Lists seem to be popular in the blogosphere. Top Ten Tastes in Kuala Lumpur. Five Great Places to Eat Falafel in Dubuque. That sort of thing. Who am I to fight the urge to catalog and collate and rank?
Especially when I'm just home from a week in Charleston, South Carolina. And my editor expects a report on how I spent her money. Here, with my Charleston Four. Two savory. Two sweet.
- Butterbeans, Miss Kitty's
Soupy and pork-kissed and somehow—somehow—tasting of something akin to Sherry, the butterbeans cooked by Martha Grant, proprietor of Miss Kitty's, are among the best I've ever spooned on top of a pile of rice. Speaking of rice, Grant makes a mean bowl of red rice. And a fine okra soup, too. Thanks go to local food writer Sara O'Kelley who put Miss Kitty's cooking on my plate. - Chicken Liver Pâté, FIG
On two successive nights, I met friends at the bar at FIG and strong-armed them into ordering a slab of chicken liver pâté. Truth be told, my friends went down easy. Served with a dice of pickled peaches and a swab of Dijon mustard, Mike Lata's way with chicken offal tastes silky and lusty, pure and decadent. - Buttermilk Pie, Hominy Grill
Our table of four fought over Robert Stehling's buttermilk pie. We were doing one of those food writer pass-arounds, but no one was willing to share. So we ordered another piece, and it disappeared, too. This is simple pie. But not simplistic. You taste the whang of buttermilk, the bite of lemon, the rasp of nutmeg. Sure, you can snag the recipe here, but why not pick up one of their hip little cookbooks, priced at ten bucks and change? - Hot Butter Rum, Red Drum Gastropub
Pastry chef Lauren Mitterer works in the same tradition as Karen Barker, the much-heralded dessert maven of Magnolia Grill, up in Durham, North Carolina. She succeeds at direct flavors. Straightforward presentations. She doesn't try dodge-and-feint moves. Mitterer's warm toffee pecan cake, drenched in a buttered rum sauce, with a housemade vanilla bean ice cream, is reason enough to leave the dripping-with-history confines of Charleston and cross the bridge into strip-malled Mount Pleasant.