Something just feels right about eating fresh fish in a pirate costume. For weeks, my friends and I had been planning a pirate-themed party, and last weekend we pulled it together: Eye patches, hats, sashes, plastic swords. Oh yes, and ten fully-grown adults calling each other Cap’n and saying things like “Shiver me timbers!” We rented our good ship, a pontoon boat, on Douglas Lake in East Tennessee, and set sail, returning to our friend’s lakeside cabin for amazing meals – including fried catfish, of course.

Hokey? Absolutely. But the next stop on our pirate-themed tour of the South will be anything but. Turns out one of the greenest restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina – which this weekend hosts the extraordinary arts festival Spoleto – is The Buccaneer, a seafood joint with a pirate museum attached.

The Buccaneer, in a warehouse on a cobblestoned street in the city’s wharf district, was in fact the first certified green restaurant in the state of South Carolina. For grub and grog, The Buccaneer serves locally-caught shrimp and crab, vegetables grown on its own Wadmalaw Island farm, and beer made by Charleston’s Palmetto Brewing Company. The small museum includes decidedly un-cheesy pirate artifacts, like cannons, tankards, engravings and coins that the owners collected from around the world. Still, when you run a pirate-themed restaurant, you must tolerate at least a bit of pirate silliness, right? My friends and I will bring an eye patch or two but leave our plastic swords at home.

Image: Courtesy of Tripadvisor

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