Ten years ago, a young Charleston cook named Jason Stanhope made a friend a white truffle omelet, then a birthday dinner built around the dishes that had made FIG one of the best kitchens in the South. He didn't think much of it at the time. The friend, a Sullivan's Island resident named Jeremy Graves, remembered every plate.
That memory is the reason 2019 Middle Street has a new chef this year, and it is also the reason the restaurant at that address looks almost exactly the way it did last year, and the year before that, going back further than most people who eat there realize. When Graves later wanted to bring a partner into Sullivan's, the restaurant he co-owns on the island, he called Stanhope. "I was talking with Jeremy who wanted me to buy into Sullivan's Seafood & Bar and he remembered a white truffle omelet I made for him, and then a birthday dinner with FIG classics," Stanhope told the Charleston City Paper. "That was almost a decade ago." He called it the romance of the story. It is also, if you have lived here a while, a pretty good description of how the entire island does business.
A Building With One Address and Three Owners
The space at 2019 Middle Street has changed hands twice in 38 years, and it has never once sat empty for more than a renovation.
Sammy and Donna Rhodes Hiott opened Sullivan's Seafood Restaurant there in 1988, right before Hurricane Hugo nearly took the building down. They rebuilt it and ran it for 32 years, closing on September 6, 2020, when they retired. Ben and Kate Towill, who run the Charleston hospitality group Basic Projects behind Basic Kitchen and Post House Inn in Mount Pleasant, spent two years renovating the space and reopened it as Sullivan's Fish Camp on May 17, 2022, according to the Post and Courier's coverage of that opening. Last spring, the Towills sold their stake to Graves and to Stanhope, who left his job as executive chef at Lowland, the restaurant inside The Pinch Hotel downtown, to become chef and part owner alongside Graves and fellow owners Wes and Betsy Fuller.
Ben Towill's statement on the handoff sounds less like a business transaction and more like a family passing down a house. "Reviving Sullivan's was a labor of love for Kate and I and we are thrilled to see it passed to the very capable hands of Chef Stanhope," he said in the announcement covered by WCBD News. "We feel honored to have played a part in the story of such a beloved beach institution."
Stanhope's own resume would suggest he is exactly the kind of chef who reinvents a place. He spent 15 years at FIG under Mike Lata, became executive chef there in 2012, and won the James Beard Foundation's award for Best Chef Southeast in 2015. He has cooked at some of the most ambitious tables in the state. And yet the first thing he told the Post and Courier about taking over Sullivan's was that he planned to change the name back to Sullivan's Fish Camp, dropping the newer Sullivan's Seafood & Bar branding entirely, to get closer to what the space was before he arrived.
What Actually Moved on the Menu
None of this means nothing changed. It means the change happened at the level of the plate, not the address.
By the time the Post and Courier reviewed the restaurant in February 2026, Stanhope had spent 75 straight days in the kitchen reworking the menu one dish at a time, according to the paper's review. He reconnected with purveyors he had used for years at FIG and Lowland, including Abundant Seafood, Kindlewood Farms, Tarvin Seafood, and Lowcountry Shellfish. The Sully's basket and hush puppies that made the original Sullivan's Seafood Restaurant a family staple are still on the menu. So is a clam and fish chowder ($16) the reviewer called just-right creamy, a lobster roll ($34) described as the best in Charleston, and a catch of the day ($39) served with celery root purée and arugula pesto that would not look out of place on a FIG tasting menu. A crispy fish sandwich runs $24, and the Lowcountry boil is $34.
That range, a $16 chowder sitting next to a $39 plated fish course, is the clearest evidence of what Stanhope means when he calls his goal a "neighborhood seafood joint" rather than a fine-dining relaunch. He is not trying to out-FIG FIG. He is trying to cook food that a family walking up from the beach and a couple celebrating an anniversary can both order from the same short menu, in a room the Towills already built and that he has largely left alone. As the Post and Courier put it, the food coming out of that kitchen now diverges noticeably from what was served there a year earlier, even as the restaurant itself feels like the same place it has always been.
The events calendar tells the same story in miniature. This summer, Sullivan's hosted a Lowcountry Khmer Boil, bringing in visiting chef Sophina Uong to cook alongside Stanhope, a traditional Lowcountry seafood boil filtered through Cambodian technique. It is a genuinely new idea layered onto a 38-year-old address, which is close to a working definition of how this island treats change in general.
Longer Leases, Longer Memories
Sullivan's is not the exception on this stretch of Middle Street. It is closer to the rule.
Dunleavy's Pub, opened by a sister and brother team from New England, and Poe's Tavern, named for Edgar Allan Poe's stint as an enlisted soldier at Fort Moultrie, have both been fixtures of the island's restaurant scene for decades. A 2022 Post and Courier feature on Sullivan's Island dining noted that Dunleavy's had just turned 30 that year and Poe's Tavern was closing in on its 20th anniversary. Run the clock forward to today and Dunleavy's is pushing 35, with Poe's not far behind at 25.
That kind of tenure is unusual for a beach town, where restaurant concepts typically turn over as rents rise and trends shift. Part of the explanation is structural. The town's planning department describes its own mission as maintaining the residential character of the island's neighborhoods, which by design leaves very little room for new commercial square footage to appear, according to the Town of Sullivan's Island's planning and zoning page. There is also, as one tourism writeup for the island put it, almost no chain retail on Middle Street to begin with. When a commercial address does become available here, it tends to change hands through relationships rather than a bidding war, the way Ben Towill handed his lease to Jeremy Graves, and Graves called in a favor from a chef he had fed a birthday dinner nearly a decade earlier.
What This Means If You Eat Here Regularly
If you have lived on Sullivan's Island for any length of time, you already know the rhythm. The buildings along Middle Street rarely go dark. The names sometimes shift, Sullivan's Seafood Restaurant to Sullivan's Fish Camp and back toward Sullivan's Fish Camp again, but the continuity underneath is the point, not an accident of a slow market.
What is genuinely new right now is the caliber of chef willing to work inside that continuity instead of against it. A James Beard winner with 15 years at one of the South's defining restaurants chose to keep a beach shack's bones intact rather than build something that erased them. That choice says something about what this island rewards, and it is worth knowing whether you have eaten at that booth for twenty years or you are still learning which nights the lobster roll sells out.
Robertson Allen and the team at The Cassina Group spend their days thinking about what makes a place worth staying in, whether that is a historic home on the peninsula or a fish camp that has outlasted three owners on the same corner of Middle Street. If you are curious what that kind of continuity looks like from the inside, on Sullivan's Island or anywhere else in the Lowcountry, schedule a private market consultation and we will talk it through.
