Nantucket Meat and Fish Market opened on Coleman Boulevard, and it is not a grocery store.
It is 8,000 square feet of butcher case and seafood counter at 616 Coleman Boulevard in Moultrie Plaza, open since July 17.
"People care about what they eat. You should know your butcher and we cut everything fresh in house every day," the owners told the Post & Courier.
That is the entire thesis, and it is a direct shot at how most people in Mount Pleasant currently buy protein.
Who is behind it
Father and son, Sean Ready and John Ready. Sean founded the original Nantucket Meat and Fish Market in Edgartown, Massachusetts, which tells you exactly what kind of clientele this format was built for.
They brought it South seven years ago with a Bluffton location, opened after they noticed how many people were buying prepacked meat off a grocery shelf and calling it dinner. Mount Pleasant is the next logical stop on that map. Same demographics, bigger base.
What is in the case
Center-cut steaks, wagyu, Kobe and poultry on the meat side. Local and imported seafood on the other: clams, lobster, halibut, cod and swordfish.
The one to circle is Nantucket Bay scallops, which come into season in November. If you have never had them, they are the reason people talk about that market the way they do. They are worth building a dinner around, and the window is short.
Beyond the counters, the store carries groceries, ready-to-eat vegetable sides, and brick-oven pizzas made in house. That last one is the part that turns a special-occasion stop into a Tuesday stop.
Why this works here
Mount Pleasant has plenty of places to buy food and very few places to buy it from someone who can tell you what he is handing you.
That is the gap. Charleston's restaurant scene trained an entire population to care about sourcing, then sent them home to a shrink-wrapped ribeye. A real counter with real people behind it is not nostalgia. It is the obvious answer to a demand this market created for itself.
The Readys clearly know it. You do not sign 8,000 square feet in Moultrie Plaza on a hunch, and you do not carry Kobe and swordfish in the same building unless you expect people to shop both counters on the same trip.
Moultrie Plaza is the right address for it too. That center has quietly turned into the place Mount Pleasant actually runs errands, which is a different thing from the place Mount Pleasant gets photographed.
Go before November so you know what you are looking at when the scallops land.
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