By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer

After learning about the health hazards of trans fat during a Chicago food show last year, John Keener, owner of the Charleston Crab House, thought about his three young children.

“They eat about 70 percent of their meals here,” Keener said at his James Island restaurant, one of three Charleston Crab House eateries in the Lowcountry. “They like chicken fingers, French fries and fried shrimp.”

For 20 years, Charleston Crab House had been using cooking oils containing trans fat, said Keener, who also operates a Charleston Crab House in Columbia. A trans-fat oil is formed when manufacturers add hydrogen to vegetable oil, a process called hydrogenation. Hydrogenated fat increases the shelf life of food and makes foods crispier, creamier and richer.

However, trans fat reportedly clogs arteries and raises the level of low-density lipoprotein, or “bad cholesterol,” both of which contribute to heart disease.

That is what got Keener thinking about his children. In November, Keener’s restaurants replaced trans-fat cooking oil with natural, trans fat-free canola oil made from cottonseed. Doing so has attracted more diners to his restaurants, Keener said.

Although the healthier oil costs about 20% more, that cost increase is not passed on to Crab House customers, Keener said.

“Because our customer volume has increased, the switch will pay for itself,” Keener said.

In the national concern over trans fat, a public health issue Forbes magazine likens to the uproar against tobacco in the 1990s, New York City’s board of health voted last December to ban trans fat from its restaurants. Big Apple eateries must eliminate the ingredient by July 2008.

Here in the Lowcountry, many restaurants have already done so, and without being nudged by a government mandate.

In July, West Ashley-based TBonz Restaurant Group, which owns 19 restaurants in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, stopped using trans-fat shortening largely because of customer inquiries, TBonz Chief Operating Officer David Miller said.

“We have found that over the years, consumers become more and more health conscious. So we started listening to their needs through their questions,” Miller explained.

TBonz restaurants now use a trans fat-free liquid shortening. The switch costs TBonz an extra $10,000 a year, but because the cost is spread over 12 months and shared among the company’s restaurants, TBonz did not raise its menu prices, Miller said.

The Charleston-based Maverick Southern Kitchens restaurant group, which owns Slightly North of Broad, High Cotton and Old Village Post House, has been cooking with canola rather than trans-fat oils for the past 12 years, said spokeswoman Laura Bright.

“We do not use any trans fats at all,” Bright said, adding that Maverick Southern Kitchens’ restaurants do use small amounts of natural pork, duck and meat fat, in addition to butter.

In December, state Sen. David Thomas, R-Greenville, filed a proposed bill requiring restaurants serving food with trans fats to post a sign saying so.

Dennis Quick is senior staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.

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