Barbara Jeans’s

Charleston City Paper:

Barbara Jean’s is an import from St. Simons Island, Ga., where the Barta family launched their first “Easy Southern Dining” restaurant in 1998. The Mt. Pleasant franchise is the seventh to open along the Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina coasts, bringing Barbara Jean Barta’s signature crab cakes and home-style cooking to the Lowcountry.

The menu offers a range of southern mainstays, such as meatloaf ($8.99), chicken fried steak ($9.99), and turkey and dressing ($9.99), but the marquee items are the seafood dishes. It’s not quite a meat-and-three, but close: all the entrées come with two sides and a selection of bread. The specialties of the house are two coastal favorites: she-crab soup and crab cakes.

First, the soup. It’s a brassy move to bring a Georgia version of she-crab to the city that invented the stuff. But Barbara Jean’s recipe ($3.99 cup/$6.99 bowl) holds its own. It has a thinner, more bisque-like texture than your typical Lowcountry she-crab, and there doesn’t seem to be any of the sweetness of sherry. It’s a spicy soup, with a generous dose of red pepper and lots of crab meat. It may not be enough to make a Charlestonian swear off crab roe and sherry for good, but it’s a good cup of soup.

If the she-crab soup is less sweet than one would expect, the rest of the food more than makes up for it.