If you have ever eaten fish in Savannah, there’s a decent chance a Russo cut it. The name has been on seafood there for generations. Charles Russo III is the one carrying that name in Bluffton now, and the way he got there is my favorite part of the story.
It starts with a milk crate. Russo was three or four years old, standing in his grandfather’s shop on 40th Street, wearing a little apron of his own. The crate got him up to the cutting rack. Fridays were whiting days, and a spot at the table was always saved for him to wash fish, gut them, and pull heads.
His grandfather ran a tight shop. Russo remembers riding in the truck to the shrimp docks, where his job was icing boxes, and his grandfather wouldn’t let a single one onto the truck until he’d dumped it out and checked every shrimp himself. That was the Russo standard, and nobody argued with it.
You’d think a kid raised like that would stay put. Russo didn’t, at least not right away. He figured he’d had enough, went to culinary school in Tallahassee, Florida, and cooked his way through Atlanta and then downtown Savannah, eventually running a kitchen as chef de cuisine. He was good at it.
Charles Russo III
But professional kitchens eat up the holidays. They eat weekends and family dinners and everything else that happens when other people are off work. Russo comes from a big family and missing that time wore on him more than any long shift did. He tells it plainly: The work he loved was costing him the people he loved. Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be the people.
So, he went looking for a way back to seafood that still left room for a life. The opening came when a longtime supplier serving Hilton Head Island went out of business. Russo started pitching himself to chefs on the island, and a friend who was in the spice trade offered to ride along and introduce him around. He had no shop, so his father let him use the family’s place at night. His small crew clocked in at six, cut fish until two in the morning, loaded one truck, and he was driving to Hilton Head at sunrise – for five years. Russo says it made him a better businessman. It also made him tired.
In 2018, he bought land in Bluffton on Red Cedar Street after spotting a man hammering in a “for sale” sign. That’s where Russo’s Fresh Seafood is today, with a retail counter and an outdoor space where customers can sit down and eat what he sells.
Bluffton is a different crowd than the one his grandfather served. Many customers are transplants from bigger cities, and they come in asking for cod and halibut, which Russo says he never once sold growing up. So, he teases them gently, tells them they’re not in the north anymore, and hands them a sheepshead. He watches their seafood vocabulary grow, and he gets a kick out of it. The grouper bones become soup, and nothing goes to waste, just like at the old shop.
But the fish lessons aren’t really the point. Russo wants people to feel at home. Customers still tell him they remember him as a kid in his grandfather’s shop, and he says that stops him every time. It means the family name still stands for something.
That’s the thread through all of it. Savannah or Bluffton, a milk crate or a pavilion, Russo is doing the same thing his grandfather did: showing up, doing it right, and making people feel like they belong at the table.
Jesse Blanco