I came to this port city to see if I could get in anyway. I wanted to see what the fuss was all about.
I discovered a good, young restaurant with a zeal for its location and a passion for selling it hard. Mr. Brock makes a mean shrimp and grits at Husk, which is in a beautiful restored 1893 Queen Anne home in the town center. Bartenders carve fine country ham from suppliers like Finchville and Newsom’s and serve it with top-notch bourbon in a barroom next to the restaurant that’s as pretty as any on earth. It’s comfortable on the Husk bandwagon. Everyone’s happy. But as they say down here, I’ll tell you what: I ate at McCrady’s, too. And that restaurant is one of only a few outside the first tier of American cities that could compete in any of them. It is marvelous, well worth a two-hour drive from Columbia, the state capital, or the flight from New York.
Of course, coming to this salty gem of a city would be worth it even if neither restaurant had ever opened. Charleston, with fewer than 125,000 residents, is one of the great eating towns of the American South, on par with New Orleans for quality if nowhere near it for size or variety.
I’ve been there once and was captivated by the place. Can’t wait to get back.
YUM!!
I guess it’s ok with the chef that he attended a place originally founded as a Yankee school…
🙂
A friend of mine is a pastry chef from JW and she is 4.0!!
One of my favorite cities.
Hmmm … didn’t the onlie begetter of this blog launch on a weight reduction campaign for himself? (I write, by the way, as one of the spherically challenged myself.)
9 years in Coastal SC and I have yet to hear a bad word about Chucktown. The 125K population is highly misleading though (that is the city which is alternatively very expensive or very unappealing), the 3 county MSA is 600K.
Charleston is truly God’s gift to the Eastern Seaboard.
Before I was “In Texas”, I lived in LA (Baton Rouge) for several years, and often went to NOLA on business. My view of Charleston (which I love to visit, I don’t get there often enough) is that it is like the French Quarter, but cleaner and safer. Food is very good, but I would not say it is better than NOLA. IMHO, NOLA has the best food anywhere in the country. I’m getting hungry just thinking about some good gumbo and an alligator po-boy, and maybe some turtle soup (with the splash of sherry), bread pudding, ….
I am baffled at how the Food Editor of the NYT would go to Charleston and order shrimp and grits. That is the obligatory dish everyone has to have on their menu for the tourists. The culinary equivelant would be going to Daniel or Per Se and asking for a Hebrew National hot dog, because that’s what New York is famous for. I admit I’m a food snob; I just assumed the Food Edirtor of the Times would be too!