In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, historic preservation runs headlong into modernization, and Frogmore stew shakes hands with New American cuisine.
I spent my youth fishing, casting shrimp nets, and gathering oysters along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. I also spent a good part of it eating the Creole classics of the region , from simple breakfast shrimp (now called shrimp and grits) to elaborate “country captains.” Like many other folk recipes, these dishes were served only in private homes. So when I returned to the city after a peripatetic career as a private chef in Florida, a photographer in the Caribbean and Europe, and a food editor in New York, I had a mission: to resurrect the traditional foods and cooking of Charleston and the surrounding Lowcountry. I started by opening a culinary bookstore, in 1986, when it was all but impossible to find ingredients such as stone-ground grits in the area. There were then only a handful of restaurants in town worth their salt. But as culinary historian Karen Hess and I worked in tandem on our Lowcountry cookbooks, young chefs began opening new restaurants. Within a few years, there were dozens of places offering their versions of shrimp and grits.
I closed my shop four years ago, but not a day goes by when someone doesn’t ask me where to eat Lowcountry cooking in this city. “At my house,” I still say, for although Charleston has beautifully designed modern bistros that serve delicious New American cuisine, some of the best local fare continues to be home-cooked. But traditions are regaining strength, and some powerful cooking is going on at the relatively new chef-owned places in town. It may be Italian or French, but the style is pure Charleston—the cooking that for centuries has blended the best of French, English, Caribbean, African, and Mediterranean influences. We set the standard for historical preservation; now we’re working to extend that standard to our culinary heritage.
Charleston’s Historic District consists of about a square mile of predominantly 18th- and 19th-century structures built on a peninsula surrounded by barrier islands. It’s the commercial center of the city, and King Street, the main retail artery, which bisects Charleston, offers a mile of shopping between Spring and Broad streets. Upper King, to the north of Calhoun Street, was once a low-rent district of wig shops and loan sharks. That’s not true anymore.
At the hip, two-year-old 39 Rue de Jean, uptown near the Visitors Bureau, I can’t resist dunking a piece of bread in a bowl of mussels steamed in one of six classic French preparations. The large, open space recalls a Paris brasserie, but sushi and burgers have been added to a menu that includes steak frites and plats du jour of braised rabbit and skate wing meunière. The raw seafood platter is piled with Atlantic Farms littlenecks, raised in the eight-foot tide of nearby Folly Creek. Just behind the restaurant, down an alley lined with tables, Rue de Jean’s owners have opened Coast, a seafood restaurant that features wood-grilled grouper, wahoo, and triggerfish.
Few mom-and-pop stores have survived the gentrification south of Calhoun Street, but at fred you can buy French and American bakeware, kitchen tools, boccie sets, and stainless-steel Charleston rice steamers from Fred and Judy Reinhard, who are also the sole distributors of Alessi products in South Carolina. For fine crystal and silver, stop by King Street’s 86-year-old Crogan’s Jewel Box.
Lower king street, south of Market Street, is the heart of the antiques district, where two intimate Italian restaurants are tucked away from the main drag. Fulton Five is the most romantic spot in town. I have gorged myself on their pappardelle with braised rabbit and the perfectly braised osso buco (the service is perfect, too). The fare is simpler (but no less wonderful) at Il Cortile del Re. A Charlestonian’s dream dinner might just be a plate of ravioli ai funghi porcini, a sampling of sheep’s-milk and goat’s-milk cheeses—such as truffled Sottocenere and pecorino aged in walnut leaves—and a bottle of one of their 75 Italian wines, at an outdoor table here.
The two best downtown restaurants for Lowcountry specialties couldn’t be more different. At Hominy Grill, a converted barbershop west of King Street, near the Medical University, chef Robert Stehling serves authentic southern dishes slightly updated (if tweaked at all): homemade sausage or country ham with biscuits at breakfast; a plate of collards alongside okra and tomatoes over rice at lunch; or a chicken coun try captain (a tomato-based curried r ice dish) at dinner. Desserts are as rich and as southern as they come—buttermilk and pecan pies (available by the slice or whole) and homey chocolate and butterscotch puddings. At Anson (north of the touristy City Market), where they grind their own organically grown heirloom corn, I recently asked manager Phil Pettus what else was fresh and local. He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with an invoice from Celeste and George Albers, shrimpers and organic farmers whom many Charlestonians know from the downtown farmers market. A minute later, I ordered grits, crab cakes (made with regional crabmeat), just-caught shrimp, and a variety of Celeste’s heirloom greens, barely wilted in olive oil with a hint of garlic.
As Charleston has grown, dozens of good restaurants have opened off the peninsula, many on the six barrier islands that surround the city. One of the newest, Al Di La, is a simple Northern Italian trattoria west of the Ashley River whose menu relies on the morning’s market offerings. Frogmore stew, the traditional Lowcountry seafood boil, is cleverly reworked with local clams, corn, and spicy sausage at Rosebank Farms Café, located at Bohicket Marina, about 25 miles from downtown but a short hop from neighboring Kiawah and Seabrook islands. The Old Post Office Restaurant, on Edisto Island, is about an hour south of town. Chef Philip Bardin is a native South Carolinian, and it shows in his splendid grits, quail, and oyster dishes. In the spring, be sure to ask for asparagus, grown on the island for him.
East of the Cooper River, north of town, there are two venerable restaurants doing business in strip malls. But don’t let the plain exteriors fool you. Alain Saley’s flounder in brown butter sauce has been dazzling Charlestonians since his first restaurant opened downtown, 20 years ago, and he’s still doing it right at Coco’s Café, in Mount Pleasant. No one in town cooks fish better, or more simply, than Patti and Buddy Thomas, of the Long Island Café, on the Isle of Palms (Long Island is its original name). And Patti’s bread pudding is one of the Lowcountry’s most delicious desserts.
But if you want to eat like a true sandlapper (as South Carolinians are called), you’ll have to cook like one. The best way to do that is to rent a beach house, as I do each year; gather ingredients at the farmers markets, roadside stands, and fishmongers; and cook up some of our great shrimp and crabs, our oysters and greens, our tomatoes and sweet potatoes yourself.
Leeward to the barrier islands are docks where shrimpers and fishermen sell their catch. For 20 years I’ve done business with the Crosbys, who, in addition to their wholesale seafood business, run Crosby’s Fish & Shrimp from their dock off Folly Beach. They also own Crosby’s Seafood, a market on the Ashley River that’s open seven days a week . Both sell stone-ground grits and an assortment of locally produced foods such as she-crab soup, chowchow, piccalilli (green tomato relish), and pickled okra.
The Lowcountry shrimp season runs from spring through fall, but Eddie Corley, of Southern Shrimp, drives to Georgia and Florida once a week throughout the year to buy fresh, heads-on shrimp right off the docks. He sells the shrimp from his travel trailer out on U.S. Highway 17 about 15 miles south of Charleston. Sandlappers use the heads to make a stock that is the basis of soups, pilafs, gumbos, and the sauce served with shrimp and grits.
The Saturday morning Charleston Farmers Market provides a haven for a dozen or so vendors, such as Celeste and George Albers, whom I consider vital to the preservation of Lowcountry foodways. They sell eggs, beets, potatoes, greens, ground-corn products, and shrimp in season. Dan and Karen Kennerty, of Kennerty Farms, sell peppers, eggplants, and greens. Pete and Caroline Madsen, of Pete’s Herbs, offer potted plants and herbs that they grow on their farm on John’s Island.
At Fields’ Farms , Robert and Joseph Fields, their sister Juanita Fields Pinckney, and her husband, Alonzo Pinckney, have melons and corn, green peanuts for boiling, scuppernongs and muscadines (the area’s native American grapes), onions and squash. I often buy tomatoes from Juanita, who has cooked for 12 years at another brother’s corner store, Doug’s Seafood, in the still-thriving Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Dis trict, west of Upper King Street, and who sets up a farm stand on James Island on Saturdays. Robert sells on Folly Beach, and another sister, Anna White, sells on River Road on John’s Island. Doug’s is my source for live crabs. On Mondays, Juanita stuffs the crab shells with her deviled crab mixture, and freezes the individual crabs for sale. Tuesday through Friday, she fries fish and sells take-out plates with shrimp fried rice. One of my typical summertime meals at home might consist of a couple of Juanita’s deviled crabs, some of Robert’s okra lightly steamed, and a good serving of Joseph’s black-eyed peas over rice with a side of local Kieffer pear relish. For dessert I go to Wali’s Fish Supreme, down the street from Doug’s, for one of their bean pies, a favorite among Charleston Muslims. Ms. Wali also offers fried chicken and fish and Lowcountry standards red rice, hoppin’ John, and chicken pilaf—dine-in or take-out.
Paul Cercone, at Normandy Farm Artisan Bakery, in the Historic District, makes the greatest breads—crusty, European-style loaves made with slow-rising yeast doughs. At Ambrosia, west of the Ashley River, Wade Sexton’s layer cakes jammed with seasonal fruit are legendary. And the Olde Colony Bakery produced Charleston’s famous benne (sesame seed) wafers for 50 years on King Street, and moved two years ago to a larger space in Mount Pleasant. Owners Peter and Sheila Rix produce more than 500 pounds of the crisp cookies each day.
At The Vegetable Bin, on the eastern edge of the peninsula, beside the docks, Cary Toole stocks Lowcountry ingredients you can’t find anywhere else: young South Carolina chickens for frying, smoked and salted herring, sugarcane, souse and hogshead cheese, crowder peas and sieva beans, smoked ham hocks and “butt’s meat” (hog jowl), and “soup bunches.” I add these bundles of mixed greens, turnip roots, potatoes, carrots, onion, celery, and herbs to a beef shank to make a classic Lowcountry vegetable soup.
A few small grocers have endured; the most well known is Burbage’s Self Service Grocery, north of the tony South of Broad addresses. Two generations of the family have worked in the shop, which offers custom butchering and homemade soups—okra, split pea, squash, potato, black bean, and chicken with rice—among the staples. Big Al Burbage’s pimiento cheese (a spread of grated sharp Cheddar, roasted peppers, and mayonnaise) is redolent of the requisite hint of onion. He also sells some of the tastiest locally made food products, such as Normandy’s bread and goat cheese from Split Creek Farm, in the up-country.
Whether I’m dining out or at home on Friday night, I like to drop by Debbie Marlowe’s Wine Shop, at the City Marina (or her newer Wine Shop, in Mount Pleasant), for her casual wine tastings. In the 15 years that I’ve known Debbie, she’s never once steered me wrong on a wine. Charleston has been one of the country’s most important ports for more than 300 years, and its love affair with wine is one thing that hasn’t changed a bit. I can’t think of a better reason to live here.
A Food Lover’s Charleston Address Book
39 Rue de Jean
39 John Street
843-722-8881
Coast
39-D John Street
843-722-8838
fred
237 King Street
843-723-5699
Croghan’s Jewel Box
308 King Street
843-723-6589
Fulton Five
5 Fulton Street
843-853-5555
Il Cortile del Re
193-A King Street
843-853-1888
Hominy Grill
207 Rutledge Avenue
843-937-0930
Anson
12 Anson Street
843-577-0551
Al Di La
25 Magnolia Road
843-571-2321
Rosebank Farms Cafe
1886 Andell Bluff Boulevard
843-768-1807
The Old Post Office Restaurant
1442 Highway 174
Edisto Island
843-869-2339
Coco’s Café
863 Houston Northcutt Mount Pleasant
843-881-4949
Long Island Café
1515-A Palm Boulevard
Isle of Palms
843-886-8809
Crosby’s Fish & Shrimp
2223 Folly Road
843-795-4049
Crosby’s Seafood
382 Spring Street
843-937-0029
Southern Shrimp
3803 Savannah Highway
843-852-9542
Charleston Farmers Market
Marion Square at King and Calhoun streets, Saturdays from 8 A.M. to 1 P.M., April through December. (A Tuesday afternoon market is held in Mount Pleasant, across the Cooper River.)
Kennerty Farms
843-559-1179
Pete’s Herbs
5920 Chisolm Road
843-559-1446
Fields’ Farms
(Robert Fields’ Stand)
Folly Beach
Daily in summer.
(Alonzo Pinckney and Juanita Fields Pinckney’s Stand)
Folly and Fort Johnson roads, James Island, Saturdays.
(Anna White’s Stand)
River Road, John’s Island
Saturdays in summer.
Doug’s Seafood
63 Spring Street
843-723-8859
Wali’s Fish Supreme
119 Spring Street
843-853-2517
Normandy Farm Artisan Bakery
86 Society Street
843-577-5763
Ambrosia
32 Windermere Boulevard
843-769-6400
Olde Colony Bakery
1391-B Stuart Engals Boulevard
843-216-3232
The Vegetable Bin
10 Society Street
843-723-6424
Burbage’s Self Service Grocery
157 Broad Street
843-723-4054
The Wine Shop
3 Lockwood Drive
843-577-3881
607-A Johnnie Dodds Boulevard
Mount Pleasant
843-881-3881