Clifton Fish & Seafood

Mrs. Clifton, you got your blood-pressure medicine with you?? Vincent Miller, a Clifton cook, teases.

She shakes her head and moves on, checking the expanding row of tickets that line the kitchen wall, making sure the assembly line of breading, deep-frying and packing is done swiftly so that customers, most of whom she knows by face if not by name, can head home with dinner in hand.

She breaks free to check out the pungent fish-cleaning room, where Royal Smith expertly guts a fish while cutting the fool with Brandon Richardson and German Sanchez. “You can call me a fishmonger,” said Smith, who has been employed with Clifton’s for 25 years. Richardson and Sanchez take turns wielding a mechanized fish scaler, then loading one fish after the other onto plastic trays for delivery to the front counter.

“They say the economy is bad, but I don?t see it,” Clifton said. “People gotta eat.”

In a typical week, Clifton’s will sell 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of fish, 35 bushels of oysters and a similar number of bushels of crabs, all plucked from the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida.

Fridays and Saturdays are slammed. People know they have to get there early – the store closes at 7.

Family members and employees weave in and out of each other’s way as they call out special orders, answer the phone, man the cash register and eye the line of customers that swell and recede like the ocean tide.

“We all work together,” said Linda Clifton, Clarice Clifton’s daughter-in-law. “That’s how we get through it.”

The customers seem to relish the controlled pandemonium.

“It’ll be crowded most of the time, but it seems like I never see nobody get upset,” said Paul Wood. He had called in a 10-piece flounder order for his family when his son dialed him on his cell phone and asked to add a trout dinner.

Wood didn’t mind the short wait. “I order a little more so I’ll have fish and grits in the morning,” he grinned.

Scott Tyler, who has patronized Clifton’s for 20 years, relaxed outside, near his car, as he waited for his order to come up.

“I’ll tell you what, they deal with chaos very well,” he said. “The clientele are faithful to them, and they are faithful to their clientèle.”

The Cliftons have lived and breathed seafood all their lives. Benny Clifton, Clarice?s husband, crabbed for years off the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, along with their two sons, Curtis and Allen. Clarice Clifton often went out in the morning on the water with her husband, she said, working in the evening as a waitress. Benny Clifton, now retired, still keeps his hand in the fish store, coming in a day every other week, she said.

The Cliftons first entered the retail fish business in the 1980s, when Dockside Seafood came on the market in Mount Pleasant. The family operated it for several years until it was destroyed by Hurricane Hugo. When the chance came, they moved the business to Columbia, where the boys had attended elementary and middle school. Along the way, they changed the name.

The first Clifton Seafood opened in a trailer on nearby Two Notch Road; they moved to Decker about 12 or 13 years ago.

“Daddy said we’d give it a try, and we’ve been here ever since,” said Curtis Clifton, who tried his hand at plumbing before returning to the family business. The store only closes on Sundays. No one in the family can remember the last time they took a vacation.

Instead, they thrive on making Clifton’s the neighborhood hangout, a place where, if they don’t know your name, they still remember your preference for fish. It’s a place that draws a heavy African-American clientele, leavened with Asians and whites and the occasional young hip urban professional.

“I don’t care where I go, everybody knows Clifton’s,” Clarice Clifton said. “Everywhere I go, it’s How are you, Mrs. Clifton?”

As Friday afternoon became Friday evening, Curtis Clifton worked the Frymaster, lifting up the succulent, deep-fried pieces of whiting and flounder and trout out of the bubbling oil, topping the plates with French fries, a container of cole slaw and Clifton’s signature hush puppies. The breading is Clarice Clifton’s special mixture.

“We make our own cocktail sauce and tartar sauce, too,” Clarice Clifton said. “None of this ‘bought’ mess.”

Allen Clifton, Curtis’s brother, manned the front, along with Theresa Waiters and Mary Bell, who is known to cajole the few prickly customers with a deft hand and the occasional wry witticism.

Gwen Carolyn Henley and her husband, Eliger Henley, sat serenely on the front chairs, inhaling the sweet scent of fish and enjoying the atmosphere as they waited for 4 pounds of steamed crabs.

They live in Fort Lauderale, Fla., now, but visit relatives frequently. Gwen Henley said she always makes a point of coming to Clifton’s.

“The fish here just tastes different than in Florida,” Gwen Henley said.

“That’s what Clarice Clifton likes to hear – and wants to continue to hear.

“Everybody asks me when I’m going to quit,” she said. “I tell them I guess they’ll carry me out one day.”

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