One of the reasons I moved away from Charleston last year is I felt like I was being held hostage in my North Charleston ranch house by high prices and vicious traffic. As a small business owner, I had neither the time nor money to experience the place that tourists (or at least those tourists who read Southern Living) have named the South’s best city for 10 years running.
But now that I live in Macon, Georgia, I get to see Charleston as visitors see it. When I go back, I stay downtown and eat at new restaurants—which haven’t gotten any cheaper, but the meals are easier to justify in the absence of a home kitchen.
Usually, I spend a day or two at most in Charleston when in town for Spirited Brunch purposes. But I recently had a chance to spend close to a week there in connection with a new Lowcountry Foodways program at the College of Charleston; I was invited to help stimulate faculty members’ thinking about the cross-departmental curriculum.
As you might imagine, the scholars had some sophisticated questions. Or so it seemed to me, since I’m accustomed to answering just one question about Charleston food: What’s new?
Fortunately, that’s a question I’m now qualified to answer, with the caveat that it’s a mistake to skip out on places with long local histories when collecting culinary passport stamps. Easily my best breakfast of this trip was at Fast and French, which opened on Broad Street in 1984. Looking down the block toward the social media-controlled hordes at Sorelle’s Mercato, a swanky café where pizza’s priced at $40, I could only figure those folks don’t care for warm hospitality, honest food, and the kind of artistic streak that once wound all around Charleston.
Here, a few standouts from my catchup tour (interestingly, none of them are located on the peninsula):
CudaCo. Deckhouse
I’ve been a fan of chef Shaun Brian since his days as executive chef at Parcel 32, an upper King Street restaurant that was cursed with a succession of scandals before its 2018 opening. I was impressed both by his ability to cook through the noise, and his deft handling of seafood.
Almost from the moment that he and Chris John opened CudaCo. Seafood House, a fish market on James Island, I started talking up its lunch counter as one of the city’s most underappreciated dining destinations. (While I don’t have a logbook to consult here, my guess is I might have waited a few months for Covid vaccines to become widely available before dealing out restaurant recommendations.)
CudaCo.’s no longer a secret, particularly in the wake of its Deckhouse debut in June. The outdoor raw bar doesn’t serve anything hearty enough to qualify as a meal: The menu’s devoted to crudo and ceviche, although it includes a fetching twirl of fish skins for eaters who can only stand so much slippery. As always, the fish is magnificently fresh and treated with just the right amount of citrus.
769 Folly Road, instagram.com/cudacodeckhouse
Bar Weems
For years, it took some work to find Bar Weems, Weems Pennington and Sharon Brown’s roving noodle project. But since it last December settled into a permanent home on Reynolds Avenue in North Charleston, the ramen house has been hard to miss: The exterior brick wall painted with a green, noodle-slurping monster certainly caught my attention when I drove away from the latest location of Maya del Sol upon discovering Raul Sanchez’s dinners require reservations (His Sunday brunch—one of my favorite morning meals in Charleston—is still a seat-yourself-at-the-counter situation.)
To enter Bar Weems, you walk through a door that doubles as the monster’s mouth, a detail that’s consistent with the quirkiness within. There are ramen devotees who tediously overanalyze every component of the Japanese soup, and then there are the ramen fans who gravitate toward late nights, loud music, and the rambunctious qualities of pork. Based on Bar Weems’ playful cocktails, casual dining room, and embrace of cheese seasoning powder, I’m betting that Pennington and Brown belong to the latter camp. While I only sampled a small sliver of the menu, the excellence of their broth suggests it deserves further exploration.
1921 Reynolds Ave., North Charleston, barweems.com
Second State Navy Yard
Maybe I’m biased toward coffeeshops these days because Macon only has three by my count, two of which are outwardly Christian. (To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with Christianity, but I prefer a separation of church and cold brew.) Still, I was totally smitten by the newest location of Second State, a local chain that got its start on Beaufain Street in 2012.
Housed amid a collection of century-old storehouses, Second State is bound to get very busy as the retail and residential development of North Charleston’s Navy Yard continues. In the meantime, though, the coffee’s terrific, and the setting—just west of the Cooper River—is almost serene.
2156 Noisette Blvd., North Charleston, secondstatecoffee.com
Sullivan’s Fish Camp
Like the wedding dictum, Sullivan’s Fish Camp is kind of old, somewhat new, and makes good use of the borrowed and blue—so long as that final category encompasses the nearby sea. To briefly recap its resume, the restaurant opened in 1988 as Sullivan’s Seafood Restaurant and was purchased in 2021 by the hospitality firm responsible for the creation of Basic Kitchen in downtown Charleston and redesign of the Post House Inn in Mount Pleasant. Last year, ownership of the reimagined seafood shack shifted to a group including longtime FIG chef Jason Stanhope, who now runs the kitchen.
Under Stanhope, Sullivan’s the quintessential example of a restaurant that’s a million times better than it needs to be. I got the sense from other patrons at the bar that they’d be completely satisfied with lobster rolls and boozy frozen drinks, both of which are available. But savvy diners will find evidence of FIG’s famously high standards on every plate: The care expended just on the selection and slicing of the springtime vegetables that garnished my fish was astounding.
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