Hot Fish Club

Separate cooking before the pass

The components stay distinct before they meet on the plate. Chris Hastings, James Beard Award winner at Hot Fish Club in Murrells Inlet, brings that habit of order to a Lowcountry seafood room built around the marsh and the catch. His own description of the method is plain: “We cook the ingredients separately to make a composed salad.” It is a cook’s sentence, concerned with sequence rather than flourish.

Hastings came through Johnson & Wales University before sous chef posts at the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta from 1984 and Lark Creek Inn in San Francisco from 1989. Those kitchens asked for timing, polish, and repetition, the kind of discipline that follows a cook long after the station changes. His public shorthand for revision, “We take dishes from the past and make them more modern and healthier,” fits a restaurant where the menu keeps recognizable forms close: lobster pot pie, hot fish sampler, lowcountry steampot. The past stays legible. The hand adjusts the weight.

Lowcountry seafood kept in its shape

The kitchen’s stated approach is traditional, and the useful work inside that word is restraint. Local sourcing matters here because the restaurant sits on Murrells Inlet, where seafood is not an imported idea but the material immediately outside the room. A lowcountry steampot asks for timing more than decoration; shellfish, seasoning, steam, and service have to arrive in the same breath. Lobster pot pie carries another kind of structure, with richness held in a familiar form rather than spread across the plate for effect.

Hastings’s broader cooking has long favored clarity of composition. Hot and Hot tomato salad, from his Birmingham work, reads that way: ingredient-led, assembled with each part still clear. At Hot Fish Club, that preference suits an a la carte seafood menu whose work is less about disguise than handling. The plate can be generous without becoming loose. The pass has to hold both the old appetite for a marsh-front seafood supper and the discipline of a cook trained to keep each element in its place.

The marsh at the edge of the room

The room is lively by design. Murrells Inlet sits in the view, and the restaurant leans into that proximity with marsh-front sightlines, a live music gazebo, and décor drawn from the inlet’s natural forms. It is not a hushed dining room; the energy belongs to a large seafood house where the counter, the pass, and the tables all carry motion at once.

That setting changes how the craft is felt. The work has to cut through conversation, music, and the pull of the water outside. Upscale casual service gives the kitchen a broad field: composed dishes, shared seafood, and Lowcountry standards moving through the same evening. The room’s liveliness does not excuse looseness. It requires steadier hands.

A dish that still names the place

Hastings’s role here sits beside a wider career that includes ownership and executive chef work, advisory posts, and restaurant openings, including The Side by Side in Tuscaloosa from 2015 and Ovenbird in Birmingham. His James Beard Award, Best Chef in the South, came in 2012, and the food at this address can carry noise, marsh air, and appetite without losing its outline. End the evening on the lowcountry steampot at Hot Fish Club.