Bowens Island in its earlier days. Near Charleston, South Carolina, a city with a booming new restaurant scene, Bowens Island has stood like a beacon of slow-idling time for seventy-five years. Since opening in 1946, the gritty fish camp fantasia on the way to Folly Beach has seen half a dozen major hurricanes, a devastating fire, a global pandemic, and herds of diners who make the pilgrimage to the thirteen-acre hammock island for the promise of piles of steaming oysters and cold beers in a space that can only be described as shanty chic. If hunger is the best sauce, then sweating and salivating over the smell of fried hushpuppies and flounder while waiting in line to enter the scruffy space is a local rite of passage. Travelers lucky enough to go find the space just as legendary. It’s a story to tell when they return home to Milwaukee or Missoula or Kansas City. A story about a place where, “hand to God,” you can almost hear them say, the fish comes in fresh from the waters off the dock, wood porches overlook mountains of discarded oyster shells, and the laid-back vibe is as uncanny as the brilliant sunsets casting scarlet rays against the seemingly endless swaths of golden marsh grass.