On the up-and-up

Marc and Liz Hudacsko don’t just own a restaurant on the ground floor of downtown Charleston’s Meeting Street Lofts, a sprawling residential complex that opened in 2018. The couple also lives in the 264-unit building, which its developers promote as “modern,” “trendy,” and “upscale.”

After all, the Hudacskos wanted to belong to a community electrified by personal interactions. They’d moved down from New Jersey in 2015 in part because the food-and-beverage scene seemed so friendly. Marc, a born maître d’, is the type to strike up conversations in the elevator, as he did recently at Meeting Street Lofts. Noting that his fellow passengers were dressed for a big night out, he asked where the twosome was headed.

“The Archer!” the woman said brightly.

Marc was crestfallen.

“Guys, you could have gone in jeans.”

Across the rapidly urbanizing South, mixed-use developments like Meeting Street Lofts are opening at a swift clip. Dedicating street-level space to restaurants is a practice that appeals to city planners, who like to see people out and about, and developers, who appreciate the reliable source of rental income. Plus, in cities with outsized culinary reputations, such as Charleston, Nashville, and Atlanta, an on-site restaurant may impress prospective tenants more than a rooftop pool or Peleton fleet in the gym.

Yet if the situation in Charleston, where I visited four upmarket mixed-use developments, is any indication, apartment dwellers mostly aren’t forming deep bonds with the restaurant downstairs. What might have seemed like the ultimate amenity a decade or so ago has largely lost its luster in an era when people can order food delivered from just about anywhere and mix drinks from the home bars they built up during the pandemic. “I thought we’d see residents come down in pajamas and have a Manhattan and a burger,” Marc said. Instead, they appear to be saving The Archer for a special occasion.

“If I had an apartment, I’d be here all the time,” a middle-aged white man with a square in his pocket and dirty Ketel martini in his hand told his friends, all of whom were similarly outfitted for a private dinner at Costa. Before their meal began, they clustered around a corner of the bar near the front of the unapologetically posh Italian restaurant, where personal magnums are so common that the restaurant’s menu clarifies their owners will be charged the corkage fee twice.

Costa, located beneath The Jasper, just north of The Battery, is a prime example of total disconnect between the residential and restaurant portions of a pricy new development. While older professionals might fantasize about dropping by its bar after work, The Jasper’s demo skews considerably younger, according to the bartender who stirred all those martinis. Most tenants telecommute, so don’t think of the two-year-old Costa as a layover between home and office. 

Nor are they especially smitten by its ambiance. On weekends, the bartender told me, they’ll “come down for an espresso martini or two, and then go somewhere more vibrant.”

By contrast, Beautiful South, at the base of The Guild, was developed at least partly with the building’s residents in mind. “This is us on our best behavior,” Tina Heath-Schuttenberg said of the 2023 sequel to Kwei Fei, which she and her husband, David Schuttenberg, opened in 2019. Whereas Kwei Fei leads with the Sichuan peppers and loud music that dovetail with the Schuttenbergs’ punk sensibilities, Beautiful South serves dishes inspired by Southern China and the Chinese-American canon tin a stylish dining room that edges toward serene.

Heath-Schuttenberg said a few residents have grasped the advantages of living above a takeout specialist. One upstairs customer has ordered the General’s Tso’s so many times that he once asked whether there was a different cook on the sauce station. Turned out the new guy had missed a step.

“You appreciate having someone who knows your food so intimately,” she said.

More frequently, though, residents disregard physical distance when choosing meals. “These people will Uber Eats a cup of coffee,” said Heath-Schuttenberg, who admits her vision of Beautiful South’s bar becoming The Guild’s default gathering place takes shape only when the building’s fire alarm system is triggered by mistake.

Residents [of the Guild], many of whom have primary residences in New York City, instead tend to treat the restaurant as a kind of bodega. Specifically, Heath-Schuttenberg said, when tenants find themselves short a decent bottle of wine, Beautiful South is the most convenient place to buy it.

When I started reporting this story, I assumed building residents would be flocking to their in-house restaurants. That’s because it’s been widely reported that apartment kitchens are getting smaller. Since 2014, the average size of U.S. studio apartments has decreased by about 10 percent to 445 square feet. Many of those cuts are being made in the kitchen. “The kitchen is probably your greatest variable,” a real estate development exec last year told the Wall Street Journal.

While the shrinkage of residential kitchens is well documented, researchers are just starting to puzzle out the phenomenon’s consequences. Authors of a study published by Cities & Health in 2024 called for more scholarship on the topic, suggesting “poor apartment kitchen designs… are a public health concern, given the health benefits of home cooking.” Their informants complained about faulty ventilation that trapped the smell of fish, cramped cupboards that limited how many ingredients they could keep at home, sinks too slight for pot-washing, and ovens too dinky for roasts.

I wanted to see these detrimental mini kitchens for myself, so I tried to set up sales visits to a few high-end high-rises in downtown Charleston. These days, though, most properties actively discourage apartment shoppers from showing up in person. With salespeople undoubtedly keen to quit wasting time on lookie-loos, their websites flaunt prerecorded virtual tours as the best way to peek inside building units. 

Almost immediately, I realized these apartments didn’t have a kitchen deficit. In a Morrison Yard video, when the host reached the “custom gourmet kitchen,” she vowed to viewers, “Pretty soon, you’ll find yourself recreating your favorite meals from some of Charleston’s best restaurants!”

It appeared the kitchen wasn’t the problem. The problem was the dining room.

Dining rooms were essentially nonexistent in the new buildings I cybertoured. For example, at The Jasper, the complex that’s home to Costa, only two of 17 one-bedroom floor plans included a dedicated dining area. 

From a Southern perspective, the disappearance of the dining room from luxury homes—The Jasper’s studios start at $2,100 a month, a touch more than the peninsula-wide average of $1,900 —is just as confounding as editing out the kitchen. As M. Nolan Gray pointed out in a 2024 Atlantic story subtitled “Dining space is dying,” walling off the dining room from the kitchen is an architectural vestige of “creating a separate sphere for ‘the help’.” But having a place for guests to sit down and hosts to entertain, even if it’s as humble as a porch bench, is a Southern tradition that transcends race, gender, and class. It’s the very meaning of hospitality.

The Hudacskos understand hospitality, and that run-in with the neighbors in the elevator left an impression. They’re now revising The Archer’s menu to make it fancier; among the additions is roasted octopus with sweet potatoes, bathed in ‘nduja vinaigrette sparked with tangerine juice, and ornamented with sea beans.

Sounds like a dish worth getting dressed up for.