For half a century, if you told someone in Hilton Head Plantation you were headed to Skull Creek for dinner, they knew exactly where you meant. Not the marina, not the general run of waterfront spots along Squire Pope Road. The Old Fort Pub, perched over the water at 65 Skull Creek Drive since 1973, was the place you booked for an anniversary or a visiting parent, the one with the sunset martini and the she-crab soup people compared every other bowl to for the rest of their lives.
That restaurant is gone. It closed for good, and by most local accounts, condominiums are coming to the site. If you drive that stretch now expecting the familiar row of cars in the gravel lot, you'll find an empty building instead. What's worth understanding is not that a good restaurant closed. It's what happened to the habit it created, and where that habit has scattered across the rest of the corridor.
What Actually Happened at 65 Skull Creek Drive
The closure wasn't a slow fade. People who'd been going since the 1970s describe a normal Tuesday dinner service, then a closed sign the next morning. Staff on site at the time told departing guests that condos were planned for the property, and Hilton Head's own Yelp listing now carries the flat designation "CLOSED" over what used to be a AAA Four Diamond dining room, one of only two on the island to hold that rating.
The building sat on land with more history attached to it than most restaurant sites in the Lowcountry. Old Fort Pub took its name from Fort Mitchel, a Union-built Civil War earthwork that shares the same address and is connected to the restaurant lot by a boardwalk through the gardens. For years, a dinner reservation and a stroll through the fort were the same errand. That pairing is now broken, and it matters for reasons beyond nostalgia, which the next section gets into.
Where the Sunset Habit Moved
Skull Creek's dining identity was never really one restaurant. It was a short row of very different rooms that happened to share a shoreline, and Old Fort Pub was the formal end of that spectrum. The rest of the row is still open, still doing the job it always did, and each one absorbs a different piece of what the Pub used to offer.
- Skull Creek Boathouse, at 397 Squire Pope Road, is the loud, lively version of a Skull Creek sunset. The open-air Buoy Bar and the Dive Bar's raw bar and sushi program pull the after-work and weekend crowd, and its Sunday brunch is now the corridor's only one, where Old Fort Pub used to run its own from 11 to 2 on the same day.
- Skull Creek Dockside leans into the old river-house feel that Old Fort Pub's dining room had, with reclaimed wood and a covered patio angled at the water. It's the closer of the two to a quiet dinner, minus the white tablecloths.
- Hudson's Seafood House on the Docks and the newer Benny Hudson Seafood and Benny's Coastal Kitchen round out the working end of the corridor, less about the view and more about what came off a boat that morning.
None of them replicate what the Pub did. That's the honest read. If you wanted a quiet, formal, water-view dinner on this stretch, that specific experience doesn't have a direct successor right now. What you get instead is a wider spread of casual options that, taken together, cover more nights of the week than one restaurant ever could.
The Fort Nobody's Walking To Anymore
The overlooked casualty of the closure isn't a restaurant at all. It's Fort Mitchel, the Civil War site next door, maintained through the Heritage Library. A visitor review posted in 2024 put it plainly: with Old Fort Pub closed, foot traffic to the fort has thinned, since most people who walked the boardwalk through the gardens were doing it on their way to or from dinner, not as a planned stop on its own.
That's a real opening for anyone who lives nearby. The fort was part of the Union's occupation of Hilton Head Island during the Civil War, and it's the kind of site that used to get seen almost by accident, tucked onto a dinner reservation. Now it sits quieter, which for a resident who already knows the area means an actual chance to walk it without a crowd, something that wasn't really possible when the parking lot filled up every evening. You can find background on the fort and its preservation through the Heritage Library.
The Corridor Still Works On Foot And By Bike
None of this requires driving if you live inside the gates. Hilton Head Plantation's leisure path network connects neighborhoods to Skull Creek Marina and the surrounding restaurant row, and the community's Bluff Walk, a roughly nine-tenths-of-a-mile path along the water, puts you within easy reach of the corridor without touching Squire Pope Road at all. Skull Creek Marina itself, with its deepwater slips and Intracoastal access, is the anchor point for that walk, and it's worth treating as a destination on its own rather than just a landmark you pass on the way to dinner.
The practical version of this for anyone who lives in the Plantation: the closure of one restaurant changed where you'd book a table, not whether the corridor is worth the walk or the ride. If your routine used to be Old Fort Pub on special occasions and Boathouse or Dockside the rest of the time, that routine still works. It's just missing its formal option, and the Fort Mitchel boardwalk you used to walk off a big dinner is sitting there for anyone who wants to make the trip on its own terms.
Skull Creek has always been the part of the island where residents eat, not the part built for tourists passing through Shelter Cove or Harbour Town. Losing a fifty-year restaurant is a real loss, and it's fair to miss it. But the corridor's actual character, a working waterfront with a handful of honest seafood spots and a quiet Civil War site tucked behind them, is intact. It just asks a little more of you now to go find the fort on purpose instead of on the way to dinner.
If you're the kind of person who notices when a place like this changes and wants to talk through what else is shifting around Hilton Head Plantation, from Spring Lake to the golf corridors along Bear Creek and Dolphin Head, I'd love to hear from you. You can find more on the neighborhood through Carolyn Kraus Realty's Hilton Head Plantation page, and if Skull Creek's food scene has you thinking about how other Lowcountry communities handle the same kind of change, our look at Moss Creek's restaurant row covers similar ground on the other side of the island. Let's Connect.
