CELESTE
Coastal Cuisine A new location celebrates a family legacy
that changed Hilton Head Island cuisine. BY BARRY KAUFMAN
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TASTEOFHILTONHEAD.COM
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PHOTOS BY ROB KAUFMAN
Earl Nightingale has worn a lot of hats in his time as a restaurateur. Along with his son Alex as well as the rest of his family, he’s raised places like Ela’s, The Pearl in Bluffton and Roadhouse in Beaufort to legendary status in the Lowcountry’s culinary community. But he’s not just the front of the house “face of the company.” You’ll find him doing everything from hammering in nails to helping plate dishes in his operation. He’s been a lot of things. During the opening of Celeste, however, he became something that those who know him might not have thought possible: He became speechless. “This restaurant was named…” he began before a lump in his throat choked off the speech he’d been giving to the assembled crowd. “This restaurant was named for (my wife’s) mother.” Nightingale first met his wife in New Orleans, and shortly after he met Celeste, the French Cajun matriarch of the family. A whiz in the kitchen, she quickly welcomed Earl with open arms. “She was just a great Southern cook,” he said. “When I first met my wife, her mother was in the kitchen cooking and she kept speaking in this French creole language. I asked my wife, ‘What is she saying? Is she talking about me?’” Nightingale needn’t have worried. “She was just telling us what she needed from the store,” he said with a laugh. As Celeste’s name is on the wall, her namesake restaurant will carry some of her Cajun influence to a menu that should seem very familiar to anyone who has dined at Ela’s or The Pearl. “All of our restaurants do a higher-end caliber of dish we call coastal cuisine. You can never get away from scallops, grouper, steamed lobster, and of course our steaks” said Nightingale. “But we are going to have five or six dishes that carry a little bit of that Cajun creole influence. Jambalaya, Crawfish etouffee, New Orleansstyle BBQ shrimp (head on, in a rich red sauce)…” The décor also carries hints of New Orleans through wrought iron accents, but the rest is the same upscale coastal chic that have made Nightingale’s other restaurants such a hit. “I like to look at a restaurant as a whole sensory experience – it all has to come together,” he said. “With Ela’s we have the water view, so we just wanted the inside of Celeste to have enough of those visual pearls.” And it certainly did, with walls of crisp white shiplap encircling dining that doesn’t feel overly contemporary or pretentious, but embraces the upscale. To one end of the massive footprint, a gargantuan bar serves up a litany of craft cocktails and boasts a side stage for live music. At the heart of the dining room, a glass-walled wine cellar offers private dining as well as a showcase for some of the fantastic wines on offer. “We have a standard we use in all of our restaurants. John (Wasem, Nightingale’s son-in-law) does all of our