This Southern City Is Top of Our List for Food Right Now. Here’s Why.

Thanks to delights such as Lowcountry shrimp and grits and fluffy biscuits smothered in gravy, Charleston has long been renowned as a great dining town, but in the past the city’s global cuisine has rarely turned heads. However, there’s a new wave of chefs opening critically acclaimed international eateries, ranging from West African to Chinese. Some restaurants have met the challenge of launching in a nationally recognized food city with gleaming, ambitious projects, especially in the high-rent spaces on downtown’s tony King Street. Others have opted for more modest neighborhoods to showcase their cooking (a choice that helps tamp down menu prices).

The common threads among these entrepreneurs are standout cooking and a willingness to take risks. The collective gamble has paid off, with numerous awards bestowed upon Charleston’s newest dining venues. Gorge your way through these eight restaurants, and you may not even regret missing out on those grits.

Photo by StarChefs

Bintü Atelier

Chef-owner Bintou N’Daw launched her Line Street spot in a bid to bring the underrepresented cuisine of West Africa to Charleston. The Senegal-born breakout culinary star spent her formative years in France, before working in New York City restaurants, and during the pandemic she relocated to the South, opening here in July 2023. “I wanted to make authentic dishes,” she says, “while tracing the culinary roots of the Gullah Geechee communities back to West Africa.”

N’Daw works with local ingredients, such as black-eyed peas, while importing key ingredients (palm oil, the West African grain fonio) to achieve Senegalese-inspired flavors, and she strives to keep prices accessible so the city’s diverse communities can discover her food. (Avoiding the sky-high liquor license fees in favor of a BYOB program certainly helps.) This, along with a a placement on Bon Appétit‘s 2024 list of the 20 best new restaurants in the USA, keeps the place packed.

Photos by Andrew Cebulka

Beautiful South

David Schuttenberg and Tina Heath-Schuttenberg, the owners of James Island’s Kwei Fei—every in-the-know Charelstonian’s destination for Sichuan spice—opened Beautiful South last summer in a modern industrial space downtown. Although Schuttenberg acknowledges that he’s “as white as they come,” he fell hard for Asian cooking while working under Zakary Pelaccio in New York City at the Malaysian-inspired gastropub Fatty Crab.

Schuttenberg says he found the parallels between the foods of the American Southeast and southeastern China—seafood, rice, sorghum—“were too great to ignore,” and he experiments freely with them in his cooking. (Think vegetable bao with collards in place of Chinese greens.) Don’t miss the Cantonese-style roast duck; it requires a day’s advance order, but the succulent meat and crunchy skin make the planning worth it.

Makan

James Wozniuk fell in love with hawker fare—rice dishes, noodles, red-hot sambal—on a layover in Kuala Lumpur, following a trip to Cambodia. “Everyone knows Thai food, but Malaysian cuisine is wildly underrepresented in the U.S.,” he says. The Dallas-born, South Carolina–raised chef, who worked at the acclaimed Washington, D.C. restaurants Maketto and Spoken English, would go on to study cookbooks and return for research trips, and he opened the first Makan in the nation’s capital in 2020.

Seeking to be closer to his family, Wozniuk expanded to Charleston, opening a second Makan on Rutledge Avenue this past spring. He adheres tightly to traditional flavors, taking pains to source authentic ingredients—such as Malaysian anchovies from “a guy” in New York—and locals have responded by flocking to Makan for dishes like spicy hakka noodles, a savory blend of pork, wood ear mushrooms, and soft-cooked egg over wheat noodles mixed with chili crumble.

Palmira Barbecue

Barbecue has long been one of South Carolina’s signature cuisines, but pitmaster Hector Garate brings a Caribbean flair to the smoked meats at Palmira. The Puerto Rico native, who spent much of his childhood shuttling between the island and the Carolinas, fell in love with live-fire cooking and built his own custom offset smoker. What began as a hobby turned into a food hall stall and, earlier this year, a standalone restaurant in the West Ashley neighborhood.

“From the start,” Garate says, “my goal was to use barbecue to highlight our unique style,” which he describes as a combination of Carolina and Texas techniques with Puerto Rican influence. He smokes pork with an adobo dry rub and seasons ribs with sazón (a blend of onion, garlic, and coriander powders lifted by sweet, peppery achiote). Among the best-sellers are the beef cheeks, which are so tender each bite dissolves into a pool of spice and flavor.

Courtesy of King BBQ

King BBQ

Another new, globally influenced barbecue joint, King BBQ, comes from Corrie and Shuai Wang, the owners of North Charleston’s popular Jackrabbit Filly. “Frankly, we missed the Chinatown-style barbecue we used to eat in Flushing, Queens,” says chef Shuai, “and wanted to show our love for foods like roast duck, cha shao, and crispy roast pork.”

Shuai merges traditional Chinese flavors with regional smoking techniques in dishes such as soft and lacquered char siu ribs. Other standouts include five-spice duck legs, piquant Dan Dan noodles, and shrimp toast sliders, along with musically themed “trashy-fancy” cocktails like the Shimmy Shimmy Ya and the Careless Whisper. Put it all together, and you’ve got a place that earned a spot on Bon Appetit‘s list of the 20 best new U.S. restaurants this year.

Photos by Ryan Belk

Kultura

“Not in my wildest imagination did I think that I would open my own restaurant,” says Kultura chef-owner Nikko Cagalanan. Born in the Philippines, Cagalanan immigrated to the United States in 2011 to work as a nurse, then pivoted to cooking. Food & Wine named his first venture, Mansueta’s Filipino Food, the best Filipino restaurant in South Carolina in 2022, and in November 2023 he won Food Network’s Chopped show. Next came Kultura, a pop-up he started, he says, because “I just wanna eat the food that I grew up eating, make it the way I want it, while adding a little diversity to Charleston’s food scene.”

Kultura moved to a permanent space in 2024, and Cagalanan earned a James Beard Foundation Award nomination for Emerging Chef. His dishes lean traditional, with contemporary accents: The arroz caldo, for example, is inspired by his grandmother’s version, but he tops it with smoked caviar, mushroom XO sauce, and chili crisp.

Courtesy of Ma’am Saab

Ma’am Saab

“Historically, Pakistani cuisine has not received the recognition it deserves, yet it offers a unique blend of Indian and Middle Eastern flavors,” says chef Maryam Ghaznavi, who opened Ma’am Saab on Meeting Street in 2023. Ghaznavi, who was born in Pakistan, raised in Saudi Arabia, and has lived in North America for 20 years, is attempting to change that with her luscious cooking. Some dishes are familiar, like butter chicken in a fragrant sauce of garam masala, cumin, and chili powder, while others, like the Taj-e-Sabzi (seasonal vegetables with aloo methi, rice, and paratha), will serve as a delicious education for diners.

The ambience at Ma’am Saab is as inviting as the cuisine is alluring. A festive color scheme of purple and pink adorns the dining room, while a sizzle reel of vintage Pakistani street scenes is projected behind the bar.

XO Brasserie

“I honestly fought against doing Chinese food in Charleston for a long time,” Herman Ng says. “I thought people viewed the cuisine as cheap, and I didn’t know how receptive Charleston would be to an elevated Chinese restaurant.” The XO Brasserie chef and founder might be projecting—he grew up in a Chinese American household, craving pizza and burgers while his parents prepared dishes from their native Hong Kong and Guangzhou—but either way he puts the lie to any notion of cheapness with his sleek, art deco–inspired space.

While Ng may have once yearned “to fit in with American culture,” he eventually came full circle, and he now serves dishes such as steamed spare ribs in black bean sauce that are inspired by his mother’s cooking. He says he’s not seeking to “reinvent the wheel,” but he does incorporate certain high-end ingredients and techniques: The steak in the chow fun is Angus beef rib eye, for instance, while the Chilean sea bass, which is traditionally steamed, gets a touch of sear.