New Hilton Head restaurant overlooking marina crafts a menu meant to please all ages
As nice as the many fine dining restaurants on Hilton Head are, they can be expensive for families, so a new restaurant is aiming to be an alternative.
Top Dawg Tavern, featuring a varied menu and a casual atmosphere, opened at the end of July in Shelter Cove Harbour and Marina.
Renee Summers, who owns Top Dawg Tavern with her husband Brett, said their business tenets are “simple and fresh and affordable.”
“We are somewhere that you can go eat every day and you’ll still be able to afford us. And that’s one of the things that we focus on,” Summers said.
The Hilton Head location is the Mount Pleasant couple’s fifth Top Dawg Tavern. Their first restaurant opened in 2013 near Athens, Georgia, in Bethlehem. Other locations are in Columbia and Summerville, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia.
“We have been vacationing in Hilton Head for a long time,” Summers said. “We said if we ever got that opportunity, we wanted to be there. We were lucky enough that the space became available.”
The menu
The menu is largely the same across the five Top Dawg Tavern locations and includes items meant to appeal to the whole family, from grandparents to preschoolers.
“What we kind of pride ourselves on is that we have the ability to serve a wide variety of appetites,” Summers said.
The Classic Tavern Burger, a quarter-pound burger dressed and topped with cheese, is $9.50 and is served with either fries or onion rings. The menu also includes more than a dozen styles of wings ($10 for 6 or $15 for 10), an array of sandwiches such as the cheesesteak ($11) or Southern BLT ($9.50). The sandwiches come with a choice from among a dozen sides.
Salads, including a build-your-own option, and entrees such as Guinness-battered fish and chips, brisket mac and cheese, and pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy are generally in the $12-$14 range.
Selections from the kids’ menu are $5, and seven lunch specials are $7 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays.
The restaurant
The owners did extensive renovations to their Hilton Head restaurant space. They gutted and redesigned the kitchen and removed a stage area to make room for more seating. Between the indoor space and outside patio, the restaurant can seat around 180 people.
The patio has its own bar and offers views of the marina.
The owners, parents of a 9-year-old daughter, also created a kids’ play room with games and a bubble machine to keep children occupied while their families finish their meals.
“We can seat groups of two, but we also have our community tables that can seat 8-10,” Renee said.
During football season, the tavern is sure to draw sports fans with multiple televisions and new speakers inside and outside. Football season drink specials started on Monday.
Said Renee: “We are not a sports bar, but we like to say we incorporate sports viewing.”
If you go
What: Top Dawg Tavern
Where: 13 Harbourside Lane, Unit CD, in Shelter Cove Harbour and Marina on Hilton Head
Hours: Monday through Thursday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to midnight; Sunday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday brunch 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Lunch specials 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays; Happy hour specials 4 to 7 p.m. weekdays
Phone: 843-785-5600
Website: www.topdawgtavern.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/TDT.HiltonHead
This story was originally published August 31, 2021 at 2:52 PM.
