There’s a booth in the back left corner of Lulu’s Cafe on Front Street that Margaret Manigault calls her office. She doesn’t own the place — she waits tables there — but she’s been doing it so long, with such quiet authority, that the distinction feels beside the point. I found out about Margaret the way most people do: someone who grew up in Georgetown told me not to leave without eating at Lulu’s, and not to sit down until I’d introduced myself to the woman who’d probably already spotted me from across the room.
Lulu’s is a small, low-key lunch spot that opens early and closes by mid-afternoon, tucked into the older commercial stretch of Front Street a few blocks from the waterfront. The dining room is nothing fancy — maybe a dozen tables, mismatched chairs, a chalkboard specials list that changes daily. Local art hangs on the walls. The air smells like coffee and whatever soup is simmering that morning. On the day I went, it was she-crab.
Margaret has worked the room here since 2003. She remembers what regulars take in their coffee without asking. She knows which tourists need five minutes to read the menu and which ones want her to just pick something. She has strong opinions, and she’ll share them. I asked what I should order. She didn’t hesitate: the pimento cheese and tomato sandwich on toasted white bread, a cup of the she-crab, and the sweet tea, which she said is brewed fresh twice a day and not touched with syrup. I did exactly what she said. She was right on all three counts.
The pimento cheese is house-made and sharper than the cloying versions you find elsewhere — real cheddar, a little heat, enough mayo to hold it together but not drown it. The tomatoes were good, which matters more than people admit. The she-crab soup was rich without being heavy, a proper Lowcountry version with roe scattered across the top and a pour of sherry on the side. Lunch for two, with drinks and tip, ran just over thirty dollars.
What Margaret gives the place is harder to quantify than the food, but it’s real. She keeps the pace loose without letting anything drag. She introduced me to the couple at the next table — a retired marine biologist and his wife who winter in Pawleys Island and have been eating at Lulu’s since the early 2000s — and within ten minutes the four of us were talking about the shrimping history of Winyah Bay like old acquaintances. That’s not an accident. That’s Margaret working the room.
Lulu’s doesn’t take reservations and doesn’t need them. It gets busy around noon on weekdays, especially when county offices let out for lunch. The better move is to arrive before eleven-thirty or after one, when the pace slows and you can actually linger. They close around two-thirty most days, sometimes earlier if they sell out of specials, which Margaret told me happens more than management plans for.
I’ve eaten at a fair number of places in Georgetown over the years, and Lulu’s is the kind of spot that earns loyalty not through ambition but through consistency — the same good soup, the same honest sandwich, the same woman in the back corner booth who already knows what you want before you sit down.
