What does a place need to do to last forty-plus years on a tidal creek in South Carolina? At Drunken Jack’s on Murrells Inlet — the saltwater tidal creek community that anchors the southern edge of Georgetown County — the answer seems to be: keep the dock cold, keep the fish fresh, and don’t fix what isn’t broken.
The restaurant sits right on the marsh water at 4031 Highway 17 Business in Murrells Inlet, and the setting does most of the talking before the food arrives. Diners eat on open-air decks that hang out over the creek, where pelicans cruise at eye level and shrimp boats occasionally idle past. At dusk, the marsh goes gold and orange in a way that makes people linger over empty plates and order another round just to keep the view.
The name traces to a pirate legend — Drunken Jack himself was supposedly a buccaneer marooned on a nearby island with a supply of rum, and the island bearing his name sits visible from the dock. Whether any of that is historically tight is beside the point. The story fits the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is genuinely good.
The menu is straightforward coastal Carolina: oysters on the half shell, she-crab soup, steamed blue crabs sold by the dozen, shrimp prepared about six different ways, and a rotating catch that local boats bring in fresh. The seafood platter — fried flounder, shrimp, scallops, deviled crab — arrives on a tray that takes up most of a two-top. It is the kind of meal that doesn’t photograph elegantly but disappears fast. The she-crab soup is thick and peppery, closer to something a home cook would make than anything off a line.
The bar is a destination on its own. Frozen drinks, cold draft beer, and a crowd that skews toward vacationing families in summer and local retirees the rest of the year. Happy hour runs on weekdays in the late afternoon, and the deck fills up well before dinner service. Getting there by six on a summer Friday and expecting a table without a wait is optimistic; getting there by five with patience puts the sunset squarely in view from a good seat.
Prices are honest for a waterfront place. A cup of she-crab soup runs around six or seven dollars, fried shrimp baskets in the mid-teens, and the full seafood platters land between twenty and twenty-eight dollars depending on what’s running. Raw oysters are priced by availability, which fluctuates with the season — fall and winter are the better months for those.
Murrells Inlet as a whole bills itself as the Seafood Capital of South Carolina, and there are a dozen restaurants competing for that claim along the same stretch of road. Drunken Jack’s isn’t trying to be the fanciest or the most innovative. It has the oldest reputation on the inlet and the best dock for watching the water, and for a lot of people who come back year after year, that combination is exactly the point.
Parking is a surface lot off the highway. Casual dress is both accepted and expected. The kitchen runs seven days a week in season, with reduced hours in winter — worth calling ahead between November and March before making a special trip.
