Half the sugar, all the flavor
LighterSide offers tasty, healthy food to Darlington County
By Melissa Rollins, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
Going out to eat with friends can be fun, unless you have a food allergy or dietary restriction; then it just becomes a chore. The LighterSide in Hartsville wants to take away the guessing game when it comes to eating out and give people a fun place to meet up with friends.
Catrina Penny is a diabetic. She said that that fact led her to look for alternatives when eating out, even something as simple as barbecue has large amounts of sugar in the sauce, but she didn’t have much luck.
“There is no place to really go, if you’re diabetic, to have a healthy meal,” Penny said. “Everything right now is manufactured and has things like corn syrup and lots of sugar. I just felt like there had to be a better way.”
Knowing that there are others in the same position, she began formulating the idea that would become the LighterSide.
“At the restaurant, we make everything from scratch,” Penny said. “We have special ketchup, a no high fructose corn syrup ketchup, brought in. We make all our sauces from search so we control the sugar and the salt and the additives that go into them.”
Everything at the restaurant, even the bar, revolves around the idea that healthier food does not equal food that tastes bland.
“To lower the sugar content, a lot of our sauces have some sugar and some Truvia,” Penny said. “Behind the bar, we use Truvia to make our simple syrups. We are about 90 percent gluten free. With our brunch, we have gluten free pancakes, French toast, biscuits; almost all of the flour we use in the restaurant is gluten free.”
With an experienced chef from Charleston, Penny said that she is excited to bring new things to Hartsville.
“We are putting a different spin on things,” Penny said. “Our chef is from Charleston and when I told her what I wanted to do, she said ‘We can do this. I know how to cook like this.’ When we do a new dish, we go through and dissect the recipe and see how we can make it healthier.”
Penny said her restaurant puts a healthy spin on their entire menu so no matter their food needs, or wants, everyone can find something they like.
“Going out to dinner has become a pastime and you want to be able to do that but you don’t want to be so singled out, to be the only person eating off the smaller healthy menu,” she said. “Instead of singling people out, we went across the board and everything is healthy,” Penny said. “That’s what LighterSide is: is a lighter side of all food. We take things we love and there are ways to take things like the chunk of fat or salt that we don’t need out of it. And it can still taste good.”
