MOUNT PLEASANT — Boats sat idle in Shem Creek around noon July 2, as diners sauntered into restaurants along the crowded strip to peruse menus featuring all kinds of seafood, from crab to flounder to grouper.
Shrimp, a hotly debated topic in recent weeks, is offered fried, boiled, blackened or piled onto grits at many of the establishments in this popular tourist section of the Charleston area.
Just beyond Shem Creek's restaurant row, manager Sarah Fitch assisted customers outside Mt. Pleasant Seafood, a family-owned retailer founded in 1945. The market currently sells three types of shrimp.
One is locally sourced. Two are imported.
Mt. Pleasant Seafood's signage does not denote its shrimp as local or imported, but the staff is transparent with customers about where it's coming from, Fitch told The Post and Courier within earshot of patrons waiting in line.
But not every local business is being open about its sourcing methods, members of the shrimping industry allege.
About six miles away at another popular tourist area in downtown Charleston, the S.C. Shrimpers Association and its lawyer announced they had added the names of 25 Charleston area restaurants to an existing lawsuit that accused 40 establishments of selling imported shrimp while advertising them as being local or wild caught.
The 25 restaurants cited by name extend from Shem Creek in Mount Pleasant to downtown Charleston, up to North Charleston and Summerville, across West Ashley and out to Folly Beach. Some are widely known, with others less so.
Addressing reporters in front of the Pineapple Fountain at Waterfront Park, Bryan Jones and Rocky Magwood of the S.C Shrimpers Association and the organization's attorney, Gedney Howe IV, criticized the practice of passing off imported shrimp as local.
"It's obviously the shrimpers, like myself, Rocky, and the entire fleet throughout South Carolina, that are affected when they're undercut by restaurants not buying our shrimp and then purchasing imported shrimp and selling it as local," Jones said.
Those claims met pushback from members of the seafood industry, including some of the restaurants that have been singled out — with many denying they have done anything to directly mislead customers.
The cost of imported shrimp is significantly cheaper, said the managers at Red's Ice House, Tavern & Table and Sunsets Waterfront Dining, all located along Shem Creek. At other establishments, including Mt. Pleasant Seafood, owners said cost coupled with a lack of local availability create a need for imported shrimp.
The release of restaurant names came weeks after 40 out of 44 restaurants tested in the Charleston area were alleged to be misleading customers with the sale of imported shrimp. In announcing the initial results in June, SeaD Consulting of Texas publicly identified the four restaurants found to be selling local or wild-caught shrimp, and accurately advertised as such. Left out were the names of the 40 other establishments.
SeaD's testing was commissioned by the Southern Shrimp Alliance, an industry trade association based in Tarpon Spring, Fla. SeaD officials declined a Post and Courier interview request.
The names of the remaining 15 businesses aren't expected to be released in the immediate future.
Owners spotlighted by the research firm largely refuted the claims that they mislead customers. Questions remain about how SeaD Consulting carried out its testing, as well as what criteria were used in determining which restaurants to test and how conclusions were drawn.
Ongoing litigation
Testing results culminated with the Shrimpers Association filing a federal lawsuit on June 13 against all 40 restaurants initially accused of selling imported shrimp. An updated complaint was filed July 2 to name 25 businesses, but not the remaining ones.
It's unclear what the association, as well as SeaD Consulting, consider to be fraudulent. Howe said the Southern Shrimp Alliance, the group that funded the study, provided the restaurant list to the S.C. Shrimper’s Alliance.
SeaD officials would not address how the 44 places were selected to be tested, nor what the company considers to be fraudulent. SeaD's testing took place in late May, about a week before the commercial trawling season opened.
The lawsuit accuses the restaurants of false advertising and violating South Carolina's Unfair Trade Practices Act and the Lanham Act, a federal law that prohibits false advertising. According to the lawsuit, restaurant defendants "falsely advertised shrimp served in their establishments as 'local,' 'Carolina-caught' (and) 'fresh South Carolina shrimp,' among other misrepresentations."
"The SeaD Consulting results that we've been provided do not specify … which of the specific rules may have been violated to indicate that that facility had a violation. We've checked on every one that we've named, and we found things that we believe violated with the state of federal law," Howe said.
These are restaurants that SeaD Consulting determined were not actively advertising their shrimp as local, Howe said. Following a thorough review of menus, restaurant décor and marketing materials, The Post and Courier found no indications that many of the 25 restaurants explicitly claim to be selling wild-caught shrimp.
Some of the restaurants may not be familiar to the average Charleston diner. But the testing results paint a broad picture of alleged deceit in a restaurant industry reliant on places serving seafood.
SeaD’s list featured Dockside Charlie's, a virtual kitchen operating out of O’Charley's. It is only available through online delivery services.
"We take the quality and standards of our seafood very seriously," a spokesman for Dockside Charlie's said in a statement. "We have yet to be served anything related to the lawsuit in question and, as such, cannot comment on something which we have not seen. If and when we receive more information, we will, of course, investigate it fully."
The complaint also listed Poseidon's Playground, a food truck in North Charleston, that serves shrimp tacos. Its menu makes no claim that they are made with wild-caught shrimp.
Teri Turner, manager of a Cajun seafood restaurant in North Charleston called Crab Du Jour, said they make no such assertion. The business does not sell locally sourced shrimp and doesn't claim to, she said. Their shrimp comes frozen from an outside provider.
Turner said the restaurant only claims to offer fresh seafood, so she can't figure out why the group was targeting them.
"I think it is unfortunate that they have to lie," she said. "We do good business here, and we are very honest with our customers."
Red’s Ice House lists "local peel ‘n eat shrimp" in its Lowcountry boil, even though the restaurant acknowledged they are sourced from outside the U.S.
"That should have come off our menu a long time ago," said Skipper Kress, a manager at the Shem Creek restaurant. "We don’t get local shrimp right now."
Hyman’s Seafood, a downtown mainstay which draws a line down Meeting Street most days, does not claim to sell wild-caught shrimp in marketing materials. Some of its social media posts in the past, however, have alluded to local sourcing. Hyman’s ownership recognized that those posts implied that “we were serving fresh shrimp, when in fact we were serving imported shrimp at those times."