay Closed
The building has worn exactly two names in almost four decades, and the gap between them tells you something about how this island treats its institutions.
| Era | What Happened |
|---|---|
| 1988 | Sammy and Donna Rhodes Hiott open Sullivan's Seafood Restaurant, days before Hurricane Hugo nearly takes the building down |
| 1988–2020 | The Hiotts rebuild and run it as a family restaurant for 32 years |
| September 6, 2020 | The Hiotts close the doors and retire |
| May 17, 2022 | Ben and Kate Towill of Charleston hospitality group Basic Projects reopen the space as Sullivan's Fish Camp after a two year renovation |
| Spring 2025 | The Towills sell their stake to Graves and to Jason Stanhope, who becomes chef and co-owner alongside Wes and Betsy Fuller |
Every one of those transitions could have been an ending. A retirement, a two year gap, a change of hands to new owners twice over. Instead the address kept working, and each new operator chose to build on what was already there rather than start over. The Towills' 2022 renovation kept the original wood bar, the vintage photos, the walk-up check-in window with its soft serve machine. Stanhope's arrival kept the building's bones again, along with two menu items that trace straight back to 1988: the Sully's basket and the hush puppies.
What the Chef Actually Changed
Stanhope didn't rewrite the restaurant. He rewired its supply chain and added a few dishes that reflect where he's cooked before.
He reconnected with purveyors he'd relied on at FIG and Lowland, including Abundant Seafood, Kindlewood Farms, Tarvin Seafood, and Lowcountry Shellfish. That sourcing shows up in specific plates: a clam and fish chowder that a February 2026 Post and Courier review called just-right creamy, a lobster roll the same review described as the best in Charleston, and a catch of the day served with celery root puree and arugula pesto, plated in a way that wouldn't be out of place at FIG's own tasting menu.
What's telling is the price spread across that menu. The chowder runs $16. The lobster roll is $34. The catch of the day is $39. A crispy fish sandwich is $24, and the Lowcountry boil is $34. That's not the pricing of a fine dining relaunch dressed up in a beach shack. It's a chef choosing to let a $16 bowl of soup sit on the same short menu as a $39 plated course, which is a specific, deliberate call. The intent seems to be a casual, everyday seafood spot rather than a downtown tasting menu wearing a beach town address, and the pricing backs that up. A family walking up from the beach and a couple celebrating an anniversary can order from the same handful of pages.
The kitchen has also started bringing in outside talent for one-off nights. That June, not long after he took over, Stanhope teamed up with visiting chef Sophina Uong for a Lowcountry Khmer Boil, folding a traditional low country seafood boil together with Cambodian flavors. Condé Nast Traveler's Charleston coverage and Eater's Carolinas guide have both kept the restaurant on their Charleston lists through this transition, which is its own small proof that the change in ownership didn't cost the place its reputation outside the island.
The Pattern Underneath It
Step back from the menu and the same instinct shows up somewhere you wouldn't expect: at Battery Gadsden.
The cultural center occupies part of an artillery battery built between 1903 and 1906, one of a string of coastal fortifications along the island's shoreline. A nonprofit took over part of the structure in 2014 and has run it as a museum, art gallery, and event space ever since, hosting a free monthly speaker series and an annual members' dinner on the grounds. This year, the town's council asked Battery Gadsden to serve as its liaison to SC250 Charleston, the regional effort to plan eight years of programming around the country's 250th anniversary. The organization isn't building a new venue or a new identity for that work. It's using the same battery it's occupied for over a decade to host a commemoration that starts with Carolina Day and July 4, 2026 and is planned to run for eight years.
That's the thread connecting a seafood restaurant and a Revolutionary War battery: on Sullivan's Island, new chapters tend to get layered onto existing structures instead of replacing them. The building stays. The organization or the ownership around it changes hands, sometimes more than once, and each new steward adds something without erasing what was there before. It's a small island with a short list of commercial addresses, and the ones that matter don't get demolished when circumstances change. They get handed to whoever's willing to keep them running.
Your Fall Rotation, If You Need a Refresher
None of this means Middle Street is standing still elsewhere. The Longboard, which started as a St. John, USVI concept before opening its Sullivan's Island location, is still doing weekend brunch and its Oyster Hour happy hour. The Obstinate Daughter is still running its wood fired oven and seasonally rotating menu built around Lowcountry farms and fishermen. Poe's Tavern is still Poe's Tavern. None of them needed Stanhope's arrival to justify a visit, and none of them are going anywhere because of it.
A few practical notes if you haven't been back to the Fish Camp since the change:
- Weekend dinner service gets busy even outside peak summer months, so a reservation is worth making rather than assuming a walk-in seat.
- The menu is intentionally short, closer to two dozen items than a full page, which keeps kitchen turnaround fast even on a packed Friday.
- If you're going for the history as much as the food, the check-in desk, the wood bar, and the wall of vintage photos above the entrance are all original to the 2022 renovation, not new additions.
If you've lived here long enough to remember Sammy and Donna Rhodes running the original dining room, the current version is closer to a continuation than a reinvention. If you're newer to the island, it's worth knowing that the building's history is part of what you're eating around, not just a detail on a placemat.
Sullivan's Island doesn't reset often. It adds a layer and keeps going. That's as true of a 120 year old battery getting a new civic assignment as it is of a fish camp with a new name over the door and a familiar basket still on the table.
If you're the kind of person who pays attention to how a place actually holds together over time, that's exactly the sort of local read the Calore + Lacke Team brings to every conversation about this island, whether you're asking about a restaurant's history or a house's. Reach out anytime you want that same kind of ground-level context on what's happening here.
