Lowcountry Rising

In late October, Charleston, South Carolina, was in the throes of a charcuterie revolution. Of course, it was possible—easy, in fact—to find fried green tomatoes, fried oysters, and fried flounder, too, but plates of house-cured meats were featured on a few of the more daring restaurant menus around town, and they were causing some excitement. Not along the lines of, say, girls at The Citadel or that serious commotion at Fort Sumter in 1861, but excitement just the same. Change comes slowly to the South.

In Charleston sitting rooms, you can still hear the Civil War referred to as the War Between the States, and homeowners can be reprimanded by historical fundamentalists for veering a few shades away from the original paint color on the exterior of their antebellum mansions. Yet somehow, in an enduring swell of proud preservation (from the pre-Revolutionary Powder Magazine, one of the oldest fortifications in the 13 colonies, to the scholarly and modern Charleston Renaissance Gallery), the city’s culinary heritage was besmirched, or at least belittled, by popular demand. For fried fish.

By now, the storied city is a blockbuster tourist destination whose reputation as a beautiful living museum has (perhaps) eclipsed the Confederate flag controversies. Its fortunes built long ago on rice and cotton, today it hosts Spoleto, the internationally acclaimed annual arts festival; it opted for a design for the new bridge over the Cooper River that would do Santiago Calatrava proud; it spawned Stephen Colbert (insert joke here). And while the roster of good restaurants has grown steadily, like the number of hotel rooms and pedicabs, the tourist traps cast a pall. It’s impossible to miss the throngs spilling out of the Noisy Oyster or the lines to get into Hyman’s Seafood—waiting for the food, that is, not for an “I Got Crabs at Hyman’s” T-shirt. Nonetheless, Charleston is shaking off its gastronomic inferiority complex and forging an identity of its own. (And it must be said that the city has benefited from New Orleans’s misfortunes.)

It’s not just shrimp and grits, though there are very good shrimp and grits to be had. Particularly at Slightly North of Broad (better known as S.N.O.B.), where the pioneering Frank Lee—that’s him in the open kitchen wearing a baseball cap with red chiles on it—tosses in big pieces of sausage for a hearty version that pleases the busy lunch crowd of bankers, lawyers, and politicians. (A longtime New Yorker who has started spending half her time in town calls S.N.O.B. “the ‘21’ Club of Charleston.”) Robert Stehling, chef-owner of the homey Hominy Grill and winner of the 2008 James Beard award for Best Chef in the Southeast, has a more refined take that uses bacon and a combination of sharp white Vermont Cheddar and parmesan cheese. Fans wait patiently on the sidewalk on a still-ungentrified northern part of Rutledge Avenue for the dish, unperturbed by a couple of protesters picketing a proposed Planned Parenthood clinic across the street. Neither chef is rewriting Charleston Receipts, but both have changed expectations. Their shrimp come from shrimpers they know by first name; their grits (or hominy, as the coarsely ground corn is more politely known among the old families in town) are milled by artisans to their preferred specifications; they have tried to get as far away from the industrial food chain as possible; and they’ve helped drive a consistent availability of local ingredients. Now, when an ambitious southern chef with Per Se on his résumé returns home to take over an established kitchen (see Jeremiah Bacon, at Carolina’s), he’s got the raw material to work with.

As Glenn Roberts, founder of Anson Mills, in Columbia, South Carolina, points out, the region’s agricultural bounty and diversity is comparable to that of Northern California and some parts of Europe. (“It’s hard for people to believe,” he says, “but there are olive trees on Folly Island.”) Finally, there are some chefs in Charleston adept enough to take what’s representative, put their imprint on it, and contribute to the collective identity. “It’s a sorority,” as Bob Waggoner, who was the chef at the Charleston Grill until this past January, calls the small vanguard.

In Waggoner’s shiny dining room, with a view of a big Gucci sign inside the shopping halls of the Charleston Place Hotel, there was a whiff of haute Vegas (and prices to match) but also an ambitious menu that has been taken over by his executive sous-chef, Michelle Weaver (an actual woman in the otherwise male “sorority”). Time will tell how economics and style are going to affect the restaurant’s Carolina pheasant breast, or, according to season, flounder with lima beans, but, for now, female ascendancy is exciting in itself. Another crowd-pleasing chef, Ken Vedrinski, has left Sienna, on Daniel Island, to set up a place in the old Johnson & Wales building downtown (called Ristorante Introdacqua, it should be open by late summer); he combines an Italian sensibility with Lowcountry ideas to make modern dishes like piccata of grouper with a spicy blue-crab marinara. Last fall, he opened Trattoria Lucca, Charleston’s answer to a casual Mario Batali place, on an unlikely residential corner away from the tourist traps, and the natives came running.

Increasingly, locals are willing to eat out, enough to sustain a hometown favorite (Al di La) and to support a promising newcomer (The Glass Onion) among the modest houses and strip malls of West Ashley. Meanwhile, just off the main shopping drag of King Street, downtown, the tiny bohemian café City Lights Coffee is a real magnet for regulars: a groovy postgrad in cigarette pants drinking a café au lait while hunched over his MacBook; a professional couple sparring over the finer points of mortgage rates; and a former employee with a nose ring who’s stopped by to say she’s moving to Portland, but not before reading the house copy of The New York Review of Books while also absorbed in a glass of Nebbiolo. At Tristan, hidden inside the French Quarter Inn, chef Aaron Deal is quietly perfecting his ambitiously modern repertoire, which is punctuated these days by a very fine she-crab soup and an imaginative foie gras pot de crème. (The dining room may be in need of an update, but it hardly matters considering the fact that when I was last there, Tristan offered one of the best bargains in town: a three-course lunch for $20.) Up by the College of Charleston, near the 18th-century campus on George Street and not far from Marion Square, which is home to the burgeoning Saturday farmers market, a bellwether of epicurean interest has opened up in the form of Caviar & Bananas. A bit like a mini Dean & DeLuca, it’s a café and specialty foods shop that sells everything from sea salts and soft cheeses to prepared things such as ossobuco for $19 a pound. And Hank Holliday, owner of Peninsula Grill, on Market Street, is investing nearly $5 million to revamp the old city market, currently a place to buy souvenir magnets and prepackaged Gullah spices, into something more along the lines of Seattle’s Pike Place Market.

Indeed, the elements are in place to make Charleston a great food town, not least because of the serious competition between the city’s top chefs, two of whom are suddenly pulling way ahead. Sean Brock, a 31-year-old Virginian, took over the kitchen at McCrady’s in 2006 and has since attracted the attention of New York luminaries Wylie Dufresne, of WD-50; Johnny Iuzzini, of Jean Georges; and Momofuku’s David Chang, who calls Brock “the real deal. ” They’re drawn by the chef’s wizardry in the kitchen (he uses liquid nitrogen to make a powder of olives and Maldon sea salt, for example) that is second only to his true passion and reverence for food. He’s started a garden and a seed-saving program on Wadmalaw Island, not far from where he’s raising some pigs—on six acres of oak-shaded land that would sell for $240,000—that he’ll serve at McCrady’s (he makes his own charcuterie). He’s not merely overseeing these endeavors; most mornings he gets into his Chevy Silverado Z71 pickup wearing a hat with the slogan “Make Cornbread Not War” on it and heads out to Wadmalaw to spend a lot of time with his hands in the dirt. Some evenings, too.

On Wednesday nights, the Wadmalaw Supper Club gathers. About 30 people—all workers of various stripes on the rural low-lying island—bring their drink kits, put five dollars in a Mason jar, make jokes, and say the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer before eating. “I cook whatever they’ve got,” says Brock. “A deer, a cobia. It sounds corny, but I love it. ” The joy comes through, too, on his menu downtown, a long list of dishes that are pretty on the plate (an oyster on the half shell with pearls of frozen horseradish) and unpredictable on the palate (foie gras with apple butter and smoked caramel). If he comes out to say hello, you’ll notice a flush on his round cheeks. If he thanks you for coming to Charleston, you’ll notice he means it.

Mike Lata, chef and co-owner of FIG, a chic, spare restaurant on Meeting Street, is a Yankee, originally from Massachusetts. In a manner of speaking, though, he’s been repatriated as a southerner. The turning point may have come many years ago when he charmed his way into a fully booked Alain Ducasse restaurant in Paris with a bag of stone-ground grits.

“Every memorable meal I’ve had is on my menu,” he says now, six years after opening his own place. One meal in particular, tête de veau with perfectly round, yellow waxy potatoes at La Merenda, in Nice, sticks with him: “It was rustic done with such a level of finesse that it was transcending.” Lata might as well be describing his own style of cooking—farm to fork, yes, but with very confident shepherding. A salad of speckled butter beans, radish, and sautéed Carolina white shrimp that appeared last fall was a lovely thing to behold—a tangle of glistening, soft colors—yet it was also sublime to taste, with its contrast of textures and bite of preserved lemon. Like Brock and his colleagues, Lata works very closely with his purveyors (just look at the bright orange hue of his egg yolks) and wholly appreciates the array of ingredients available to him. And like Brock, he has hit his stride. “Charleston,” he says, “has been good to me.”

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