The Eggs Up Grill restaurant was first established in 1997. Chris Skodras founded this eatery in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. The casual set-up and friendly atmosphere of this place made it an instant hit within the community.
As the name suggests, its menu majorly comprises egg-based dishes. However, with an increasing number of people opting for the vegan diet, it is important to ascertain whether they have any vegan options.
Answer: nobody can tell you. Eggs Up Grill publishes calories and macros but no allergen data and no ingredient lists, and its own nutrition guide states it “cannot guarantee that any menu items is vegetarian” — let alone vegan. Nothing on this menu can be confirmed vegan from an official source.
That is a genuinely unusual position for a restaurant chain, and it needs stating before anything else on this page.
The Notice That Governs This Whole Page
The only nutrition document Eggs Up Grill links from its site is a one-page PDF. Its columns are calories, total fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrate, fibre, sugars and protein. There is no allergen column of any kind, and no ingredient lists anywhere. The word “allergen” appears zero times on the menu page, and the site has no allergen page at all — the URL simply does not exist. Item pages carry one-line marketing descriptions and nothing more.
The PDF does carry a notice, and it is the single most important thing published about eating here:
“NOTICE: Please be aware that we cannot guarantee that any menu items is vegetarian*, or free from allergens, including eggs, fish, milk, peanuts, shellfish, soy, tree nuts, or wheat. Our normal restaurant operations involve shared cooking and preparation areas, equipment and utensils. In addition, ingredients or production methods used by our suppliers may change, there may be product differences among regional suppliers, or we may need to substitute ingredients in menu items.”
“*Eggs Up Grill offers vegetarian menu items, which do not include animal meats, but may include eggs, dairy, fish, honey and any foods with animal by-product.”
Read that second sentence again. The brand declines to guarantee even vegetarian status, and defines its own “vegetarian” as something that may contain fish and honey. If “vegetarian” at Eggs Up Grill can include fish, the word carries no information for a vegan reader, and no item on the menu is designated vegan by the brand at all.
The kitchen adds one more: “We offer gluten-friendly items, however, our kitchen is not a 100% gluten-free facility.”
Corrections To What This Page Used To Say
Avocado Toast Now Comes With Eggs
This page used to call the avocado toast “an entirely vegan option” you could order “without any apprehensions”. The item is now sold as Avocado Toast and Eggs: “Toasted Tuscan bread, smashed avocado, and fresh picante salsa served with two eggs.”
Whether the eggs can be left off is not published. Neither are the ingredients of the bread or the salsa. So this is now a question to ask, not a dish to order on trust.
The Yogurt Parfait Is Now Honey Berry Yogurt Crunch
The old advice was to order the fruit and yogurt parfait and “request a vegan alternative from your waiter”. The parfait is gone. What replaced it is Honey Berry Yogurt Crunch: “Fresh strawberries and blueberries, low-fat vanilla yogurt, and honey granola crunch.”
That is dairy yogurt and honey, and no vegan yogurt substitute is advertised anywhere on the site. There is no version of this item to order.
Oatmeal — Renamed, And Not Confirmable
The oatmeal brunch bowl is now Oatmeal & Fruit: “Cinnamon, brown sugar, raisins, and granola. Add fresh strawberries, blueberries, and bananas.” The nutrition PDF lists it at 460 calories.
It is probably the closest thing on the menu to a vegan breakfast, and it still cannot be confirmed. The granola’s composition is not published, granola commonly contains honey, and the brand’s own notice explicitly says its vegetarian items may contain honey. Ask what is in the granola before you order it.
Potato Salad And Bagels Are Not On The Menu
Neither appears anywhere on Eggs Up Grill’s current menu — “potato salad” and “bagel” both return nothing at all. The bagel section this page used to carry (which also wandered off into breakfast catering in Greenville, South Carolina) described a product this chain does not sell. Both sections have been removed.
Toast Is Not “The Safest Menu Item”
This page used to say toast “doesn’t contain any animal products” and could be picked with confidence. That was never sourced. Toast exists only as an accompaniment (“Served with toast and choice of home fries or grits”), no bread ingredients are published anywhere on the site, and there is no statement about whether the grill butters it. Diner toast is commonly buttered by default. The specific question to ask is whether the bread contains dairy or egg and whether it is buttered on the grill.
The PETA Claim Has Been Removed
An earlier version of this page said Eggs Up Grill “has become more inclusive of vegans” through pressure from PETA, and that “new gluten-free and vegan-friendly dishes are available on the menu now”. There is no support for either statement. No item on the current menu is designated vegan or vegetarian by the brand, and the brand refuses to guarantee vegetarian status at all.
Sides: What Exists, And What You’d Have To Ask
Home Fries. Exists as a side across the menu — with the Egg-Centric, with the bennies, and with the burgers. No ingredient or allergen data is published, so the old caveat here (butter versus vegetable oil) simply cannot be resolved from any official source. Ask what the potatoes are cooked in.
Grits. Exists as a side. No ingredient data at all. Grits are the classic case where butter, cream or milk is stirred in as standard and never appears in a menu description. Ask whether there is dairy in them and whether a plain version is possible.
Toast. See above — bread ingredients undisclosed, buttering practice undisclosed.
None of these three can be listed as vegan on this page, and none can be called non-vegan either. They are unknowns, and the specific unknown is named in each case.
Beverages
The published beverage list is short, and it is not the list this page used to print. In full, it is: Cafe Mocha, Sweet Cream Vanilla Cold Brew, Mocha Cold Brew, Fresh Brewed Coffee, Caramel Cinnamon Smile and Sparkling Strawberry Lemonade.
Gone entirely: the Classic Mimosa, the Poinsettia Mimosa and the Good Morning Sunrise. None of the three appears on the current beverages menu, so all three recommendations have been deleted.
Renamed: the Strawberry Lemonade Spritzer is now Sparkling Strawberry Lemonade — “Lemonade, club soda, and fresh strawberries.” Still no ingredient disclosure, so still unconfirmed.
Not on the published menu at all: the cranberry, tomato, orange and apple juices; “all popular soft drinks”; sweet and unsweet iced tea; and plain lemonade. This page listed all of them as vegan-friendly. None of them is published as an Eggs Up Grill beverage, so none can be confirmed to exist, let alone to be vegan.
Of what is published, fresh brewed coffee is the least complicated thing on the list. The cold brews and the mocha drinks carry dairy in their names or descriptions, and no plant-milk option is advertised anywhere on the site — worth asking about rather than assuming.
The Growth of Veganism
Veganism is not a passing habit. Writing in Forbes on 2 November 2018, Janet Forgrieve reported that “the number of U.S. consumers identifying as vegan grew from 1% to 6% between 2014 and 2017, a 600% increase, according to GlobalData”, and that sales of plant-based alternatives to meat, cheese, milk and eggs “grew 17% over the past year, while overall U.S. food sales rose only 2%”. Those figures are from 2018 and we have not found a more recent equivalent, so read them as a snapshot of that period rather than today’s market.
Restaurants that do not serve vegan options at present can include them on the menu — and, just as usefully, can publish what is in the food they already serve. Eggs Up Grill currently does neither.
Other Restaurants in Pawleys Island
As a resident of Pawleys Island, you might be on the lookout for restaurants with more to offer a vegan diner. Four independents have been named on this page for some time: Bistro 217, Chive Blossom, Gios Italian Kitchen and Anything Froz Acai Bowls.
They are listed here as names to look into, and nothing more. Each previously carried a description of its vegan offering on this page — a “diverse vegan menu”, a “wide variety of vegan options”, and so on. None of that was sourced to anything, independents change their menus without notice, and none of these four publishes allergen or ingredient information we can check. So the descriptions have been removed rather than restated. Call ahead or read the current menu yourself before you make the trip.
Summing It Up
Eggs Up Grill is a breakfast chain built around eggs, and it publishes less about what is in its food than almost any other chain covered on this site. There is no allergen chart, no ingredient list, and no vegan or vegetarian designation on a single menu item.
The brand’s own guide says it “cannot guarantee that any menu items is vegetarian”, and that the items it does call vegetarian may contain eggs, dairy, fish, honey and animal by-products. Combined with shared cooking and preparation areas, equipment and utensils — also the brand’s own words — that means this page cannot honestly tell you that anything at Eggs Up Grill is vegan.
What it can tell you is what still exists and what to ask. Oatmeal & Fruit is the most plausible candidate, subject to what is in the granola. Home fries, grits and toast are unknowns with a specific question attached to each: cooking fat, dairy, and butter respectively. The avocado toast now comes with two eggs. And the parfait is now made with dairy yogurt and honey, with no substitute offered.
If you eat here, eat here knowing that — and put the questions to the kitchen rather than to the menu, because the menu does not answer them.
