The son of a seafood legend, Jesse Sandole followed a coastal path from Nantucket to Charleston to chart his own course. Today, his 167 Raw outposts combine new-school versions of briny classics with effortless hospitality and a solid sense of his seaside homes.

When he arrived, there was a ready-made crew of familiar faces to receive him. Many of them were either friends from home who had ventured South first, or part of an older generation of Nantucket emigreés and summer regulars who paved the trail between the two cities in the late-1970s. “Whether it was my friends’ parents, older kids I knew growing up or people from Charleston, like [restaurateur] Hank Holliday, who used to paint houses up in Nantucket and now has a house up there, I knew a lot of people,” he says. “There’s always been this connection between Nantucket and Charleston.” And, of course, nearly all of them knew Jesse’s dad.

Bill Sandole is a Nantucket institution. He started out selling seafood wholesale toward the end of the 1970s. Over the ensuing years, he grew frustrated with the instability of the business as Nantucket became increasingly driven by seasonal tourism, but the demand for his speciality seafood never wavered and the people who had tasted it elsewhere began asking to buy from him directly. “He had so many back-door retail customers, people who were clamoring for whatever he would sell them,” Jesse says. “By the time he finally gave in and opened a retail store, in the early-1990s, he already had a backlog of people lined up, thrilled to go in the front door.”

Jesse was raised in the waterman tradition of his father. As a result, nearly every Nantucket landmark that holds significance for Jesse is related to the water and those experiences—from Great Point Lighthouse, where Bill first started scalloping, to the waters off Madaket Beach, where Bill famously caught a haul of striped bass that set his wholesale business in motion.

Jesse was also a regular fixture around his dad’s shop, then called 167 Seafood, and witnessed the business grow and evolve to suit the changing times. Growing up, and later during college breaks, he performed a variety of roles, from washing dishes and cutting fish to working the boats and prepping ceviche, bluefish patê and other fresh-made grocery items sold in the market.

Eventually, Jesse began to consider those moments as more than just a side gig on the path toward adulthood. What if, he wondered, he could take the lessons he learned from dad and make a go of selling seafood fulltime There was a lot he knew he could do to build onto his dad’s Nantucket market. And, he believed, Charleston was primed for the same kind of thing.

His dad wasn’t so sure at first. Turning your passion into a profession isn’t always an easy endeavor—or financially stable—especially when it comes to the business of selling seafood. But Jesse forged ahead. He opened 167 Raw in a tiny storefront on East Bay Street in Charleston in 2014, and took the reins of his dad’s shop in Nantucket—now called 167 Raw, as well—shortly thereafter.

“I’ve been here fourteen years now, and I’ve always been struck by the parallels between Charleston and Nantucket,” Jesse says. “The seafood comparables are different. We’re used to big industry in New England, with tons of fishing boats and multiple ports—down here, it’s a bit different and you have to work a little bit harder to get really great product.”

Jesse’s original idea to create a take-away market in Charleston similar to the Nantucket business met with challenges from the beginning. “We were learning what worked and didn’t work as we went along,” Jesse says. “Ultimately, the problems were mostly good ones—people loved coming in, and they just wanted to sit and stay rather than pick up market items and take them home.” But he was nimble, quickly adjusting the space and the offerings to suit his customers. “I just refused to give up,” he says. His head-down determination, confident leadership and willingness to pitch in when staff was short—all buoyed by the support of an enthusiastic and infinitely patient crowd of repeat patrons—kept the ship afloat.

The sense that he would have to move to a larger space to grow the business set in not long after Jesse opened the doors on East Bay, and he began searching. The hunt for the perfect spot took two years. And once he finally settled on the new location, a landmark building on Lower King Street that had previously housed a beloved Italian restaurant, it took another two years to complete construction and restoration on the building.

In the interim, he kept working on the Nantucket establishment, growing his team and strengthening the connections between both locations. “People who are part of our team will often be in New England for summer and then move down South to work in the winter,” Jesse says. “It’s not vacation, but it’s definitely a fun new outlet.”

When the dust finally settled on the new King Street location in early 2020 and Jesse welcomed guests to the new and improved 167 Raw, the results were clearly worth the wait. Throngs of eager diners filled the tables, bar stools and outdoor courtyard to sip a newly introduced slate of craft cocktails and feast on crudo, crispy oysters, pastrami’d swordfish and and Baha-inspired specialities like the house pork carnitas.

The design is as enticing as the menu. Interior designer Kathleen Hay, a family friend with whom Jesse had worked on his Nantucket house, helped define the aesthetic that brought Jesse’s vision to life. And no detail was too small for their attention. They removed wooden walls to expose antique bricking, only to have the bricks removed and restacked by hand to ensure structural support, something Jesse shows off with pride. They commissioned multiple Urban Electric designs to create a nautical-meets-downtown vibe throughout the indoor and outdoor spaces. Old medicine bottles excavated during the build-out are on display in the dining room, signalling the building’s earliest use as a pharmacy. Wooden beams pulled from the ceiling during an effort to raise them higher were repurposed to refinish floors and create shiplap-style walls. A rear Dutch door leading from the kitchen to the outdoor bar calls to mind boat life and beach house in equal measure, and custom azure tiles surrounding the massive oven in the open kitchen pay homage to the water that inspired it all. Jesse even put his own cabinetry skills to use, making sliding barn doors for the bathrooms. And, of course, he brought the long wooden bench that served as overflow seating at the East Bay location to line the courtyard wall. The overall effect is an organic blending of old and new, Nantucket and Charleston, in a way that feels fresh and nostalgic and totally relevant.

“When people from Nantucket come in, I love seeing their reaction,” Jesse says. “They are surprised and also not—somehow it seems familiar to them, even though it’s their first time here.”