FOOD

The food is built around the kind of South Carolina buffet plate that makes sense before you ever reach dessert: pulled pork barbecue, fried chicken and chicken bog surrounded by vegetables, casseroles, rice, gravy and breads. The selection is not trying to win a size contest. Its advantage is authenticity and local tradition. Nearly everything belongs to the same country-cooking vocabulary, so the buffet feels less like a collection of unrelated stations and more like one very large Southern meal.

Start with the barbecue. In South Carolina, “barbecue” traditionally means pork, and Simply Southern’s pulled pork gives the buffet its regional anchor. The sauce choices let you push it in different Carolina directions: vinegar and pepper brings the sharp coastal style, while mustard adds the tang associated so strongly with the state. A small helping of each is a better introduction than committing the whole plate to one bottle on the first pass.

Chicken bog is the other dish that makes this distinctly Grand Strand food rather than generic Southern fare. The Horry County staple combines chicken, rice and sausage into a soft, savory one-pot dish that lives somewhere between a pilaf and a very thick chicken-and-rice stew. It is humble food with deep local roots, and here it belongs naturally beside collard greens, lima beans, cabbage, tomato and okra, green beans and cornbread.

Fried chicken provides the buffet’s crisp counterpoint, while chicken and dumplings, mashed potatoes with gravy and macaroni and cheese pull the plate toward classic comfort food. Sweet potato casserole adds the sweet-savory note that makes a Southern buffet plate feel complete. This is also where the vegetable selection earns attention: collards, butter beans and tomato with okra are not filler surrounding the meats; they are part of the reason the buffet reads as country cooking in the first place.

The rotating features are worth noticing because they can change the character of lunch. Hamburger steak with gravy is especially at home here — browned beef under a generous blanket of gravy, exactly the sort of cafeteria-and-meat-and-three classic that encourages an extra spoonful of rice or mashed potatoes. Baked spaghetti is the surprise: familiar, deeply comforting and much better suited to a Southern buffet line than its name initially suggests. The current rotation also brings fried pork chops, sausage with onions, cheesy potatoes, hot wings, chicken tenders and fried fish on selected days.

Dinner adds another reason to time a visit deliberately. Ribs come out at 4 p.m. while they last, followed by fried pork chops, giving the evening buffet a heavier smokehouse edge. Friday’s baked beans fit naturally beside the pork, and fried fish appears as a recurring end-of-week feature. These changing dishes keep the line from becoming static even though the core identity stays firmly barbecue-and-country.

Dessert should stay simple. Banana pudding is the obvious Southern finish, and the cobbler of the day can be paired with soft-serve vanilla ice cream for the hot-cold combination that buffets were invented to make possible. It is an appropriately unfussy ending to a restaurant whose best quality is that nothing needs to be translated into vacation language: barbecue, bog, gravy, greens and pudding are the attraction.