Waterfront Seafood Shack — Restaurant in Calabash

Local - grew up here and know the seafood restaurants. Decided to check this place out because it’s byob with a $2 corking fee. Terrible portions and terrible service by both the waitress and the owner. I’d NEVER go back. Waitress was miserable and was bothered by menu questions. When the food came out (at least 30 min later) I immediately laughed at the small portions, but then decided to say something. When I called the waitress over I explained it wasn’t her fault, but for the price you can get at least twice the amount of seafood at any of the neighboring restaurants, and the side dishes were really poor quality (think middle school cafeteria corn and freezer fries). Also, hush puppies aren’t served with every meal (like the neighboring restaurants). For reference, a $20 combo plate of scallops and oysters included 4 tiny scallops (probably less that the size of a quarter) and about 5 fishy-tasting oysters. Anywhere else around you would’ve gotten a plate full for that price. The fish sandwiches were okay, but nothing special, and again the sides were bad. We asked to speak to a manager or owner. At first we were told they were making us a new flounder filet, which is strange because that wasn’t the primary concern. I said we’d just like to speak to someone, and the server said she told the owner, but he said he was busy so it’d be a minute (who says that?!). So we waited. And waited. I went up and knocked on the kitchen window, and when a different server came out I asked her to please ask management to come over. Eventually a man finally came over- I had to ask if he was the owner, he didn’t introduce himself. When I told him about our experience he started arguing with me about how scallops are expensive... I said I understand but every other restaurant around will give a decent portion for $20. He kept trying to go back and forth me. I told him I was just trying to give an honest local review. He took the scallop plate off the bill, but at that point we had waited for more than an hour to get our food and speak with him. An...

Service was good, so this has nothing to do with the review. They forgot to charge me or their system had a hiccup and being honest, I didn’t want them to take an L for a $70 tab. We drove from OIB to get some crab and seafood takeout since OIB has little to no options. It’s around a 20 minute drive for us but we were looking at reviews and it looked helpful. We got a pound of crab legs($31), along with some other items. Our order was placed around 6:40 pm.

When we got home(20 mins later) I opened the crab legs and my husband immediately smelled the crab was slightly fishy(which wasn’t a good sign). I was looking forward to this so I tried desperately to see it through. I eat crab legs pretty often and have never had ones like this. They were tough to break open even with a seafood cracker device. The crab was mushy and breaking apart. Typically when you eat crab it will come out in a lump, so this was a first for me. The only part that I was able to get meat out of was the knuckle. I took a video to even show how difficult this was but can’t post it on the review. All of the broken pieces in the photo still have crab in them since it was impossible to get out.

I called several times to see if there was a way that I could speak to someone since they close at 8pm. By the time I got my kids back together to head there it was 7:40 which wouldn’t have given me time to get up there and try to show them what happened. I have never left a bad review but they wouldn’t answer the phone. I am hoping someone calls me back tomorrow after seeing this and listening to...

Terrible, terrible disappointment! After looking at all the other reviews, we were really excited to eat here. Let me start by saying - it was 93 degrees at 6 p.m., so eating outside in direct sunlight thanks to the angle and time of day was a lapse in judgement, and it was all downhill from there. We recieved a can of warm, flat root beer, a bottle of cheap off-brand water, and sweet tea made with Splenda that was so watered down I may as well have drank it straight out of the tap. Feeling optimistic, I ordered the calamari appetizer. Upon arrival, it was extremely pale in color and had ZERO taste - it didn't even taste like it had been fried! Thank goodness for the marinara sauce, because that's literally the only thing we could taste. Following that, I received crab cakes and scallops, coleslaw, fries, and hush puppies. The fries were clearly straight out of a freezer bag and barely cooked and the grilled scallops also had no flavor but were extremely salty-something no amount of watered-down sweet tea would remedy. The waitress ran by every now and then to ask how things were going, but never waited to see what our answer was. I had to stop the cook when he walked by to ask for another tea refill so I could get through my main meal. They charged me another $2 for that, and it was 75% ice!!! The other members of the group had the grouper and the snapper, which were actually both very good but did not make up for the awful side dishes and...