Myrtle Beach: Where to Eat
Myrtle Beach’s food identity is Calabash-style seafood: shrimp, oysters, and whatever else is running, lightly battered and flash-fried, served with hush puppies and slaw, often as an all-you-can-eat buffet. The name comes from Calabash, North Carolina, just over the state line, not a South Carolina town, so don’t expect it to be a local invention even though it’s everywhere on the Strand.
Lowcountry staples
She-crab soup is the other dish worth ordering on purpose, a cream-based soup named for female crabs, whose roe gives it its color and richness. It’s Lowcountry-rooted, more associated with Charleston than Myrtle Beach specifically, but you’ll find it up and down the coast. Shrimp and grits and frogmore stew, a one-pot boil of shrimp, sausage, corn, and potatoes, round out the Gullah-Geechee Lowcountry cooking that underpins a lot of the region’s seafood menus. BBQ is secondary here; there’s no signature Myrtle Beach BBQ tradition worth chasing the way there is in, say, the Midlands or the Upstate.
Murrells Inlet MarshWalk
For a sit-down dinner, the Murrells Inlet MarshWalk, about 18 miles south, is the move and the one place on the Strand where naming specific restaurants actually holds up: Dead Dog Saloon, Drunken Jack’s, Wahoo’s, Bovine’s, the Wicked Tuna, and the Claw House line roughly half a mile of boardwalk over the salt marsh. It’s earned the “Seafood Capital of South Carolina” tag honestly, and going for sunset means dinner and a view in one stop.
Elsewhere on the Strand
Away from the MarshWalk, keep expectations dish-based rather than address-based: look for Calabash-style seafood houses and buffets along the main corridors, especially near Restaurant Row, and Lowcountry-focused kitchens for she-crab soup and shrimp and grits. Broadway at the Beach and the Boardwalk both carry a mix of casual chains and local spots, useful if you’re eating between attractions rather than making dinner the event.
What it costs
Tax stacks higher here than you might expect: roughly 11.5% on a restaurant meal inside Myrtle Beach city limits, about 10.5% in unincorporated Horry County just outside it. Both rates are volatile and worth checking before you assume the number on the menu is the number on the check. Standard US tipping applies, 15 to 20% for good service.
Build a MarshWalk dinner into your plans regardless of trip length; the 3-day itinerary shows where it fits alongside Brookgreen Gardens and a live show.