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Cuisine

Ma Daisy’s Porch in Bluffton grew up around a 1945 deer tongue warehouse

Ma Daisy’s Porch on May River Road brings Chef Bridgette Frazier’s Gullah cooking, a bakery, a market and a Gullah heritage center to the site of an old deer tongue warehouse.

Tan Adirondack chairs around a tall blue sculpture on a lawn at Ma Daisy's Porch, with the metal-roofed building behind.

Photo: Google Maps

Ma Daisy's Porch at 1255 May River Road, in the Old Town Bluffton Historic District, puts four places on one property: Chef B's, a restaurant serving coastal Southern and Gullah-inspired food; Backus Bakery; De' Market, an open-air market for Gullah retailers and Black entrepreneurs; and the Bluffton Gullah Cultural Heritage Center. The porch is named for Ma Daisy, and its own line for the place is "Four experiences. One porch." The directory entry is Ma Daisy's Porch.

Chef Bridgette Frazier cooks from family recipes

Bridgette Frazier is head chef at Chef B's, and the menu is built on family recipes. She is also the founder and chairwoman of the heritage center on the same property, which describes her as a fifth-generation Gullah descendant, born in Charleston and raised in Bluffton.

The menu is written in the language it cooks from. Seafood comes "from da crik," supper is "Suppa," and the children's menu is "Fa Da Chillun'." The plate to order is the Geechee Surf & Turf at weekend brunch, smothered oxtails and grilled shrimp on creamy grits under crab butter gravy, because it carries the name of the Gullah Geechee heritage the whole porch was built to honor. Brunch runs Friday through Sunday from 8 a.m., and tables are booked through OpenTable.

The Deer Tongue Warehouse dates to about 1945

Before the porch, the property held a restaurant called Pepper's Porch. Its dining room was inside an old corrugated-metal-and-wood building known as the Deer Tongue Warehouse, which, according to an application filed with the Town of Bluffton in December 2021, had already been moved once, in the 1980s, and first stood across Huger Cove from the Seabrook House.

The dark wood-sided Ma Daisy's Porch building with a covered porch and outdoor tables on a sunny day.
Ma Daisy's Porch on May River Road.Photo: Roy Patrick (Patrick Investments), via Google Maps

In February 2022 the town's Historic Preservation Commission ruled that the warehouse, a 1945-era contributing structure in the historic district, had to be kept. Only its non-historic northern section and four outbuildings could come down, and the old building could be moved on the property. The heritage center's plan, filed with the town in 2023, was to take it apart, catalogue every salvageable piece with the nonprofit Re:Purpose Savannah, and rebuild it as the center.

Bread loaves, pastries and white roses arranged on a dark table with a teapot.
Breads and pastries.Photo: Ma Daisy's Porch, via Google Maps

Bluffton remembers the smell of deer tongue

Deer tongue is a plant, and the warehouse was named for it. The center's application to the town described what the building holds for Bluffton's Gullah families: workers tying deer tongue into bundles with twine, local Gullah farmers selling what they had grown, children playing underneath the building, "and memories of the smell of deer tongue permeating Bluffton."